Abstract
Researchers in ethnomethodology have carried out, since the very beginning, a vast array of empirical studies on ordinary everyday activities in naturally occurring, mundane settings and institutionalized worksite practices such as legal studies (e.g. Atkinson & Drew, 1979; Burns, 1996; Lynch, 1982; Pollner, 1974, 1975); teaching practices (e.g. Cicourel & Kitsuse, 1963; Have, 2003; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979); medical analysis (e.g. Fisher & Todd, 1983; Heath, 1986; Pomerantz, 2003; West, 1984); scientific work (e.g. Garfinkel, Lynch, & Livingston, 1981; Livingston, 1986; Lynch, 1985), etc. They are encouraged to acquire the skills of the field they are studying in order to see things in the members’ eyes and at the same time adopt a reflective stance. In the following, some earlier case studies by Garfinkel highly relevant to daily language use, naming, categorization and communicative order will be analyzed.
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- 1.
As noted by Heritage (1984, pp. 98–99), though it was the aim of Garfinkel’s earlier experiments to create situations which were literally unintelligible or senseless, rarely did he achieve this aim. In the experiments, though the subjects do not always fully understand what is going on, seldom are they at a total loss or do they find the interchange senseless. Instead, they try to see the breaches as involving ‘“active”, i.e. “chosen” or “motivated”, departures from the normal which, reasonably enough, they viewed as illegitimate and offensive.’
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I am grateful to Chris Hutton for making this observation.
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Zhou, F. (2020). Case Study. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_11
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