It’s All in the Day’s Work: A Study of the Ethnomethodology of Science

Abstract

My conclusions about the work of the ethnomethodologists of science — whom, for brevity and in accordance with the verbal though not so far the published practice of other sociologists, I shall call the ethnos — are like their conclusions about the work of scientists they have studied. As they typically conclude that natural scientists misunderstand the nature of their own enterprise, or at least in their publications so write as (perhaps unwittingly) to conceal or even mislead about it, so I conclude that ethnos do. They conclude that it is mistaken to think that scientists discover about independently existing objects truths that are not artefacts of their own social and political performances. I conclude that it is mistaken to think that the ethnos have discovered or revealed such truths about scientists. I conclude in particular that they have not discovered that this traditional view of scientists is mistaken.