Ethnomethodologists investigate the production and interpretation of everyday action as skilled

accomplishments of social factors, and they are interested in conversation as one particularly
pervasive instance of skilled social action. (Read)

Ethnomethodologists adopt what is called a phenomenological view of the world; that is, the world
is something that people must constantly keep creating and sustaining for themselves. In this view,
language plays a very significant role in that creating and sustaining.

Ethnomethodologists regard ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful activity’ as something people accomplish

when they interact socially. They focus on what people must do to make sense of the world around
them, and not on what scientists do in trying to explain natural phenomena. (Read)

Since much of human interaction is actually verbal interaction, they have focused much of their
attention on how people use language in their relationships to one another.

They have also focused on how in that use of language people employ what ethnomethodologists
call commonsense knowledge and practical reasoning. (Read)

a.commonsense knowledge

Commonsense knowledge refers to a variety of things. It is the understandings, recipes, maxims, and
definitions that we employ in daily living as we go about doing things, e.g., knowing that thunder
usually accompanies lightning; knowing how houses are usually laid out.

Commonsense knowledge also tells us that the world exists as a factual object. There is a world ‘out
there’ independent of our particular existence; moreover, it is a world which others as well as
ourselves experience, and we all experience it in much the same way. (Read)

b. practical reasoning.

Practical reasoning refers to the way in which people make use of their commonsense knowledge
and to how they employ that knowledge in their conduct of everyday life: what they assume; what
they never question; how they select matters to deal with; and how they make the various bits and
pieces of commonsense knowledge.

People do not think through the problems of everyday life the same way that trained scientists go
about solving problems. Scribner (1977), for example, surveyed a number of pieces of research that
looked at how people in different parts of the world reason. (Read)

Ethnomethodologists have found that naturally occurring conversations provide them with some of
their most interesting data. Such conversations show how individuals achieve common purposes by
doing and saying certain things and not doing and saying others.
They obey certain rules of cooperation, trust, turn-taking, and so on, and they usually do not
confront others openly, doubt them, insist they be always ‘logical,’ or refuse to do their own part in
‘sustaining reality.’(Read)