Studies in Ethnomethodology

Introduction

Harold Garfinkel, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who had studied with Parsons and drew on Schutz, collected these papers in 1967. Ethnomethodology, a term he coined, studies the methods by which members of society make their activities recognisable as orderly and accountable. In the breaching experiments, students behaved like lodgers in their own families or kept asking what everyday remarks meant, exposing the background expectations everyone relies on. The study of Agnes, a young trans woman who had presented herself to doctors as intersex, shows how sex status is accomplished in everyday interaction; an appendix records her later disclosure that she had taken hormones since adolescence.