Together with a team of sociologists – Chiara Bassetti, Erik Boström, Kenneth Liberman, Jakub Mlynář, Robin James Smith, I read Georg Simmel’s “Sociology. Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms” (“Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung“) to explore how Simmel’s sociology can/could have informed ethnomethodological inquiries. The result of this collaborative reading project has just been published in The American Sociologist. The paper titled “Simmel and Ethnomethodology: Foundational Sociological Issues from a Nondualist Perspective” and written by Chiara Bassetti, Erik Boström, Kenneth Liberman, Jakub Mlynář, Robin James Smith & Dirk Vom Lehn has can be downloaded HERE.
Hopefully, by the end of the year or at the latest by Spring 2023 “The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel” co-edited by Philippe Sormani and myself will be published with Anthem Press. It’s currently due to be published in March 2023.
Chapter One Garfinkel’s Praxeological ‘Experiments’
by Michael Lynch
Chapter Two The Continuity of Garfinkel’s Approach: Seeking Ways of ‘Making the Phenomenon Available Again’ through the Experience and Usefulness of ‘Trouble’
by Clemens Eisenmann and Anne Warfield Rawls
Part II: ‘Experiments’
Chapter Three Lay and Professional Competencies: Linking Garfinkel’s Tutorial Exercises to a Study of Legal Work
by Stacy Lee Burns
Chapter Four Bargaining on Street-Markets as ‘Experiment in Miniature’
by Dirk vom Lehn
Chapter Five Notes on Galileo’s Pendulum
by Dušan I. Bjelić
Chapter Six Disruptures of Normal Appearances in Public Space: the Covid19 Pandemic as a Natural Breaching Situation
by Lorenza Mondada and Hanna Svensson
Chapter Seven Gender as a Scientific Experiment: Towards a Queer Ethnomethodology
by Luca Greco
Chapter Eight Breaching and Robot Experiments: Continuing Harold Garfinkel’s Spirit of Experimentation
by Keiichi Yamazaki and Yusuke Arano
Chapter Nine Dealing with Daemons: Trust in Autonomous Systems
by Jonas Ivarsson
Part III: Implications
Chapter Ten Experimenting with the Archive? Performing Purdue in Paris, an Instructive Reprise
vom Lehn, D. (2019). From Garfinkels’ ‘Experiments in Miniature’ to the Ethnomethodological Analysis of Interaction. Human Studies, 42(2), 305-326. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09496-5
In den vergangenen 10 Jahren sind verschiedene Texte zur Analyse von Interaktion erschienen, in deren Zentrum Videoaufnahmen als Daten stehen. Von besonderer Bedeutung sind in diesem Zusammenhang Texte, die sich auf die Ethnomethodologie und Konversationsanalyse stützen. “Ethnomethodologische Interaktionsanalyse” schließt hier und an mein Buch zu Harold Garfinkel an, in dem ich die Entwicklung der Ethnomethodologie als besondere soziologische Einstellung nachzeichne.
“Ethnomethodologische Interaktionsanalyse” bettet die Analyse von Interaktion auf Basis von Videoaufnahmen in den Kontext der Entwicklung der Ethnomethodologie ein und führt die Analyse am Beispiel von Daten, die ich in den Untersuchungsräumen von Optometrikern aufgezeichnet habe, vor. Dabei gehe ich auf Praktikalitäten der Datenerhebung und -analyse und die Transkription von Videodaten ein. Anschließend wendet sich das Buch der Darstellung von Analysebefunden in Live-Präsentationen und in Texten zu. Das Buch ist in der Serie ‘Standards standardisierter und nicht-standardisierter Sozialforschung’, die von Nicole Burzan, Ronald Hitzler und Paul Eisewicht herausgeben wird, bei Beltz/Juventa erschienen. “Ethnomethodologische Interaktionsanalyse” ist als Kindle-Buch und vom 20. August 2018 auch in der gedruckten Version erhältlich.
Together with Will Gibson (UCL) I have just published a book titled “Institutions, Interaction and Social Theory” (Palgrave).
From hospitals and prisons to schools and corporations: no matter how large or seemingly abstract, all institutions are ultimately the result of the actions and interactions of people. In this original and innovative text, Gibson and Vom Lehn show the different ways in which studying people’s own meaning-making practices can help us understand the role of institutions in contemporary society.
Institutions, Interaction and Social Theory takes the reader through the core conceptual foundations of Symbolic Interactionism, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Engaging with a rich tradition in sociological thought, it suggests that interactionist perspectives have remained largely absent in the study of institutions, and how they contrast with and contribute to the broader field of research in institutional contexts.
With chapters on healthcare, education, markets, and art and culture, this text will be of interest to those studying institutions, organisations and work in sociology and in business schools. It will also be valuable for students of social theory interested in interactionism, and in the challenges and opportunities of connecting complex theoretical discussions to real world examples.
A bit of self-advertisement… in May my book “Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology” was published by Left Coast Press. The book discusses Garfinkel’s creationof ethnomethodology, its anticipation of and important influence on a range of contemporary developments in sociology, including the sociology of science and technology, the new sociology of knowledge, the sociology of work, gender studies and others.
Interaction, Organisation & Technology 