Harold Garfinkel, "Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order..."

 Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and as of the Essential Quiddity of Immortal Ordinary Society, (I of IV): An Announcement of Studies*

Harold Garfinkel

University of California, Los Angeles

Introduced by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Why This Text Matters Now

Harold Garfinkel's 1988 essay "Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order" stands as one of ethnomethodology's most forceful declarations of independence from mainstream sociology. Published fifty years after Parsons' The Structure of Social Action, Garfinkel uses this anniversary not for celebration but for clarification: ethnomethodology is not a variant of formal analytic sociology but an "incommensurably asymmetrically alternate sociology" that studies fundamentally different phenomena through fundamentally different methods.

For those developing Critical Interactionism in 2025, this text is essential reading. It articulates with unusual clarity what makes ethnomethodological studies radical, why they cannot be assimilated into conventional social science, and what it means to study "immortal ordinary society" as a locally produced, naturally accountable achievement. Garfinkel here defends the territory that Critical Interactionism must occupy if it is to remain true to its microsociological foundations while developing critical analysis of power and oppression.

The Central Argument: Against the Plenum

Garfinkel's argument hinges on a devastating critique of what he calls "the plenum" - a concept he uses to describe how mainstream sociology (exemplified by Parsons) handles the concreteness of actual activities. The plenum refers to the "analytically empty concreteness of organizational things" - all the messy, situated, embodied details of actual social life that formal analysis systematically ignores or treats as irrelevant.

Parsons and the entire "social science movement," Garfinkel argues, operate through a fundamental distinction between:

• Concrete activities (the plenum) - treated as having no inherent order
• Analytically represented actions - where order is located through formal theorizing

This distinction allows formal sociology to demonstrate (Garfinkel says this "without irony") that there is no orderliness in the plenum. All order must be imported through constructive analysis - through formal schemes, ideal types, and theoretical models. The plenum becomes merely raw material awaiting analytic organization.

Ethnomethodology's Radical Counterclaim

Against this, Garfinkel marshals two decades of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies to make an extraordinary claim: there is order in the plenum. Not just any order, but:

• Locally produced - achieved in and through situated practices
• Naturally accountable - recognizable to participants without formal analysis
• Reflexively organized - the methods of production are visible in what they produce
• Immortal - endlessly reproduced as "ordinary society's" ongoing accomplishment

This order cannot be recovered through formal analytic methods. It is only discoverable through detailed empirical investigation of actual occasions. It cannot be imagined, modeled, or derived from theoretical principles. It must be found.

The List: A Catalog of Radical Phenomena

The heart of the essay is Garfinkel's catalog of ethnomethodological studies - a deliberately heterogeneous list ranging from Kpelle secrecy practices to mathematical proofs, from emergency dispatch work to learning jazz piano. This list performs crucial argumentative work. It demonstrates:

1. The scope of ethnomethodological inquiry - not limited to conversation but extending to all domains of practical action
2. The radical nature of the phenomena - unavailable to formal analysis, irreducible by conventional methods, only discoverable through investigation
3. The existence of a research community - an "international and interdisciplinary company" whose collective work establishes a technical domain

Each study in the list shows order being accomplished in the concrete details that formal sociology's plenum dismisses as analytically empty.

What Makes Phenomena "Radical"?

Garfinkel specifies eight characteristics of the phenomena ethnomethodology studies. These are not just empirical findings but define an alternative ontology of the social:

1. Available to ethnomethodological policies (like "ethnomethodological indifference") but NOT to constructive analysis
2. Systematically used but ignored by mainstream social science
3. Not reducible without losing the phenomena themselves
4. Only inspectably the case - not recoverable through definitions, models, or ideals
5. Discovered, not imagined - cannot be derived theoretically
6. Specify "foundational" issues as practical accomplishments
7. Locally and endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable
8. Every topic (logic, order, reason, meaning, method) is respecifiable as locally achieved phenomena of order*

This last point is crucial. Garfinkel uses "order*" (with an asterisk) as a placeholder for all the topics that intellectual history treats as abstract universals - logic, rationality, meaning, method, consciousness. Ethnomethodology respecifies each as a practical, local, accountable achievement. Not order in general, but order-in-and-as-of-the-workings-of-ordinary-society.

Why "Incommensurably Alternate"?

Garfinkel insists ethnomethodology offers not a refinement of formal sociology but an incommensurably asymmetrically alternate sociology. This is not rhetorical excess. The incommensurability is real:

• Different phenomena (locally produced order vs. analytically represented structures)
• Different methods (discovery through detailed investigation vs. constructive analysis)
• Different ontology (order as achievement vs. order as structure)
• Different epistemology (only inspectably the case vs. theoretically derivable)

There is no common measure, no translation protocol, no way to reconcile these approaches. They study different worlds.

Implications for Critical Interactionism

For Critical Interactionism, this essay establishes several non-negotiable commitments:

1. No shortcuts around detailed empirical investigation. If the phenomena are only discoverable, only inspectably the case, then Critical Interactionism cannot rely primarily on theoretical argument or formal models. It must do the empirical work.

2. Order is in the details. The "layered moral economy of oppression" cannot be specified as an abstract theoretical framework and then applied. It must be discovered in how oppression is accomplished, turn by turn, in actual encounters.

3. The plenum is not empty. When we observe police stops, welfare interviews, or street outreach encounters, the order we're seeking is already there in the concrete details - in how people talk, move, orient to each other. We don't need to import order through critical theory; we need to discover how oppression is locally produced.

4. Resistance lives in the plenum too. If order is locally produced, so is disorder, resistance, and transformation. These are not theoretical possibilities but practical achievements that must be found in actual occasions.

5. "Structure-in-action" is not a metaphor. When the Santa Barbara School spoke of structure-in-action, they weren't suggesting structure is "like" action or "expressed through" action. They were claiming structure IS action - locally produced, naturally accountable, reflexively organized.

The Challenge Ahead

Garfinkel ends by noting that ethnomethodology's distinctive emphases "set them in contrast to classic studies as an incommensurably alternate sociology." This poses a profound challenge for Critical Interactionism. Can we maintain ethnomethodological rigor - the commitment to discovering locally produced order in concrete details - while also developing critical analysis of structural oppression?

The answer must be yes, but only if we recognize that power, domination, and inequality are also locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena. They are not external structures imposed on interaction but achievements that must be studied in their "essential quiddity" - their concrete, situated, methodical production.

Garfinkel's 1988 essay gives us permission to be radical in method because he demonstrates that the phenomena themselves are radical. They were "not suspected until their studies established their existence." Critical Interactionism must maintain this radical empiricism even as it asks critical questions about who benefits and who is harmed.

A Personal Note

Reading this essay in 2025, I'm struck by how much of the Critical Interactionist project it anticipates and authorizes. When Garfinkel catalogs studies of 911 dispatchers, emergency rooms, and urban institutions, he's showing that ethnomethodology was never confined to polite conversation among equals. It always investigated sites of institutional power, professional authority, and consequential decision-making.

What Critical Interactionism adds is an explicit foregrounding of these power relations, a centering of oppression and resistance, and a commitment to making ethnomethodological insights available to those engaged in struggles for justice. But we build on Garfinkel's foundation: that order is locally produced, that it must be discovered in concrete details, and that formal analysis cannot substitute for empirical investigation of actual occasions.

The work continues.

Citation: Garfinkel, Harold. "Evidence for locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. in and as of the essential quiddity of immortal ordinary society,(I of IV): An announcement of studies." Sociological theory 6, no. 1 (1988): 103-109.

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At a recent symposium of the American Sociological Association celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Social Action, Jeffrey Alexander called attention to the book's continuing influence upon professional sociology. In the generosity of the celebration, he situated ethnomethodology's program in the agenda of analytic sociology and offered ethnomethodology good advice.

From his place within the agenda, he identified for ethnomethodologists the studies they do, advised them of studies they should do, and offered friendly advice about emphases they cannot avoid. In thoughtful reflections, he praised ethnomethodological studies for carrying on with the problem of social order that Parsons specified with which he instituted formal analytic sociology. In a spirit of generosity Alexander offered ethnomethodology an olive branch. Rather than pursuing their program of current studies—which in another context he has criticized as "individualistic"—ethnomethodologists should celebrate The Structure of Social Action by returning to the analytic fold.

I disagree. There are good reasons for ethnomethodological studies to specify the production and accountability of immortal, ordinary society—that miracle of familiar organizational things—as the local production and natural, reflexive accountability of the phenomena of order*. Among those reasons is making discoverable one of those phenomena of order* but only one, namely what analysis incarnate in and as ordinary society, as practical action's locally and interactionally produced and witnessed embodied details, could adequately be.

Although both formal analytic sociology and ethnomethodology address produced phenomena of order*, and although both seek to specify the production and accountability of immortal ordinary society, a summary play on Durkheim's aphorism reminds us of their differences.

For The Structure of Social Action, Durkheim's aphorism is intact: "The objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental principle."

For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that and just how it is every society's locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members' work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs, is thereby sociology's fundamental phenomenon.

In his talk, Alexander properly reminded the profession that in The Structure of Social Action Parsons gave to professional sociology a way to find and exhibit the real production and accountability of immortal, ordinary society. Concerned with, and profoundly reasoned about generic, massively recurrent properties of human action in and as the properties of populations, The Structure of Social Action set an example for formal analytic sociology and has become emblematic of analytic sociology and of the world-wide social science movement.

Ethnomethodology has its origins in this wonderful book. Its earliest initiatives were taken from these texts. Ethnomethodologists have continued to consult its text to understand the practices and the achievements of formal analysis in the work of professional social science.

Inspired by The Structure of Social Action ethnomethodology undertook the task of respecifying the production and accountability of immortal, ordinary society. It has done so by searching for and specifying radical phenomena. In the pursuit of that program, a certain agenda of themes announced and elaborated in The Structure..., has over the years offered a contrasting standing point of departure to ethnomethodology's interest in respecification. Found throughout the book, faithful to the book, and used by ethnomethodologists to read the book, these themes brought the book's materials together as its coherent and researchable argument that the real society was available to the policies and methods of formal analytic sociology. With these policies concrete society could be investigated and demonstrated to indefinite depths of detail, with no actual setting excused from jurisdiction, regardless of time, place, staff, locality, skills, or scale.

In the brief remarks that space allows, I must reduce Parsons' agenda of themes from an argument to a recitation of slogans.

Endlessly seminal was sociology's stunning vision of society as a practical achievement. Affiliated to this vision were several technical specifics. A first one was the problem of social order formulated by Hobbes. Another, inexorably tied to it, were theorizing's constantly undertaken and unfinishable tasks of requiring that the vexed problem of the practical objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning, because it was vexed, serve as the standing source and grounds for the adequacy of theorizing's claims. Third, in every actual case of inquiry a priority of relevance was assigned, no matter how provisional, to empirical studies to specify the problem of social order's identifying phenomena. Altogether, sociology's standing job was to specify the issues that identified as society's workings—real workings, actual workings, and evidently—the ongoing production and accountability of ordinary society.

Deep policies and technical methods of theorizing were stated explicitly with which to specify real immortal, ordinary society in the methods of its production, and in the conditions of their effectiveness, as structures of practical action. Administering the unit act as if it were constitutive of practical action was one of these methods of theorizing. Administering an in-principle difference between common sense knowledge of social structures and scientific knowledge of social structures was another. Theorizing was directed to design and administer policies with which to specify real society as observable structures of practical action.

These policies were accompanied by concerns to design, develop, clarify, correct, criticize, and administer methods of constructive analysis. For one example, a recurrently used method consists of designing a formal scheme of types, giving their formal definitions an interpreted significance with which to develop and explain the orderly properties of the types as ideals, and then assigning the properties of the ideals to observable actions as their described properties of social order.

The book's policies of theorizing and methods of constructive analysis emphatically provided for issues of immortal society's observability. Among these policies one policy dominated all the rest: the distinction between concreteness of activities and action provided for analytically. The distinction inhabits every line of The Structure of Social Action. When the book was written, the distinction was omniprevalent in professional sociology and the social sciences, and it remains so today.

I shall call actions provided for concretely that Parsons provided for with his distinction, Parsons' plenum. His plenum is a constituent part of the pair, actions concretely and actions analytically. His plenum was administered as a constituent of the pair.

Parsons needed a plenum. He was not the first author ever to need one and he was not alone. Not only in the social science movement but everywhere in intellectual history authors have made use of plenums. Authors have designed plenums with which the tasks of recording, reading, writing, collecting, picturing, speaking about, remembering, marking, signing real world specifics were accompanied by provisions for worldly things left over and worldly things left out, real world matters that remained unremarked. Webster tells us "Plenum" has been used to speak of "a space every part of which is full of matter—as opposed to vacuum," "fullness," "a general or full assembly," "the condition of being absolutely full in quantity, measure, or degree; a condition of fullness, completion." "Plenty!" puts the case according to Webster. So does "Plenarty." So does "Plenilunium."

For what I want to get at, the question is not, what does plenum mean? And not, how is plenum to be defined? But who needs a plenum? I don't mean its not needed. I mean who has had what need of a plenum? By whom has a plenum been needed? For what? To do what with it?

William James' plenum, the blooming, buzzing confusion, was needed to specify distinctive generic properties of perception and attention. Alfred North Whitehead needed common sense that would sit in judgment on every version of itself. Edmund Husserl used his hyle as his plenum with which essential, invariant structures of consciousness—the noesis-noema structures—could be found and made findable without so assigning to a transcendental phenomenological ego its jobs that perception's things would have been lost. The circumstantiality of signs, another of Husserl's plenums, was needed to carry out his policy of the ideality of meanings. A beautiful plenum is Colin Cherry's soundful, noisy assemblages in and with which intelligible and remembered "sounded doings" are demonstrable phenomena. Experimental perception's noisy assemblages—its plenum—permit published experimental studies of selective attention to be collected as specifications of the "cocktail party effect." A recent and compelling plenum is found in the intractability of common sense that exhibits itself in furiously numerous but so far unsuccessful attempts in the computing industry to design computable representations of ordinary human jobs.

With his concreteness/analysis pair, Parsons demonstrated there was no orderliness in concrete activities. With his plenum, Parsons specified the analytically empty concreteness of organizational things. With Parsons' plenum the concreteness of organizational things is not yet real organizational things. Nor is it yet organizational things produced according to, let alone consisting of, methodic procedures—call these "actual" organizational things—nor is it yet organizational things evidently.

Established analytic sociology's big prize—and Parsons' big prize—is immortal ordinary society, and not just any imaginable society but (i) real society, the society available in coherent structures of inexhaustible details; (ii) actual society, society for just how it is produced, with just what causal texture; (iii) and real and actual society, evidently, i.e. real and actual society represented in claims that are offered by analysts for their truth and correctness, for their availability to correctability, for the claimed work of a socially organized setting's production and accountability that is available to autonomous assessments of truth, correctness, relevance, facticity, motivation and other adequacies.

For Parsons, real and actual society, evidently, that prize is not to be found in the concreteness of things. Many interesting things are to be found in the concreteness but not real, immortal society. Instead, real immortal society is only specifiable as the achieved results of administering the policies and methods of formal, constructive analysis. Real society is specified distinctively and in detail and with everything that detail could be in the formal generic structures of practical actions. These are obtainable with the policies and methods of constructive analysis. These policies and constructive methods also furnish the correctable warrant for analysts' claims. Analysts' claims offer constructive methods to certify their status as objective knowledge of the work of producing accountable, invariant, essential structures of practical action, the great recurring, immortal, comparable structures of ordinary activities.

Orderlinesses in the plenum pose for formal sociological analysis its tasks of detecting and specifying that orderliness and demonstrating it in massively recurrent, distinctive, essential, invariant identifying details of formally analyzed structures of practical action.

To review: from The Structure of Social Action we could learn there was no orderliness in the plenum. We could learn from The Structure... how to distinguish between actions provided for concretely and actions provided for analytically, and we could learn how to administer this distinction over the vicissitudes and local contingencies of research and argument.

We learned from The Structure... that specifics in producing the phenomena of order are found, collected, described, explained, and demonstrated by administering a distinction between concreteness of organizational things on the one hand, and the real society that methods of constructive analysis would provide on the other; that only methods of constructive analysis could provide—only and entirely—for any and every orderliness whatsoever, for every one of the endlessly many topics of order meaning, reason, logic, or method, and for every achievement of any of these topics of order* after they were prepared for inquiry by formal analytic sociology by being respecified as phenomena of order* that are achieved in and as analytically represented generic workings of immortal, ordinary society.

Parsons' thematic agenda was in every respect answerable to the observability of immortal, ordinary society. It was therein everywhere sensitive to the difference between the concreteness of actions and actions construed analytically. In The Structure's thematic agenda, and, in that the agenda was everywhere answerable to the distinction for all issues of adequacy, Parsons was spokesman for the social science movement. He was not its leader, in this respect. And of course he did not originate the distinction. But with that distinction he spoke for the world-wide movement of professional social science which accords the distinction unanimous endorsement. In all these respects and, most pointedly, in respect of unanimous agreement that there is no order in the plenum, Parsons talked on behalf of professional sociology and of the world-wide social science movement.

Ethnomethodological studies, in which I include of course, conversational analytic studies, learned to take serious exception without sacrificing issues of "structure" and the "great recurrencies", and now with results in hand they take serious exception.

Twenty years after Studies in Ethnomethodology there exists as the work of an international and interdisciplinary company a very large corpus of empirical studies of practical actions, so-called "naturally organized ordinary activities." These studies demonstrate locally produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable phenomena of order* in and as of Parsons' plenum, in detail.

In order that concreteness not be handed over to generalities, I shall mention several studies by ethnomethodologists. These may remind the reader of just what concreteness has been used by Parsons and the social sciences, among indefinitely many analytic arts and sciences of practical action, to insist upon.

Talking medicines among the Kpelle of Liberia so as to be heard by those who need to hear it that one is properly concealing secrets (Bellman 1975, 1981).

Mathematicians' work of proving the schedule of 37 theorems and their proof accounts that make up, as instructions, Godel's proof (Livingston 1986).

The work of a local gang in a neurochemistry lab making artifact recognizable and demonstrable in electron microscopic records of axon destruction and regrowth in rat's brains (Lynch 1985).

Designing and administering a medical school curriculum in pediatrics, and evaluating the competence with that curriculum of medical students, interns, and residents (Robillard and Pack 1976-1982).

Administering federally funded mental health programs in the U.S. Pacific Trust territory, specifying the way these programs design and administer, staff, finance, care for and analyze records with which to track in specifics social and medical pathologies of Oceania (Robillard and colleagues 1983, 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1987).

Teaching English as a second language to pre-school children from immigrant families (Meyer 1985, 1988).

Teacher and students concertedly arranging for and spotting trouble-in-the-making in an inner city high school classroom (Macbeth 1987).

Coordination work-site practices of 911 dispatchers in 'working' a call (Zimmerman and Whalen 1987).

Finding in an afternoon the sequentially organized character of an experiment in undergraduate laboratory chemistry (Schrecker in press).

Understanding among Australian aborigines learned by an American anthropologist by helping them document their sacred sites so that they can withstand legal controversies instituted by corporate interests (Liberman 1986).

The use by parties at work (1) in the offices of an entrepreneurial firm in the fast food business, and (2) in the operations room at the London air traffic control center, of the on-site "notion" of a working division of labor as a local means in each of interrelating and explication the activities to be found there. (Anderson, Sharrock and Hughes 1987).

Learning to play improvised jazz piano (Sudnow 1978).

Talking the convict code in an inmate half-way house (Wieder 1974).

Undergraduates achieving the definiteness of sense and the coherence of a text's details in reading introductory sociology (Morrison 1976).

Collaborative writing at a computer in a Grade One classroom collected and elucidated as two related production problems: where am I? and what next? (Heap 1986a, 1986b).

Designing a Xerox copier to assure complaint free operation by office personnel (Suchman 1985).

Teaching civil procedure to first year students in one of the country's leading law schools (Burs 1986).

And then there is the extraordinary collection of studies on conversation. Hundreds of published studies have established the existence of a domain of phenomena that was unknown and unsuspected until it was collaboratively developed by Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and their colleagues. (For a bibliography see Heritage 1985).

I have listed a very small number of titles in the corpus of published studies that report radical phenomena.

When I speak about the phenomena that they report as radical phenomena what am I claiming about these phenomena? What is ethnomethodological about these studies and their results?

First, the phenomena they report are available to policies of ethnomethodology—for example, they are available under the exercise of "ethnomethodological indifference" and they are available under a respect for the unique adequacy requirement of methods. But they are specifically not available to the policies and methods of constructive analysis. These phenomena cannot be recovered with a priori representational methods. They are not demonstrable in the established terms of classic studies.

Second, the social science movement, in carrying out its research agenda, as a systematic feature of that agenda, depends upon their existence as omnirelevant details of their agenda and makes use of them, finds them essentially unavoidable and essentially without remedy, but finds them specifically uninteresting and ignores them.

Third, the reported phenomena can not be reduced by using the familiar reduction procedures in the social science movement without losing those phenomena.

Fourth, the reported phenomena are only inspectably the case. They are unavailable to the arts of designing and interpreting definitions, metaphors, models, constructions, types, or ideals. They can not be recovered by attempts no matter how thoughtful, to specify an examinable practice by detailing a generality.

Fifth, they were discovered. They are only discoverable and they cannot be imagined.

Sixth, they specify "foundational" issues in and as the work of a "discipline" that is concerned with issues of produced order in and as practical action.

Seventh, these phenomena are locally and endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable in and as of detail, and therein they provide for everything that details could possibly be.

Eight, not only do these phenomena provide for detail as a topic of order*, but any and every topic of logic, order, reason, meaning, or method is eligible for respecification as locally achieved phenomena of order*. Not only the topic of detail but every topic of order* is to be discovered and is discoverable and is to be respecified and is respecifiable as only locally and reflexively produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order*. These phenomena of order* are immortal, ordinary society's commonplace, vulgar, familiar, unavoidable and irremediable and uninteresting "work of the streets".

To summarize: It is ethnomethodological about these studies that they show for ordinary society's substantive events, in material contents, that and just how members concert their activities to produce and exhibit the coherence, cogency, analysis, consistency, order, meaning, reason, method, which are locally, reflexively accountable orderlinesses—in and as of their ordinary lives together, in detail.

A very large corpus shows in and as of Parsons' plenum, in detail, contrary to the entirety of the social science movement, in incommensurably asymmetrically alternate sociology, the local production and natural, reflexive accountability of immortal, ordinary society really, actually, evidently, and these ordinarily. A development of many years of work in ethnomethodology and conversational analysis these studies are founded on, they continue, and they depend upon the work of a large company of colleagues.

It is the company's achievement that their studies, by composing a current serious situation of inquiry, provide access to a technical domain of organizational phenomena. These phenomena were not suspected until their studies established their existence, provided the methods to study them, and provided what methods and their accompanying issues of relevance, evidence, adequate description, observability, validity, teachability, and the rest could be.

Distinctive emphases on the production and accountability of order* in and as ordinary activities identify ethnomethodological studies and set them in contrast to classic studies as an incommensurably alternate sociology.

My purpose in these remarks has been to sketch these emphases and to identify the fact of a company whose existence furnishes these emphases their technical details, assures their consequentiality for the tasks in ethnomethodological inquiries of discovering the identifying issues of the problem of social order, and grounds my claims in the real-world practices of their craft.

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Notes

1. When, in this paper, order* is spelled with an asterisk, but only then, it serves as a convenient proxy. I use order* as a marker to hold a place for any of the endless topics in intellectual history that speak of logic, purpose, reason, rational action, evidence, identity, proof, meaning, method, consciousness, and the rest. Any of the topics that order* is proxy for should be read with an accompanying suffix: (order*)-in-and-as-of-the-workings-of-ordinary-society. Then the topic of order* would be understood to speak of a phenomenon of order*, a practical achievement. When order is spelled without an asterisk it is used in its textually appropriate vernacular or technical meaning.
2. Based on my talk, "The Seriousness of Professional Sociology" at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, August, 1987. (See footnote 3.) A prior version, A Reflection, was published in the d.a.r.g. Newsletter, Fall, 1987, of the Discourse Analysis Research Group, Dr. Richard D. Heyman and Dr. Robert M. Seiler, The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
3. Section on Theoretical Sociology, "Parsons' The Structure of Social Action: Three Views Fifty Years On," Bernard Barber, Chair. Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, August, 1987. I wish to thank Bernard Barber for his invitation to speak at this celebration.
4. Alexander's extended argument is found in his book, Action and Its Environments, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 224-258.
5. Of course, in deliberately reconstructive readings of them.
6. Obviously, much turns on what plenum is taken to mean. Having rejected the first two questions—"What does plenum mean?" and "How is plenum to be defined?" and insisting on this one: "Who has had what need of a plenum?", I must risk the charge of willfully having my way with it, no matter what way it is, by having left specifically unspecified what plenum is to mean. Temporarily, and just here, that is just what I want to do. To define and explain plenum would introduce a distracting excursion. I don't want to take up those questions, but insofar as we can, without taking up those questions, I want to ask, "Who has used the notion of a plenum and for what?" The sense of what plenum means will emerge as I document that.
7. I use demonstrated respectfully, without irony, as Parsons' version of what he was doing with the pair. With his pair he took it to be showable, and to have been shown, he demonstrated, there was no orderliness in the plenum. Not only for his part, but on behalf of professional sociology, and as a stand-in for the analytic social sciences. For their part, with their pairs, with their administered distinctions, they are able to demonstrate the same things. Caution: That does not mean that I figure there is no orderliness in concrete activities. Because I say Parsons and the analytic social sciences demonstrate and demonstrated I fear that this will be treated as my real position and be used to read my subsequent text. In the rest of the paper I say otherwise. I must caution the reader not to use that reading to subsequently understand the remainder of my argument, which argues just the opposite.
8. As well as for the social sciences, among other countlessly many arts and sciences of practical action.
9. I regret that this list will lend itself to finding in it persons and studies that are not mentioned. I apologize to the company of ethnomethodologists and CA people for not knowing how to spare them the unfair consequences of reading the list as a roll call. Whoever has tried to do ethnomethodological studies would be thereby equipped to recognize that the list testifies to a division of labor and that the list is not a bibliography of all eligible, possible, relevant, or consequential work.
10. Foundational issues are reported in the remaining three parts of the series, of which this article is Part I.
    • PART II: The Curious Seriousness of Professional Sociology
    • PART III: Six Rendering Theorems
    • PART IV: Incommensurably, Asymmetrically Alternate Pairs of Accountable Technologies for the Production, Analysis, Understanding, Description, and Observability of Order* In and As of Practical Action and Practical Reasoning's Embodied Details.

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References

Anderson, R.J., W.W. Sharrock, and J.A. Hughes. 1987. "The Division of Labour." Paper presented at the conference on "Action Analysis and Conversation Analysis," Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, Paris, September 26-30.

Bellman, Beryl. 1975. Village of Curers and Assassins: On the Production of Fala Kpelle Cosmological Categories. The Hague: Mouton.

———. 1981. The Language of Secrecy. Unpublished monograph. Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego.

Burs, Stacy. 1986. An Ethnomethodological Case Study of Law Pedagogy in Civil Procedure. Unpublished monograph, University of California, Los Angeles.

Heap, James L. 1986a. "Sociality and Cognition in Collaborative Computer Writings." Paper prepared for discussion at the Conference on Literacy and Culture in Educational Settings at the University of Michigan School of Education.

———. 1986b. "Collaborative Practices During Computer Writing in a First Grade Classroom." Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.

Heritage, John. 1985. "Recent Developments in Conversation Analysis." Sociolinguistics. 15:1-19.

Liberman, Kenneth. 1986. Understanding Interaction in Central Australia: An Ethnomethodological Study of Australian Aboriginal People. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Livingston, Eric. 1986. The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Lynch, Michael. 1985. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Laboratory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Macbeth, Douglas. 1987. Management's Work: The Social Organization of Order and Troubles in Secondary Classrooms. Doctoral dissertation, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.

Meyer, Lois. 1985. Making a Scene: Probing the Structure of Language in Sibling Interaction. Unpublished manuscript. University of California, Berkeley.

———. 1988. "It Was No Trouble: Achieving Communicative Competence in a Second Language." in Development of Competence in a Second Language, edited by Robin Scarcella, Elain Anderson and Stephen Krashin. Newbury House.

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Originally published in Sociological Theory, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 103-109