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5Social Distribution Of Knowledge In Action: The Practical Management Of ClassificationIn Jan Strassheim & Hisashi Nasu (eds.), Relevance and Irrelevance: Theories, Factors and Challenges, De Gruyter. pp. 161-186. 2018.
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42On the demise of the native: Some observations on and a proposal for ethnography (review)Human Studies 5 (1). 1982.
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38Iv. understanding Peter WinchInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 28 (1-4). 1985.Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science has been the subject of repeated misunderstanding. This discussion takes one recent example and shows how Winch's argument is gravely distorted. What is at issue is not, as is usually supposed, whether we can accept or endorse another society's explanations of its activities, but whether we have to look for an explanatory connection between concepts and action. Winch's argument is that before we can try to explain actions, we have to identify them corre…Read more
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8Statistical Practice: Putting Society on DisplayTheory, Culture and Society 33 (3): 51-77. 2016.As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying a…Read more
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13Making Sense of Reification, by Burke C. ThomasonJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14 (1): 104-106. 1983.
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13Life Forms and Meaning Structure, by Alfred Shütz, translated, introduced and annotated by Helmut Wagner. Routledge and Kegan PaulJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14 (1): 104-106. 1983.
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26Cultural Analysis, by R. Wuthnow, J. D. Hunter, A. Bergesen and E. KurzweilJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 (2): 215-216. 1985.
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76Kuhn: philosopher of scientific revolutionsPolity. 2002.Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work i…Read more
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3Getting the Design Job Done: Notes on the Social Organisation of Technical WorkJournal of Intelligent Systems 3 (2-4): 319-344. 1993.
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26That We Obey Rules Blindly Does Not Mean that We Are Blindly Subservient to RulesTheory, Culture and Society 25 (2): 33-50. 2008.
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9In support of conversation analysis’ radical agendaDiscourse Studies 18 (5): 610-620. 2016.This comment provides an overview of the four articles by Lindwall, Lymer and Ivarsson; Lynch and Wong; Macbeth, Wong and Lynch; and Macbeth and Wong, which make up the kernel of this Special Issue of Discourse Studies on Epistemics; and it also examines the reasons for the assorted difficulties the authors of those articles have with the Epistemic Programme being proposed for conversation analysis. The legitimacy of their concerns is underscored by showing that the charge the EP makes, which is…Read more
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27Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of MathematicsHuman Studies 42 (2): 253-279. 2019.While Garfinkel’s early work, captured in Studies in Ethnomethodology, has received a lot of attention and discussion, this has not been the case for his later work since the 1970s. In this paper, we critically examine the aims of Garfinkel’s later ethnomethodological studies of work programme and evaluate key ideas such as the ‘missing what’ in the sociology of work, ‘the unique adequacy requirements of methods’, and the notion of ‘hybrid studies’. We do so through a detailed engagement with a …Read more
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18There is No Such Thing as Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (review)Analysis 69 (4): 795-797. 2009.This provocative, engaging and important book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Peter Winch's seminal The Idea of a Social Science. The authors – the first two philosophers, the third a sociologist – have worked together in various permutations before. No-one familiar with their previous publications will be surprised that the dominant voice throughout is Wittgenstein's – that is, Wittgenstein as read ‘resolutely’ by ‘new Wittgensteinians’. They have three principal aims: firs…Read more
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7Irony as a methodological theory: a sketch of four sociological variationsRussian Sociological Review 9 (1): 53-65. 2010.A peculiar method often used in sociological practice – methodological irony – is discussed in the present paper. The idea of the method is that sociologist substitutes everyday world of actor for the world of objective possibilities, which are available only to sociological investigation. Finally with the help of this method sociologists get a specific representation of social reality corresponding to their methodological preferences. Authors identify four variations of methodological irony: tr…Read more
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30II. Wittgenstein and comparative sociologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 27 (1-4): 268-276. 1984.Focusing on a discussion by Ruddich and Stassen of the ?Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough?, this paper shows that some of the usual criticisms made by sociologists of Wittgenstein are misplaced. He does not reject causal explanations of beliefs and actions and replace them with some other form of explanation, but dismisses the idea that any explanation is called for here. His argument that the origin of the desire to explain beliefs is to be found in a misconceived parallel between science and ma…Read more
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14The relationship between ethnomethodology and phenomenologyJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 (3): 221-235. 1985.
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17Praise for the First Edition: `Totally reliable... the authors have produced a book urgently needed by all those charged with introducing students to the classics... quite indispensable' - Times Higher Education Supplement This is a fully updated and expanded new edition of the successful undergraduate text. Providing a lucid examination of the pivotal theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, the authors submit that these figures have decisively shaped the discipline. They show how the classical ap…Read more
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16Fundamentals of ethnomethodologyIn Barry Smart & George Ritzer (eds.), Handbook of Social Theory, Sage Publications. pp. 249--259. 2001.
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Tom : A critical commentary continuedIn Ivan Leudar & Alan Costall (eds.), Against theory of mind, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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Closet cartesianism in discursive psychologyIn Ivan Leudar & Alan Costall (eds.), Against theory of mind, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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46Mathematical relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparisonJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36 (2). 2006.