Ethnomethodology's Program

Ethnomethodology's Program: Working out Durkheim's Aphorism emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues—and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologists have, for a century or more, ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions. Garfinkel, in this new book, shows how and why sociology must restore Durkheim's aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of social facts that are produced by complex social practices enacted by participants in the social order.