Toward the Logic of Situated Practices
Toward the Logic of Situated Practices

Summary/Abstract: This paper considers the logic of situated practices in an ethnomethodological context. This focus is important not only as a better way of examining the nature of the ethnomethodological stance, but also as an avenue to comprehending the transformations in contemporary sociology since ethnomethodology itself could be seen as a real laboratory for studying them. The notion of ‘situated practices’, however, usually remains unexplicated in the course of ethnomethodological work. Hence, this paper seeks to trace out the genealogy of the idea of ‘situated practices’ from two early manuscripts of Harold Garfi nkel (from 1948 and from 1952). Binding together notions intensively used by sociologists – such as ‘identity’, ‘identifi cation’, ‘actor’, and ‘group’ – as co-belonging to the idea of ‘situating’, makes it possible to show the ‘missing what’ that the young Garfi nkel reveals in them. The second part of the paper demonstrates why and how these notions have grown into the key ethnomethodological ideas of ‘membership’ and ‘instructed actions’.

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