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Ethnomethodology for Social Work

Carleton University, Canada

This article provides an introduction for social workers to ethnomethodology (EM), and suggests that they can find not only a similarity of attention between their front-line work and EM, but ways of making sense which explicate the connections between concrete and practical activity and the accomplishment of local as well as extra-local orders. EM redirects analytic attention to the ordinary and mundane ways that people in their everyday lives jointly produce, account for, and manage local, practical, and taken-for-granted scenes to produce social order. EM, by attending to what people ‘do’ in concert, rather than what they might say, think, or imagine, provides a essential empirical redirection for social work at a time when increasing attention is being given to language, discourse, and narrative. Through EM social workers can find tools to explicate the essential reflexivity of their practice and the incorrigible indexicality of professional and client accounts. By turning to EM social workers can recover and celebrate actual peoples’ artful accomplishment of local settings and forms of order.

Key Words: ethnomethodology • indexicality • reflexivity • research • social work

Qualitative Social Work, Vol. 6, No. 1, 95-120 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1473325007074168


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