Ethnomethodology's Program

gets reintroduced to me in a recurrent episode at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association. I'm waiting for the elevator. The doors open. Oh, Hi Hal! Hi. I walk in. THE QUESTION is asked: Hey, Hal, what IS ethnomethodology? The elevator doors close. We're on our way to the ninth floor. I'm only able to say, Ethnomethodology is working out some very preposterous The elevator doors open. On the way to my room it occurs to me that I should have said that ethnomethodology is respecifying Durkheim's lived immortal, ordinary society, evidently, doing so by working out a schedule of preposterous problems. The problems have their sources in the worldwide social science movement. They are motivated by that movement's ubiquitous commitments to the policies and methods of formal analysis and general representational theorizing and by its unquestionable achievements. Formal Analytic (FA) technology and its results are understood worldwide. Almost