The ethnomethodological studies in this book analyze everyday activities as member's methods for making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical purposes, i.e., "accountable", as organizations of commonplace everyday activities. The reflexivity of that phenomenon is a singular feature of practical actions, of practical circumstances, of common sense knowledge of social structures, and of practical sociological reasoning. it permits us to locate and examine their occurrences and establishes their study.

These studies are directed to the tasks of learning how member's actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical actions, practical circumstances, common sense knowledge of social structures, and practical sociological reasoning analyzable ; and of discovering the formal properties of commonplace, practical common sense actions, "from within" actual settings, as ongoing accomplishments of those settings. The formal properties obtain their guarantees from no other source, and in no other way. Because this is so, study tasks cannot be accomplished by free invention, constructive analytic theorizing, mockups, or book reviews, and so no special interest is paid to them aside from an interest in their varieties as organizationally situated methods of practical reasoning.

The contents of this book were written over a period of several years and include : What is Ethnomethodology? - Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities - Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: The Documentary Method of Interpretation in Lay and Professional Fact Finding - Some Rules of Correct Decisions That Jurors Respect - Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an "Intersexed" Person, Part 1 - "Good" Organizational Reasons for "Bad" Clinic Records - Methodological Adequacy in the Quantitative Study of Selection Criteria and Selection Practices in Psychiatric Outpatient Clinics - The Rational Properites of Scientific and Common Sense Activities - Appendix to Chapter Five

HAROLD GARFINKEL, Ph. D. Harvard University Departement of Social Relations, is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1967