Ethnomethodology's Program Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism

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.

Harold Garfinkel has been on the faculty of the sociology department at UCLA since 1954. Retired in 1987, he remains active as an emeritus professor. Anne Warfield Rawls received degrees in philosophy and sociology from Boston University. She has worked to establish the philosophical implications of contemporary interactionist sociology and ethnomethodology.