Accounts

Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology

Publication Date

3-31-2025

Abstract

Accounts, (stories, reports, chronicles, narrations) are massively present in social life and interaction, from ordinary conversation, to courtroom trials, to calls to the police, medical encounters, newscasts, organisational assessments, political confirmation hearings, and others. For ethnomethodologists accounts are not docile narratives, but come deeply embedded in, and embodied as, various kinds of practical actions whose unfolding particulars are contextually productive of various trajectories and interactional logics. The inquiry into accounting practices makes visible the reflexively constituent features of social action, and of "ordinary immortal society" that Garfinkel elaborated: its visibility, observability, reportability, evidentiality, reasonability, intelligibility and its moral organisation. Accounts can themselves become accountable. In looking at accounts ethnomethodologically, then, analysis simultaneously engages two mutually embedded dimensions: the organisational deployment of account detail (topics and resources as mobilised within and constitutive of the account), and the contextual situated deployment of the account itself, in and as its detail, with its practical and interactional trajectories. Thus the study of accounts enables the understanding of the mutual constitution of the epistemic, the moral and the practical in social activities: that is, what a praxiology of accounting offers, and what the analysis of accounts-in-action can make visible. The chapter will outline these issues by reference to a range of ethnomethodological works, and highlight further avenues that may be pursued.

ISBN

[9780367340971, 9780429323904]

First Page

132

Last Page

141

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Ethnomethodology, Social action, Accounts, Interactional logics, Praxiology

Scopus ID

86000503142

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS