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On the Practical Work of Citation: Foundationalism and (Inter)disciplinary Incommensurability Andrew Carlin, Manchester Metropolitan University –––––––––––––––––– Carlin, Andrew. “On the Practical Work of Citation: Foundationalism and (Inter)disciplinary Incommensurability.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 11 (2016): 28-40. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3

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In this response1 I would like to thank Pamela Moss for her careful attention to my work. I may disappoint readers hoping for some measure of controversy or opposition—Moss has produced a cogent set of arguments in response to my original article. I very much appreciate her comments, and I have followed up her references with profit. There are general and specific areas upon which we both agree. If I can gloss Moss’ reply, she details instances in my observations on disciplinary borrowings—particularly in relation to Stefan Timmermans’2 use of David Sudnow’s3 book Passing On—where I was doing precisely what I suggested Timmermans had being doing with Sudnow. I was making the point that in the case of disciplinary borrowings, authors could do more to account for the epistemological positions of arguments that are taken in support of their current paper. This elicited Moss’ “Tu quoque!” (“You too!”) conclusion:

A more generally relevant expectation might be that the cited articles are fairly represented for the purposes of the citation and that the collected body of articles cited is appropriate to the interpretations and generalizations the citing author is making.4

Moss’ critique, that had I outlined both Sudnow’s and Timmermans’ objectives more clearly I may have reached a different conclusion about Timmermans’ use of Sudnow’s work, is fair and one with which I agree—up to a point. On Referencing as Practical Work Among the—but for purposes of publication, deliberately unstated—aims of my paper was in advancing a broader consideration of literature measurement systems: bibliometrics, citation analysis, informetrics. A problem for citation analysis is context: what is a particular citation doing at a particular juncture within an article. In emphasizing the “purposes” of references and citations, Moss confirms my reading of Timmermans’ 5 article as oriented towards Sudnow’s book for the substantive field “sociology of death/dying,” what I had called “the ‘reading list’ approach to sociology.”6 I am not concerned that Moss discerns “many purposes for using the literature within research projects.”7 Indeed, I am delighted that she recognizes this, for example in my own use of citations within the original paper8; so much of the scholarship on citation and

1 I am grateful to Glenn Gillespie at UC Berkeley Libraries, for factual clarification; and especially to Rod Watson, for generous discussion of these issues, and for alerting me to analytic asymmetries within this Response. 2 Timmermans, “Social Death as Self-fulfilling Prophecy.” 3 Sudnow, Passing On. 4 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 53. 5 Timmermans, “Social Death as Self-fulfilling Prophecy.” 6 Carlin, “On Some Limits of Interdisciplinarity,” 5. 7 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 47. 8 Ibid.

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referencing misses this key feature of academic writing. Of course I was not suggesting that the main, or the one and only purpose for using the literature is for the surfacing of an identifiable research problem. The reification of citations as homogenous entities for the practical purposes of counting how many times an author’s work is cited decontextualizes the work being accomplished by the writer of the citing work. As bibliometrics becomes increasingly sophisticated and fragmented—identifying new “edges” of scholarly communication to be operationalized, and new measures for doing the operationalizing9—discussions of citation measurement, citation practices and the contextual bases of referencing from outside bibliometry (resisting disciplinary “ownership”) appear less frequently.10 They are all the more precious in their scarcity. Without distorting discussion with consideration of members’ motives—“official lists” of these have already appeared in information science11—we may observe how references are doing different, practical work. For example, and in no particular order:

• For purposes of comparison, e.g. to establish that a phenomenon was observed in other settings also. 12 The concatenation of sources or accumulative appeal to other settings may be a form of persuasion (see below)

• For purposes of comparison, e.g. that related or similar phenomena can be observed in other settings also (including citations of David Sudnow’s “Normal Crimes” paper13).

• For purposes of comparison, e.g. may be positive or negative citations. Often found in literature review sections.14 For example, references may be cited “to demonstrate the novelty of one’s results. This is often achieved by reviewing the current state of knowledge in an Introduction, and then showing or implying that the findings reported constitute an advance.”15 (This is also a form of persuasion; see below)

• Locating arguments—according credit to a previous paper16 • Locating arguments—facilitating information retrieval, so that readers are

able to pursue the inquiry into particular points of discussion (as Moss has been able to do in her reply, for instance)

• Locating arguments—while this relates to according credit it may also work to disclaim responsibility, or spreading the blame; colloquially known as “CYA”17

9 Kozak and Bornmann, “A New Family of Cumulative Indexes for Measuring Scientific Performance.” 10 Bittner, “Citation Classic Commentary on ‘The Police on Skid Row”; Blackman, “Social Media and the Politics of Small Data”; Hertz, “Pimp My Fluff”; Stavrakakis, “Wallon, Lacan and the Lacanians.” 11 E.g. Bornmann et al., “What Factors Determine Citation Counts of Publications in Chemistry Besides their Quality?”; Weinstock, “Citation Indexes.” 12 Glaser and Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, 169, passim. 13 Cavan, Liquor License, 18; Cicourel, The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice, 55. 14 Carlin, “On Some Limits of Interdisciplinarity.” 15 Gilbert, “Referencing as Persuasion,” 116. 16 Merton, “Priorities In Scientific Discovery.” 17 Raymond L. Gold, personal communication.

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• Glossing arguments—using citations as “concept symbols”18 • Persuasive devices—as Nigel Gilbert suggests, citations on their own may

not be “tools of persuasion”. However, they can do persuasive work. For example, “respected papers may be cited in order to shine in their reflected glory even if they do not seem closely related to the substantive content of the report”19

• “Recipient design”20—in submitting a manuscript to a journal, the author tailors some of the arguments, and references, as recognizable to the particular journal under consideration. This may involve having been “socialized” into a particular discipline; or, this may involve considerable guesswork, anticipating what the journal editors/reviewers find acceptable21

• “Doing disciplinarity”—displaying affiliation with particular disciplines, or fields within disciplines. Citing particular bibliographic sets presents the paper as relevant to particular research interests; for example, physical geography but not necessarily human geography

• Self-citation—this may be doing informative work; though self-citation may be rhetorical or used as an authorization procedure22

• “Doing networking”—displaying membership within a research network23; or attempts to affiliate with a particular research network.24

This is not an exhaustive list of the work of citations and citation practices; there are considerably more possibilities—demonstrable and reportable—reviewed elsewhere.25 It was not the remit of my original paper to explore all of these in detail but, suffice to say, I am aware of the complex issues arising from academic requirements and their measurement.26 Locating David Sudnow within Ethnomethodology Whilst I take no umbrage with Moss’ observation that I may be misrepresenting Timmermans’ representation of Sudnow, I am less sanguine about the contextualization of Sudnow’s work—both in Timmermans’ article, and in my own article. This dissatisfaction extends beyond Passing On and across Sudnow’s corpus of studies: I had not sufficiently explained the connections that I recognize as features of Sudnow’s works, taken as a corpus; and how this corpus coheres with the ethnomethodological corpus.27

18 Small, “Cited Documents as Concept Symbols.” 19 Gilbert, “Referencing as Persuasion,” 116. 20 Sacks and Schegloff, “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and their Interaction.” 21 Myers, Writing Biology. 22 Falagas and Kavvadia, “‘Eigenlob’”; Fowler and Aksnes, “Does Self-Citation Pay?” 23 Hellsten et al., “Self-Citations, Co-Authorships and Keywords.” 24 Note for sociologists: this is a literal “reference group”! 25 E.g. Bornmann and Daniel, “What do Citation Counts Measure?” 26 Boellstorff, “Submission and Acceptance.” 27 Sudnow, Passing On.

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For reasons that may become clear, this is not the venue in which to revisit arguments that were merely glossed by references—as mentioned above, providing citations as glosses for arguments is another use of the literature, of course—in order to explicate my practical reasoning procedures regarding selectivity of items, and corpora, of literature, which are queried by Moss.28 To borrow Harold Garfinkel’s phrase (that derived from his collaborations with Sudnow), these are “documented conjectures”—from lectures on ethnomethodology, conversations with ethnomethodologists, and my acquaintance with studies from the “ethnomethodological literature.” One issue that I should have made more explicit is how my original argument was framed within a disciplinary history of ethnomethodology. Passing On was written at a particular juncture in the history of ethnomethodology. In 1966, at University of California, Berkeley, Sudnow and Harvey Sacks were awarded their doctoral qualifications. A group of Goffman’s students had moved away from Goffman’s work intellectually, and increasingly aligned themselves with Harold Garfinkel, then a junior professor at University of California, Los Angeles.29 In the acknowledgements section of his PhD dissertation, Sacks does not mention Goffman; instead, Sacks thanked Edwin Shneidman for facilitating access to the telephone calls at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, Suicide Prevention Center, Los Angeles, which he had used as data; and he thanked Garfinkel for financial and intellectual support: “In acknowledging this support of his I may also say that it is but the most tangible and recent item on a long list of indebtedness I have to him.”30 Another source of disappointment for Goffman was how Sacks had written a dissertation very different from a ‘more-Goffmanian-style’ manuscript that Sacks had shown him in the early Sixties.31 As Sacks’ dissertation supervisor, Erving Goffman was reluctant to sign off on Sacks’ doctoral dissertation. Famously, the Chair of the dissertation committee, Aaron Cicourel, intervened to authorize Sacks’ award. Garfinkel, Goffman, Sacks and Sudnow are all dead, now; we cannot solicit their recollections of 1966. However, the possibility that Goffman resented Garfinkel’s intellectual affinity with his own students is inferentially available. If Goffman did feel this way, or if Sudnow perceived Goffman to be acting on these feelings, we should not be surprised by the sociological program that characterizes Passing On. Sudnow had already published an article critical of the use of data in traditional sociological methods 32 —whatever their considerations of members’ methods might become, Sudnow was contributing to its development.

28 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 46. 29 Pace Moss (2016, 49), in my original article (Carlin 2016, 14, n. 13) I was clear that Erving Goffman, not Harold Garfinkel, was Sudnow’s dissertation supervisor. 30 Sacks, “The Search for Help,” ii. 31 This early manuscript was known informally as “the Police Paper” (Schegloff 1999), which Sudnow went on to publish (Sacks 1972). 32 Indeed, Sudnow’s “Normal Crimes” paper was described as one of “The most significant works on this subject” (Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide, 163).

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When Moss33 decries “I read Sudnow for explicit references to ethnomethodology. I read the preface, the introduction, the conclusion, the appendices, and all the headings and subheadings in the book, and could not find ‘ethnomethodology’ named,” it would have been extremely unlikely for Sudnow to have used the word “ethnomethodology” within the pages of his dissertation as it had only just been coined.34 Although Sudnow does refer to ethnomethodology. In answer to Moss’ specific query35 the prefatory note is not in his dissertation but appears in the Prentice-Hall edition of Passing On:

I have benefited at various points in the conduct of the research from my discussions with Sheldon Messinger, Harvey Sacks, Roy Turner, and Helen Pat Gouldner. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was presented at a conference held by Harold Garfinkel of UCLA in the summer of 1965. My indebtedness to Professor Garfinkel will, I hope, be clear to those who know his work. I do not claim, however, that this study is well representative of ‘ethnomethodological’ sociology, though should that be at all true, I would be very pleased.36

One of the key phrases in this acknowledgement is “My indebtedness to Professor Garfinkel will, I hope, be clear to those who know his work.” Unlike Sacks’ acknowledgement of Garfinkel’s influence in his dissertation (above), this does not appear in Sudnow’s dissertation. It is a “noticeable absence”; and “those who know his work” recognize this as a noticeable absence. The field-specificity of Passing On is not only available through the citations it contains. “Epistemologies at the Disciplinary Level”:37 Indifference and Incommensurability Despite the ritualistic citations to Goffman contained in his thesis, Sudnow was part of the “ethnomethodological firmament”. As mentioned above, he had already published an “ethnomethodological” study;38 and, after Passing On was published, he was a key advocate of ethnomethodology in an infamous panel discussion to debate its disciplinary place in sociology.39 A decade later, at Garfinkel’s encouragement, he published an ethnomethodological study of competence—playing jazz piano—that can be seen as an early expression of Garfinkel’s “studies of work” program. Garfinkel’s procedural policy of “ethnomethodological indifference,” which discouraged literature use as a formulaic requirement of studies, made it

33 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 49. 34 Bittner, “The Concept of Organization.” 35 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 49. 36 Sudnow, Passing On, v. 37 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52. 38 Sudnow, “Normal Crimes.” 39 Hill and Crittenden, Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology.

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possible for Sudnow “to realize the consequences of allowing the keyboard, and not an academic discipline, to tell me where to go.”40 To reiterate, my detailing of Sudnow’s books and papers in the original article were not geared toward idle recitation of references but were warranted by the reticulation of intellectual concerns that made up the corpus of Sudnow’s work, and how these cohered with the developing corpus of ethnomethodological studies. This is but one of the instances of item of literature/corpus of literature to which I was referring in the original arguments, and which Moss found problematic. Yet I make no apologies for reading Sudnow this way. However, Sudnow disputed Garfinkel’s presentation of “ethnomethodological indifference.”41 As a methodological policy, qua phenomenological bracketing, ethnomethodological indifference enabled the analyst to focus on a phenomenon without the distraction of “related literature,” which both set the “terms and determinations”42 of the analysis and necessarily distanced the analyst from the phenomenon of interest. Sudnow appreciated how non-ethnomethodologists could understand “ethnomethodological indifference” as code for a Weberian attitude of “value-free” inquiry; even “objectivity” (something which, following Felix Kaufmann43 on the protocols and standards of acceptability in social science, Garfinkel did not intend); or worse, for Sudnow, as being “indifferent” to iniquities and inequalities.44 To be clear, “ethnomethodological indifference” was not an ethical (or non-ethical) position but a methodological procedure. Even though Garfinkel’s work is characterized by a compassionate advocacy of those in adversity45—Garfinkel certainly was not indifferent to circumstances—Sudnow would never reconcile himself to what he regarded as a significant error of judgement on Garfinkel’s part.46 Ethnomethodologists have not been shy of taking up traditional sociological topics, such as racism, power, and inequality. It is a misrepresentation of ethnomethodological investigations to claim otherwise. That ethnomethodology has addressed topics in different ways is undeniable, however; yet this is not the same as being “indifferent” to such matters. As I said in my original article,47 for instance, power has been approached as an in situ, collaborative activity.48 This is to be contrasted with traditional representations of power in anthropological and sociological approaches.49 Moreover, the topical relevance of studies brings me to another note of contention for Moss, regarding the appropriateness of the word “traditional” as a generalizing description of sociology.

40 Sudnow, Ways of the Hand, viii. 41 Sudnow, “An Ethno-autobiography of Teaching.” 42 Bittner, “The Concept of Organization,” 247. 43 Kaufmann, The Methodology of the Social Sciences. 44 Sudnow, “An Ethno-autobiography of Teaching.” 45 Garfinkel, “Color Trouble,” “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person,” and “Instructions and Instructed Actions.” 46 Sudnow, “An Ethno-autobiography of Teaching.” 47 Carlin, “On Some Limits of Interdisciplinarity,” 14. 48 Sharrock and Button, “The Technical Operations of the Levers of Power.” 49 Moerman, “Life after C.A.”

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My use of the word “traditional” does not connote “classical,” as Moss assumes in questioning its contemporary relevance.50 “Traditional” does not compartmentalize work in pro tempore or chronological fashion. “Traditional” is not setting an arbitrary temporal marker between, say, Nineteenth Century sociology, or pre-War sociology, or pre-Nineteen Sixties sociology; versus Postmodern sociology, post-Nineteen Seventies Sociology, or Twenty-First Century sociology. Not at all. My use of the word “traditional,” as I have consistently used it, reflects or has equivalence with “professional sociological theorizing,” or “constructive analysis” (and, later, “formal analysis”). However, I should recognize—and I thank Moss for drawing this to my attention—that these were and remain contentious adjectives, too. To clarify my use of terms, “traditional” is intended to disambiguate forms of sociology, as “professional sociological theorizing,” in contrast to “radical” forms of sociology which seek to explicate members’ practical sociological theorizing. Abbott’s fractals analogy, which he uses to emphasise the fluidity of conceptual development,51 does not address this.52 Nor, to use Moss’ other example,53 does Actor-Network-Theory (ANT).54 Moss’ specific question reads, “is ethnomethodology incommensurable with ANT in the same way it might be incommensurable [with] traditions reflecting the structure-agency dualism?” A short answer is “Yes.” 55 The structure/agency dualism is implicated in foundational forms of theorizing, which both Abbott56 and Latour57 reproduce. In taking a methodologically ironic stance vis-à-vis members’ practical decision-making activities they fail to dissolve the tensions set up by foundational theories. Moss draws attention to Bruno Latour, who “acknowledges [ANT’s] affinities with ethnomethodology,”58 but how does Latour go about such acknowledgement? Through citation of “ethnomethodological” resources; and here we may return to the ad hoc list of work done through referencing, above. Furthermore, a key criterion remarking “incommensurability” is the gestalt configuration of analytic approaches. Ethnomethodology seeks to explicate the in situ, in vivo, practical work of members’ activities. In striving towards such explication, the ethnomethodologist cannot be beholden to “foundational” (e.g. Cartesian) formal analytic positions because these theorize out the very praxeological details that are being sought. Hence, ethnomethodology “dissolves” foundational residue, such as the structure/agency dichotomy, as interference with the description of members’ practices. Likewise, Actor-Network-Theory proposes an unnecessary analytic distancing from members’ phenomena. As Sormani asks,

50 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52. 51 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52. 52 My citation of Abbott’s work reiterates the variegated use of sources, as I had, for the purposes of the original article, only selected Abbott to establish the long-standing nature of interdisciplinarity. My citation was certainly not an endorsement of the book in toto, though many studies in citation analysis fail to disambiguate negative from positive citations, i.e. treat all citations as homogenous. 53 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52. 54 Latour, Reassembling the Social. 55 However, this direct affirmative shall be qualified below. 56 Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines. 57 Latour, Reassembling the Social. 58 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52.

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why ‘ontologize’? Why, as an ethnographer, ‘ontologize, ‘epistemologize’, or otherwise ‘theorize’ phenomena, instead of describing them in their self-identifying features?59

The ontological fetishism of ANT removes the analyst further from the distinctive details which are not only constituent features of practice, what Sudnow60 once termed “describably elegant knowledge,” but are practice; whether that be managing the interactional work of running an auction, professional coffee tasting, or playing jazz piano. The plenitude of references to ethnomethodology within the Latour text cited by Moss are footnoted asides to relevant sources,61 not to necessarily commensurable sources. That is, Latour takes a “found relevance” approach to his citation of ethnomethodological sources, e.g. in his example of the user manual that came with the new digital camera62 he references Garfinkel’s63 discussion of assembling furniture according to the instructions. He collocates this citation to Garfinkel with reference to Donald Norman64 on user-centred design. The cognitivism of Norman’s thesis is at odds with the praxeological line of argument advanced by Garfinkel—these are incommensurable approaches, that become proximal citations via a reading-list approach to substantive topics, but readers familiar with Norman and with Garfinkel are unlikely to be confused as to the “found relevance” or nature of Latour’s use of literature. Latour’s practices of citation are unremarkable, routine, and certainly do not suggest that ANT possesses analytic affinities with ethnomethodology. Although, there are distinct differences, too. Moss is correct, I think, in speculating whether the nature of incommensurability—between ethnomethodology and various forms of sociology—differs, and this is a valuable point to explore. For instance, Latour65 claims overlap with ethnomethodology regarding the notion of “accounts”. However, for Latour, accounts are reasons, justifications, verifications, excuses; in environments of uncertainty, accounts justify the certainty of action, e.g. as adequate or plausible in the circumstances. For ethnomethodology, actions—textual, verbal or otherwise—are accounts. The give-away is Latour’s66 epistemological contrast between natural science accounts and social science accounts: “This is why the question of what is a good account is so much more crucial for the social than for the natural sciences”67; and later in the same chapter, this is transformed into “a good text.”68 For ethnomethodology, there are “accounts” but there is no continuum for adjudging the adequacy or plausibility of accounts, such as “a good account”; that is a member’s concept, not an analytic category. Latour’s notion of “account”

59 Sormani, Respecifying Lab Ethnography, 234. 60 Hill and Crittenden, Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology, 51. 61 E.g. footnotes 22, 49, 63, 97 in Latour, Reassembling the Social. 62 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 205. 63 Garfinkel, “Instructions and Instructed Actions.” 64 Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things. 65 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 205. 66 Ibid., 125. 67 Ibid., emphasis added. 68 Ibid., 129.

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has more in common with a symbolic interactionist notion of account 69 than ethnomethodology. Indeed, while I regard Moss’ query about incommensurability as a valuable pedagogic opportunity it also seems misdirected, given that Latour70 distances himself from Garfinkel’s gloss “formal analysis.” Garfinkel used the term formal analysis to sharpen the focus of his distinction between incommensurable approaches in sociology—what (as mentioned above) he had termed “constructive analysis”—and incommensurable approaches in the social sciences more broadly. Latour71 misquotes Garfinkel, and through misquotation, understates Garfinkel’s original distinction, the “worldwide social science movement.” Garfinkel began to use formal analysis in preference to constructive analysis in order to emphasize that sociology was only one discipline among many which misaligned its phenomena of inquiry with analysts’ versions of members’ methods.72 Furthermore, while Moss 73 posits “affinities” between ANT and ethnomethodology, Latour’s claims on this matter are shallow. Latour’s attempted connection between “the quality of a text”74 and the “unique adequacy requirement of methods”75 does not set up “equivalence.”76 The unique adequacy requirement, like ethnomethodological indifference, is a methodological policy. Like ethnomethodological indifference, the unique adequacy requirement does not distance the researcher from the phenomenon of inquiry. It thus distinguishes between studies of work that describe and produce phenomena of investigation.77,78 I take Moss’ query regarding incommensurability seriously, and suggest that both the structure/agency dualism and ANT are incommensurable with ethnomethodology through producing “methodological irony”. Both foundational reasoning (e.g. theorizing which is an outcome or based upon a structure/agency dualism) and ANT preclude a praxeological orientation as an accountable, constitutive feature of research ab initio. The post hoc incorporation and/or triangulation of members’ practices creates conceptual confusion and category-errors. This characteristic of ANT and its formulation as a blend of ethnomethodology and semiotics is fundamentally flawed as a praxeological pursuit,

69 Scott and Lyman, “Accounts.” 70 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 226. 71 Ibid., fn. 312. 72 A pedagogical heuristic of this argument is the phenomenological emphasis on distinguishing between resources for study and topics of study (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970). 73 Moss, “Reading and Writing Across (Epistemological) Boundaries,” 52. 74 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 129. 75 Garfinkel and Wieder, “Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies Of Social Analysis.” 76 Latour, Reassembling the Social, fn. 182. 77 Livingston, Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics; Lynch, Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. 78 Vide another example of the practical work of citation: Latour cites both of these studies of work in Reassembling the Social (pp. 59, 223) also; but he points to different relevances in citing them than I do in citing them together here.

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regardless of Latour’s claims—and his referential practices—to the contrary.79 As vividly formulated in another context,

These sets of analytic practices cannot be conflated any more than can the games of football and tennis be conflated to produce a ‘supergame.’80

In studies involving human action, both ANT and studies in foundationalist programs require the analyst to make the final (if analytically arbitrary) decision as to what is really going on. As Lynch argues, “the theorist’s monism frames the heterogeneous ontologies attributed to actors within the frame.”81 In summary, if I was setting up a “contrast set”—to borrow Dorothy Smith’s82 phrase—it was between traditional sociology, which as I have hoped to clarify does not connote a temporal characterization but an epistemological characterization vis-à-vis members’ practices; and radical sociology, which seeks to explicate members’ practices without re-describing them in terms of analytically imposed categories. Conclusion In trying to provide an overall view, however, I want to emphasize that the ethnomethodological position on foundationalism (and anti-foundationalism) is methodological, not epistemological, philosophical, or theoretical. Indeed, much of the contestation of this issue has been quarried through the distortion or misunderstanding of ethnomethodology’s position as an epistemological rather than a methodological approach to the phenomena of sociology.83 The “identifying details” of studies in ANT and Cartesian investigations vary, yes; and the respective identifying details have specific consequences for the realization of incommensurability. Yet this should not distract us from the difficulties of programs of interdisciplinarity: intra-disciplinary approaches within sociology have a wide degree of “autonomy,” 84 which challenges assumptions of disciplinary coherence, let alone interdisciplinarity.85 Nor should this distract us from assembling a corpus of studies that instead of taking an evaluative approach to members’ phenomena, extrinsic to the settings of members’ practices; develops inquiries that seek to explicate members’ practices from within the settings in which they occur. Contact details: A.Carlin@mmu.ac.uk

79 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 122. 80 Watson, “The Understanding of Language Use in Everyday Life,” 11. 81 Lynch, “Ontography,” 453. 82 Smith, “‘K is Mentally Ill’.” 83 Francis and Sharrock, “Where Ethnomethodology Stands.” 84 Sharrock and Watson, “Autonomy among Social Theories: The Incarnation of Social Structures.”

85 In my original article, I cited the demonstration of this problem (Greiffenhagen, Mair and Sharrock, “Methodological Troubles as Problems and Phenomena”), which, in its demonstration, attends to the “identifying details” of the autonomy of sociological strategies.

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