For us in the event of writing this we hear ‘what next’ as something we have beenudplanning ought to happen. It means we will finally begin considering the affinities andudcomplementarities between Foucauldian historical investigations and the studies ofudpractical action and practical reasoning, otherwise known as ethnomethodology.udFoucault’s work has been enthusiastically absorbed by numerous disciplines, raising hisudstatus and influence on the humanities and social science to the degree where he isudthought of in some quarters as the Karl Marx of the twentieth century. By comparison,udethnomethodology has been treated as something of a curiosity in the development of theudsocial sciences, its practitioners pursuing ‘studies’ with a missionary zeal and dismissingudattempts to integrate their findings, methods or conceptual clarifications into other programmes of social, cultural and psychological research1. Their studies are, by theirudself-assessment, asymmetrically alternate to, it would seem, any other kind of project inudthe social sciences: ‘[t]he following of the methodologies of one makes the otherud‘disappear’: the methodologies are radical alternatives to each other, fundamentallyuddisjunctive rather than being complimentary or reconcilable by means of an additiveudformula which juxtaposes and purportedly articulates the two’ (Watson 1994; p177).udWith such warnings about the ethno-inquiries of Garfinkel, Sacks and others in mind, weudnevertheless wish to argue in sympathy with McHoul (1986; 1996) for the particularudappropriateness of reconciling ethnomethodology with the work of Foucault. Indeed asudWatson (1994; p117) continues, ‘there can certainly be no a priori objection to each andudany reconciliation, as much of course depends upon the logic of the particular cases inudpoint’2. We might in fact argue that by its very popularity, Foucault’s work has sufferedudmuch more than ethnomethodology from being skimmed for its ‘big ideas’ (i.e.udpanopticism in particular, see Philo 1992 where Chris complains about the only Foucaultudknown to geographers being ‘the geometer of power’.), then affiliated and all too oftenudinappropriately added to various theoretical frameworks in the social sciences andudcultural studies.
展开▼
