Ethnomethodology: Foundational insights on the nature and meaning of documents in everyday life

The purpose of this paper is to argue that researchers in the information disciplines should embrace ethnomethodology as a way of forming deeper insights into the relationship between people and recorded knowledge.

The paper introduces the core concepts of ethnomethodology as a means of articulating what this perspective brings to the understanding of the way that society is accomplished. A selection of key studies are then examined to highlight important ethnomethodological findings about the particular relationship of documents to human actions and interactions.

Ethnomethodology highlights the fact that people transform their experiences, and the experiences of others, into documents whose status as an objective object help to justify people’s actions and inferences. Documents, as written accounts, also serve to make peoples’ actions meaningful to themselves and to others. At the same time, ethnomethodology draws attention to the fact that any correct reading of these documents relies partly on an understanding of the tacit ideologies that undergird people’s sense-making and that are used in order to make decisions and get work done.

This conceptual framework contributes to the information disciplines by bringing to the fore certain understandings about the social organization of document work, and the attendant social arrangements they reveal. The paper also outlines, from a methodological perspective, how information science researchers can use ethnomethodology as an investigative stance to further their knowledge of the role of documents in everyday life.