ABSTRACT
This chapter is an edited transcript of a lecture by Harold Garfinkel that was delivered in 1992 as part of a seminar meeting at the University of California, Los Angeles. Garfinkel introduces a set of themes, examples, exercises, and anecdotes that make up his methodological and pedagogical approach to what he calls instructed action. He presents instructed action in terms of a formal pairing of instructions (rules, recipes, direction maps, and so on) and the “lived-work” of following them in specific instances. He outlines how ethnomethodological research not only examines and describes such lived-work in detail but also aims to show that, and how, “the work of reading the text of a description exhibits the phenomenon that the text describes.” This is what he calls the “praxeological validity of instructed action.” He provides examples of a procedure for turning Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophical remark, “existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful,” into an instruction for explicating practical achievements in specific settings of action.
