Research with Numbers

AbstractThis chapter reviews Harold Garfinkel’s work on method in the social sciences, focusing specifically on research with numbers. Ethnomethodology has had a vexed relationship with the social sciences, and Garfinkel’s remarks on sociology’s methods have often been presented as a skeptical attack on the very possibility of social research. Ethnomethodology has also frequently been portrayed as being particularly critical of quantitative research, and has sometimes been taken to argue for qualitative methods as an alternative to quantitative methods. The authors argue that these readings of Garfinkel and ethnomethodology miss the mark. With increasing numbers of contemporary researchers coming back to themes first broached by Garfinkel, this is an ideal moment to revisit Garfinkel’s position. The chapter shows that rather than simply critiquing quantitative methods, ethnomethodology offers an alternate orientation to practices of quantification, since ethnomethodology is interested in quantification as practiced. Drawing together various strands in Garfinkel’s work on method across his career and a small field study by the authors, the chapter explores ethnomethodology’s re-specification of quantification as number work.