W Sharrock
Biographic Data
| ID | 10886 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Sharrock |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharrock |
| SIGNATURE | SHARROCK W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7029-8653 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 288 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Spannungen in Garfinkels Programm der Studies of Work
Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of Mathematics
Programming Visuals, Visualising Programs
This article examines the role of visualisations in astrophysics programming work, showing that visualisations are not only outputs for those producing them, but can help those developing them understand how to do their work. Studies of visualization in programming have mainly been of social and cultural factors influencing scientific research. We concentrate on the material aspects of scientific work, as of interest in their own right and on met…
Searching for Ideas in Working up a Visual Image
The empirical basis of this study is the examination of audio and video records of a screen-focussed classroom activity that involved the use of a newly developed software system designed to enable understanding of and reflection on literary works through the depiction of those works in the form of an on-screen storyboard. The central attention is on the way in which two pupils compose, in collaboration, an additional image for their shared story…
Mathematical Equations as Durkheimian Social Facts
Durkheim's influence is very directly felt in one of the central contributions to the sociology of mathematics, that of David Bloor. To Bloor, mathematical statements invite a neo-Durkheimian approach, since they are experienced as Durkheimian facts, being external to individuals and endowed with a coercive power. A neo-Durkheimian perspective insists that they are, rather, social facts. Here, Sociologists often draw on Wittgenstein's reflections…
There is No Such Thing as a Social Science
The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such conte…
In support of conversation analysis’ radical agenda
This comment provides an overview of the four articles by Lindwall, Lymer and Ivarsson; Lynch and Wong; Macbeth, Wong and Lynch; and Macbeth and Wong, which make up the kernel of this Special Issue of Discourse Studies on Epistemics; and it also examines the reasons for the assorted difficulties the authors of those articles have with the Epistemic Programme (EP) being proposed for conversation analysis (CA). The legitimacy of their concerns is u…
Statistical Practice
As a contribution to current debates on the 'social life of methods', in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which 'methods', here quantitative me…
Collaborative Music-Making with Digital Audio Workstations
This article examines amateur music-making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music-making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi-modal activity through a heuristic device: the 'nth member.' Whereas sociology has typically been concerned w…
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science …
After interpretation
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his cl…
From Methodology to Methodography
Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scru…
Two Concepts of Attachment to Rules
In this paper, we discuss some implications of John Rawls' paper 'Two Concepts of Rules' (1955) for social science. We argue that Rawls' notion of 'practice' is not a straightforward contribution to sociological theory, but rather re-orients the idea of what understanding social actions might be. We explicate how Rawls' distinction between 'summary' and 'practice' views of rules might play out in approaching mathematical practice and mathematical…
Where do the limits of experience lie? Abandoning the dualism of objectivity and subjectivity
The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether…
There is No Such Thing as a Social Science
What does Peter Winch mean by his claim that there is no such thing as a social science? Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns
"Psychotherapy as a "structured immediacy
That We Obey Rules Blindly Does Not Mean that We Are Blindly Subservient to Rules
Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following are rightly understood to be corrosive of the project of cognitive science. They do not, however, therefore privilege sociology as a competitor discipline - despite the protestations of some sociologists. Rules are invoked as explanatory devices in social theory, and Wittgenstein is criticized for failing to offer a conception of rule-following amenable to such uses. This reveals a misconception of how rul…
Naturalisme versus constructivisme
Peut-on penser autrement que de façon binaire les phénomènes - construits sociaux ou réalités naturelles ? Anthropologues, sociologues, historiens et philosophes invitent à surmonter l’opposition entre constructivisme et naturalisme, proposent des voies possibles. L’enjeu est pour les sciences sociales de relever le défi que leur posent aujourd’hui le néo-darwinisme et l’évolutionnisme des sciences de la vie. L’ambition ici est d’accompagner le m…
Linguistic relativism
A Reply to McHoul and Rapley
We reject the claim advanced by McHoul and Rapley that our remarks implied any ironic attitude toward ‘lay usage’. We do not think that elucidating the grammar of use involves any sort of irony and argue that such a charge is based upon the misconception (interestingly shared by many cognitivist thinkers) that ordinary use is a function of lay users’ beliefs
Mathematical Relativism
This article is part of a critical analysis of the way empirical examples feature in arguments for cultural relativism, which we take to be the thesis that logic, grammar, and mathematics are, in some sense, only locally valid1. Our interest lies in pinning down just what “in some sense” might amount to. In companion papers (Greiffenhagen and Sharrock, forthcoming a,b) we deal with logical and linguistic relativism, while in this article we discu…
Logical Relativism
Logical relativism is the claim that different cultures may think according to \ndifferent logical laws. For example, it is often argued that whereas ‘we’ (Westerners) \noperate according to the law of the excluded middle, ‘they’ (e.g., the Chinese or the \nAzande) may not. In this article, we question whether logical relativism is an empirical \nthesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. \nWe distinguish two f…
ToM
The Theory of Mind (ToM) is deeply dependent upon an array of (uncritically adopted but contestable) assumptions from contemporary philosophy of mind. We argue that some of these assumptions carry key and tacit but implausible conceptions of the nature and role of language in the ‘acquisition’ of ToM and seek to show that without these misconceptions ToM itself becomes superfluous
No Case to Answer
Being described as taking a 'quietist' view of a question can be alright, so long as that epithet is properly understood. In the mouth of a social scientist, such a designation may well carry more than a faintly derogatory implication, as though it encouraged looking away from rather than facing up to problems. A quietist will then sound like someone who is rather intimidated by the problem, who refrains from making a difference where one could b…
A Disagreement over Agreement and Consensus in Constructionist Sociology
Les AA. examinent le point de vue constructioniste en sociologie de la connaissance. Ils montrent que les adeptes du point de vue constructioniste partagent un interet commun pour l'etude de la construction sociale de la connaissance scientifique et pour deux idees essentielles : les notions d'accord et de consensus. Les AA. s'interrogent plus precisement sur le role de ces notions en sociologie de la science en general et dans les activites scie…
The Organizational Accountability of Technological Work
We address a problem examined by sociologists of `Big Science': the co-ordination of individuals on large-scale projects - in this case, industrial technology projects. We consider co-ordination to be a problem of social order which can be addressed through ethnomethodology's understanding of accountable action. We propose that the technology producers studied attend to the problem of the co-ordination of their work in the design of their actions…
What's the Point of 'Rescuing Motives
Statistical Practice
As a contribution to current debates on the 'social life of methods', in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which 'methods', here quantitative me…
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science …
On the demise of the native
In support of conversation analysis’ radical agenda
This comment provides an overview of the four articles by Lindwall, Lymer and Ivarsson; Lynch and Wong; Macbeth, Wong and Lynch; and Macbeth and Wong, which make up the kernel of this Special Issue of Discourse Studies on Epistemics; and it also examines the reasons for the assorted difficulties the authors of those articles have with the Epistemic Programme (EP) being proposed for conversation analysis (CA). The legitimacy of their concerns is u…
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his cl…
From Methodology to Methodography
Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scru…
The Rise and Fall of the Fact/Value Distinction
The paper addresses the problem of the conceptualisation of morality in sociology. The traditional sociological conception of morality was based upon the acceptance of a fact/value dichotomy, implying that sociology portrays the factual nature of morality, which thereby becomes equivalent to group conformity The opposition of fact and value was brought into question by trends of thought that followed from, respectively, Alfred Schutz and Ludwig W…
Ethnomethodology
That We Obey Rules Blindly Does Not Mean that We Are Blindly Subservient to Rules
Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following are rightly understood to be corrosive of the project of cognitive science. They do not, however, therefore privilege sociology as a competitor discipline - despite the protestations of some sociologists. Rules are invoked as explanatory devices in social theory, and Wittgenstein is criticized for failing to offer a conception of rule-following amenable to such uses. This reveals a misconception of how rul…
Biasing the News
The first part of the article is a general critique of radical media/cultural studies; the second is an illustration of these criticisms detailed through analysis of one media student's treatment of a newspaper. In general, the authors find media studies do not establish that their reading of materials is the reading made by media consumers; that the bias they allege in the media is not significant; that they set up a false and irrelevant model o…
Do the right thing! Rule finitism, rule scepticism and rule following
Reality construction’ in L2 simulations
Where do the limits of experience lie? Abandoning the dualism of objectivity and subjectivity
The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether…
Indeterminacy in the past
This article discusses some issues that arise from the fact of `conceptual change'. We focus on the difficulties that Ian Hacking encountered when considering whether the consequence of conceptual change is the fact that the past of individual actions is indeterminate (Hacking, 1995). We consider his use of Anscombe's thesis on actions under description and find that he misrepresents it. We further find that he neglects tenses of descriptions and…
Institutions and the Person
Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of Mathematics
There is No Such Thing as a Social Science
The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such conte…
Two Concepts of Attachment to Rules
In this paper, we discuss some implications of John Rawls' paper 'Two Concepts of Rules' (1955) for social science. We argue that Rawls' notion of 'practice' is not a straightforward contribution to sociological theory, but rather re-orients the idea of what understanding social actions might be. We explicate how Rawls' distinction between 'summary' and 'practice' views of rules might play out in approaching mathematical practice and mathematical…
"Psychotherapy as a "structured immediacy
Re-Locating Motives
Logical Relativism
Logical relativism is the claim that different cultures may think according to \ndifferent logical laws. For example, it is often argued that whereas ‘we’ (Westerners) \noperate according to the law of the excluded middle, ‘they’ (e.g., the Chinese or the \nAzande) may not. In this article, we question whether logical relativism is an empirical \nthesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. \nWe distinguish two f…
Essay Review
Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. By Ian Hacking
Institutions and the Person
Social Rules and Social Behaviour
Explorations in General Theory in Social Science
For Science in the Social Sciences
Biasing the News
The first part of the article is a general critique of radical media/cultural studies; the second is an illustration of these criticisms detailed through analysis of one media student's treatment of a newspaper. In general, the authors find media studies do not establish that their reading of materials is the reading made by media consumers; that the bias they allege in the media is not significant; that they set up a false and irrelevant model o…
Therapeutic Discourse
The Ceremonial Order of the Clinic
The Persistent Evasion of Technical Problems in Media Studies
In his 'reply' to our paper 'Biasing the News'1 Murdock accuses us of 'misrepresenting media studies'2 and there is a sense in which he must be right, though it is not alas one which enables him to rebut our arguments. A substantial part of our paper was given over to the reanalysis of some of Murdock 's data.3 This is not the part of the paper which attracts interest, and all the oral and written comments we have received have avoided reference …
On the demise of the native
II. Wittgenstein and comparative sociology
Focusing on a discussion by Ruddich and Stassen of the ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, this paper shows that some of the usual criticisms made by sociologists of Wittgenstein are misplaced. He does not reject causal explanations of beliefs and actions and replace them with some other form of explanation, but dismisses the idea that any explanation is called for here. His argument that the origin of the desire to explain beliefs is to be found…
The Wittgenstein connection
What's the Point of 'Rescuing Motives
Reality construction’ in L2 simulations
Magic witchcraft and the materialist mentality
Applied Sociological Perspectives
The Relationship Between Ethnomethodology and Phenomenology
(1985). The Relationship Between Ethnomethodology and Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 221-235
Margaret Gilbert on the social nature of language
Methodological tokenism, or Are good intentions enough
Re-Locating Motives
Executive Problem Finding
R. J. Anderson, J. A. Hughes, W. W. Sharrock, Executive Problem Finding: Some Material and Initial Observations, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2, Special Issue: Language and Social Interaction (Jun., 1987), pp. 143-159
The Ethnomethodologists
Society
Ethnomethodology
Les formes de l’action
L’analyse de l’action est remise au premier plan par certains courants actuels de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. L’étude de la sémantique de l’action (intention, volonté, motif, désir, etc.) a fait apparaître le rôle important du langage dans la constitution du champ pratique. Elle a permis d’éclairer sous un jour nouveau les rapports entre langage ordinaire et analyse sociale. Cet ouvrage restitue l’état du débat suscité, en sciences s…
The social actor
If social theory is going to pay any attention at all to the nature of 'the social actor', then how is that actor to be conceived? For some approaches to social theory (the structuralism of Althusser, 1971, 1976 and 1979, and Lévi-Strauss, 1963 are notable examples) there is little if any need for such a conception. The human sciences, for them, are not concerned with 'individuals' but with social wholes, and insofar as any conception of the soci…
Sociology (51 works) · Epistemology (50 works) · Philosophy (49 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Linguistics (16 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (15 works)