Introduction

Garfinkel's early breaching experiments, exercises and demonstrations provided the tools, materials and “instructed actions” for students and scholars to encounter and examine firsthand a then unexplored domain of phenomena. His distinctive pedagogy served as a prod to the “sluggish imaginations” of novices who were being introduced to ethnomethodology (EM) for the first time (Garfinkel 1967, 38). Such indigenous, hands-on work helped students “find and demonstrate a new phenomenon” of naturally organized activities and “elucidate[d] the lived orderliness of ordinary organizational things” (Garfinkel 1981, 2). This chapter suggests a connection between Garfinkel's early experiments, exercises and demonstrations and where EM is today. Like an intellectual archeology, I look back at early EM and consider how it laid the foundation for later EM “studies of work” in the professions and sciences, which also focus on the study-able domain of activities as properties of a local production. The chapter links Garfinkel's tutorial exercises, experiments and demonstrations to a “study of work” in the law and explores the continuities between technical legal reasoning/expert activities and commonsense reasoning/nonexpert activities as “instructably observable structures of practical action and practical reason” (Garfinkel 1996, 3).

The first part of the chapter discusses Garfinkel's breaching experiments and other early EM exercises and demonstrations that offer a “perspective by incongruity” on the otherwise seen-but-unnoticed features of social order and make visible and discoverable the locally organized detail of practical action in ordinary settings. The second part of the chapter presents what Garfinkel would term a “hybrid study of work” and examines an episode of courtroom cross-examination conducted by a highly competent trial lawyer engaged in the practical tasks of his profession as he attempts to impeach the testimony of a key witness in the famous O. J. Simpson murder case. I also discuss the practical work of the lay witness in response as he struggles to provide and sustain an unimpeachable account of what happened. Like Garfinkel's breaching experiments, the cross-examining attorney seeks to make trouble for the adverse witness, who attempts to hold his ground, and in so doing each makes study-able and accountable their respective practical action and practical reasoning.

This chapter describes the development of public policy regarding the control of individual behavior in the criminal justice system, or alternative programs outside the criminal justice system. We focus on developments in the United States, primarily in the late twentieth century and later. We identify instances of both expansion/escalation and contraction/deescalation of control and indicate how the latter may be a consequence of and partial solution to the human and economic burdens of the former. We also examine the diffusion of philosophies and practices between institutional sectors of social control (criminal justice, mental health, education) and the shifting of responsibility for control between state and local government, again in response to the human and economic burdens of the preexisting control strategies. Finally, we offer reflections on possible future developments of the trends we have identified.