| The contents of this study were written over a period of several years, during which I received inspiration and support from a number of different quarters within a changing landscape of colleagues, friends, and academic institutions. The foundations for this study were laid during my years at Boston University, where I worked as a graduate student and university fellow in the Department of Sociology. It is impossible to communicate the nature and degree of my debt to Jeff Coulter, Mike Lynch, and George Psathas, who were faculty leaders during that period of unparalleled intellectual vitality and growth in the Department. Their efforts coalesced around a multiyear seminar in "The Philosophy of the Social Sciences," which set the intellectual course for a generation of graduate students, and has been responsible for no less than six book-length studies at the intersection between Wittgenstein, ethnomethodology, and social theory. My intellectual debt and fond memories extend also to the other members of this extraordinary group of colleagues and friends: Dusan Bjelic, Eileen Crist, Fred Hunter, Kathleen Jordan, Ramona Naddaff, Ed Parsons, Gary Reed, Edith Rosenthal, and Jeff Stetson. I also wish to thank Tom McCarthy, who lead the seminar in Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University, and provided detailed criticism of several of the Chapters of this book in their early stages. I am also indebted to Charles Smith, editor of Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, whose editorial support and criticism encouraged the development of these arguments. |
| Drafts of various chapters were presented at professional society meetings and colloquia including: the International Institute of Ethnomethodology; the American Sociological Society Annual Meetings; the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences; and the MIDAS Seminar at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University. My thanks to Barry Barnes, Doug Maynard, Jim Schmidt, Lucy Suchman, and Stephen Turner |
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