A form of ethnography interested in discovering the rules governing social practices, devised by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Ultimately, though, what he discovered, contra his teacher Talcott Parsonâs thesis, is that social practices are not strictly speaking rule-governed, if by that one means for every type of social practice there exists a specific set of rules (written or unwritten) that one can refer to in order to clarify how one should proceed. In his landmark text Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), Garfinkel describes investigations into how juries operate, and what transvestites have to know in order to âpassâ, and shows that, while jurors and transvestites can give idealized accounts of what they think they need to do in order to accomplish their tasks, the reality is that generally speaking they do not know why they do what they do. For Garfinkel this is the problem with any form of ethnography or social science that relies on interviewing subjects in order to gain knowledge about them: if the subjects themselves donât know why they do what they do, then their answers to surveys and so on cannot be relied upon as explanations of cultural practices. Garfinkelâs way of getting round this was to conduct what he referred to as âbreach experimentsâ. He would ask his students to do things like take a watermelon to the drycleaners and record the drycleanerâs response, so as to bring to the fore the unspoken rules relied on in social engagements. Further Reading: R. Hilbert The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodololgy: Durkheim, Weber and Garfinkel (1992).