ix The studies in this volume were written over the last twelve years... The articles originated from my studies of the writings of Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Edmond Husserl. For twenty years their writings have provided me with inexhaustable directives into the world of everyday activities.

p.1 The following studies seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right.

p.11 I use the term "ethnomethodology" to refer to the investigation of the rational properties of... practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life.

p.36-37 The member of the society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation. With their use actual appearances are for him recognizable and intelligible as the appearances-of-familiar-events. Demonstrably he is responsive to this background, while at the same time he is at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist. When we ask him about them he has little or nothing to say.
 For these background expectancies to come into view one must either be a stranger to the "life as usual" character of everyday scenes, or become estranged from them.

p.36 The work of Alfred Schutz... Readers who are acquainted with his writings will recognize how heavily this paper in indebted to him.

p.50 One of the background expectancies Schutz described concerns the sanctioned use of doubt as a constituent feature of a world that is being understood in common. Schutz proposed that for the conduct of his everyday affairs the person assumes, assumes the other person assumes as well, and assumes that as he assumes it of the other person, the other person assumes it of him, that a relationship of undoubted correspondence is the sanctioned relationship between the actual appearances of an object and the indented object that appears in a particular way.

p.56 a commonly entertained scheme of interpretation consisting of a standardized system of symbols

p.57 Such attributions are features of witnessed events that are seen without being noticed. They are demonstrably relevant to the common sense that the actor makes of what is going on about him.

p.57 Since each of the expectancies that make up the attitude of daily life assigns an expected feature to the actor's environment... surprise is possible with respect to each of these expected features.

p.75 I have been arguing that a concern for the nature, production, and recognition of reasonable, realistic, and analyzable actions is not the monopoly of philosophers and professional sociologists. Members of society are concerned as a matter of course and necessarily with these matters both as features and for the socially managed production of their everyday affairs. The study of common sense knowledge and common sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the actual methods whereby members of a society, doing sociology, lay or professional, make the social structures of everyday activities observable.

p.98 Frequently, after encountering some actual state of affairs, the investigator may count it as desirable, and thereupon treat it as the goal toward which his previously taken actions, as he reads them retrospectively, were directed "all along" or "after all."

p.98 It frequently occurs that only in the course of actually manipulating a present situation, and as a function of his actual manipulation, does the nature of an investigator's future state of affairs become clarified. Thus, the goal of the investigation may be progressively defined as the consequence of the investigator's actually taking action toward a goal whose features as of any present state of his investigative action he does not see clearly.

p.114 The procedure of deciding, before the actual occasion of choice the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible courses of action will be elected, is one definition of a rational strategy.

p.265 Accordingly, making the situation predictable means taking whatever measures are possible to reduce "surprise."

p.266 Grounds of a person's choice may be those which he quite literally finds through retrospectively interpreting a present outcome. [JLJ - very "Weickian"... in fact, this line may have inspired Weick.]

p.272-273 Schutz finds that in everyday situations the "practical theorist" achieves an ordering of events while seeking to retain and sanction the presupposition that the objects of the world are as they appear... Schutz refers to a second assumption as the person's practical interest in the events of the world. The relevant features of events that his interest in them selects, carry along for the person as their invariant feature that they can actually and potentially affect the actor's actions and can be affected by his actions.

p.278 But, then, asks Schutz, where is this system of rational choice to be found? ...Schutz concludes that it is found in the logical status, the elements, and the uses of the model which the scientist decides on and uses as a scheme for interpreting the events of conduct. [JLJ - this appears to be Schutz's "Every sign system is therefore a scheme of our experience" reference]