In the last 20 years, we have witnessed an upsurge of social theories and methodologies which are characteristically concerned with micro-processes of social life, such as with face-to-face interaction, with everyday routines and classifications, with strips of conversation, or with definitions of the self and of situations. I have in mind specifically approaches such as symbolic interactionism, cognitive sociology, ethnomethodology, social phenomenology, ethogenics in sociology and the ethnography of speaking and ethnoscience in anthropology! It goes almost without saying that these approaches differ markedly in theoretical background and substantive interest. For example, while today's symbolic interactionism appears to be an outgrowth of Herbert Blumer's reconception of the theories of Mead and Cooley, ethnomethodologists have linked their concerns to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and most recently Merleau-Ponty, and social phenomenology has obvious roots in the works of Schutz and HusserI. 2 While cognitive sociology has stressed the role oflanguage and memory in the cognitive processing of information in everyday settings, ethnomethodology has focused on the organizational features of'practical reasoning', and ethogenics and symbolic interactionism, though also concerned with symbolic communication, have described the rules and resources which underlie social accounts on the one hand and the negotiation and management of meaning in interaction on the other hand.

One result of these varying pursuits, which I will refer to as micro-sociologies, has been a challenge of established theories and methods in sociology, and …