User:Elizraymond/Sya4010draft

User:Elizraymond/Sya4010draft

Account (sociology)
Applied to sociological theory, Accounts are defined as the ways in which actors in a scene (ie people in a situation) explain specific situations (Rizter 145).

Background
The concept of being reflexively accountable is considered one of the key points of the sociologial discipline of ethnomethodology, founded by the American Sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s. In ethnomethodology, members of society are studied for how they interact with their surroundings using methods that they have learned. It tends to focus on the everyday interactions members of society face in life.

When used in the ethnomethodological context, accountability is not intended to be defined as a sense of liability, as in the business world, but more closely related to "explainability", or the way which an action or account makes its purpose known.

Applications
Accounts, methods which members of a society use to explain and make sense of situations that they are in are analyzed by sociologists studying ethnomethodology for their "accounting practices"

Accounts and gender
Accounts have often been applied to the sociological study of gender