Games, Pastimes, and Leisure Pursuits

In studies ranging from oracular practices and court proceedings to alternative philosophies, reality disjunctures, and a family’s work in maintaining the normality of a severely retarded child, Mel Pollner put together something like a cabinet of curiosities exhibiting the social character of reasoning’s worldly enterprises. At the same time, he felt that ethnomethodology—and, in particular, ethnomethodological studies of work—had taken a wrong direction, turning away from disciplinary sociology’s sociological project. This paper, by examining the play of bridge, soccer, checkers, and chess, reconsiders this position and illustrates some of the peculiarities of a sociology of the witnessable social order.