accounts

The term account – along with the related terms accountable and accountability – is a term of art largely associated with ethnomethodology. However, it has come into wider usage as various broadly ethnomethodological insights and sensibilities have drifted into mainstream sociology. Following Marvin Scott's and Stanford Lyman's article “Accounts” (1968) in the American Sociological Review, some users of the term have dwelt primarily on accounts as linguistic devices used to neutralize the disapproval caused by seemingly untoward behavior. Thus, the term has been distinguished as a particular subset of the category explanation. According to this line of argument, accounts may be divided into two sub-types: excuses and justifications. The first device acknowledges an act to have been “bad, wrong, or inappropriate” but denies the apparently culpable party is fully responsible for what has occurred. The second device denies the act was bad, wrong, or inappropriate in the first place. Insofar as these devices rely for their efficacy on invoking what C. Wright Mills once called certain shared “vocabularies of motive” (1940) in the American Journal of Sociology, they may be used as empirical windows on the wider world of moral sensibilities shared by a studied social group.

Ethnomethodologists use the terms accounts, accountable, and accountability in a rather more inclusive and fundamental way. Indeed, they argue that it is only by virtue of its accountability that any kind of collaborative social action is at all possible. In its specifically ethnomethodological sense, the accountability of social action is more than just a matter of linguistically excusing or justifying untoward conduct. It entails exhibiting and coordinating the orderliness and reasonability of social action in the widest sense. Hence, the terms account, accountable, and accountability are used to capture various constituent features of social action as such. Social action is accountable in this sense to the extent that its witnesses find it non-random, coherent, meaningful, and oriented to the accomplishment of practical goals. Moreover, for ethnomethodologists, the accountability of social action is much more than just a theoretical matter or one of disinterested interpretation. As social actors, we are not just accountable to one another in the sense that we can linguistically describe each other's actions.