This chapter deals with an exposition of the major ethnomethodological position on rule-use together with consideration of some divergent views held by certain theorists closely associated with ethnomethodology - J. D. Douglas and E. A. Bittner. It is commonplace in ethnomethodological writings that the ethnomethodological programme leaves intact the research concerns of other sociological schools of thought. The essential difference between the conversational analyses and ethnomethodological studies of rule-use is that it is the meanings of utterances, rather than formulations of a rule, that are seen as contingent and context-dependent. There are a number of theorists closely associated with the ethnomethodological programme who have adopted rather different positions on rule-use: A. V. Cicourel's distinction between basic interpretive rules and normative rules has already been footnoted. Ethnomethodological studies of rule-use have been important and salutary, for example they have raised some thorny methodological issues to which researchers in other schools would do well to attend.
