Definition

The term “accounting process” refers to how people make sense of or “account for” the actions they commit using their common sense.

Explanation

Garfinkel, among others, has used the accounting process to illustrate how people in bureaucracies have a commonsense grasp of how bureaucracies function, which they use to make sense of what they really do in their daily lives. In other words, people use the idea of bureaucracy to attempt to justify what they are doing in their professional life.

Garfinkel concentrated on “accounts,” or the manner in which individuals describe, understand, and explain certain circumstances.

Individuals utilize accounting as a methodology to provide accounts to comprehend the world around them. In addition to examining people’s stories, ethnomethodologists pay close attention to how narratives are presented and received (or rejected) by others. This is one of the grounds that ethnomethodologists focus so much on studying conversations when they examine accounts. They take a position known as “ethnomethodological indifference.”

Instead of evaluating the substance of accounts, they examine how they are used in actual situations. They are interested in the accounts and the procedures that both the speaker and the listener must use to present, comprehend, and accept or decline accounts.