Alec McHoul

Alec McHoul (born 14 June 1952) is a British/Australian Ethnomethodologist. He has written numerous books and articles, many of which are informed by Ethnomethodology. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Murdoch University.

McHoul was born in Wallasey, a town on the Wirral Peninsula, England. In 1973 he graduated from the University of Lancaster, with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Literature and Linguistics and, in 1974, a Master of Arts. In 1975 he moved to Australia. In 1978 he was awarded a Doctorate from the Australian National University.

Criticism and Culture

McHoul's work spans a range of academic fields such as linguistics, cultural theory, continental philosophy and literary theory. Critics have noted McHoul's approach to diverse subjects wherein he is seen as adhering to no strict rule of academic enquiry. Whether McHoul should or, indeed, can work with one set of analytical tools in order to cover such a diverse range of social phenomena is not entirely clear among critics of his work. Robert Eaglestone, for example, offers the following critique of McHoul's' Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics: 'The book is no less [...] an attempt to work in at least three fields at once, and McHoul seems at home dealing with analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, semiotics, and linguistics'. Douglas Ezzy says, 'His [McHoul's] theoretical range is wide, drawing on Wittgenstein, Saussure, ethnomethodology [and] phenomenology'.. McHoul appears to stray from an unwritten set of academic norms when he uses whatever is at-hand to get the job done: to be a social commentator and to understand, in an era of intellectual self-reflection, that the commentary itself is social. In short then, McHoul takes A posse ad esse (as far as this is attainable), confusing his peers, perhaps, but clearly winning some applause in terms of his willingness to utilize the ideas of others, no matter how dissimilar those ideas might appear.