Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011) was an American sociologist, ethnomethodologist, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology. Garfinkel's contribution to sociology includes his book, "Studies in Ethnomethodology", a collection of articles published in 1967, and some of the essays had previously been published. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: "Seeing Sociologically" and "Ethnomethodology's Program". He also edited a collection of 'studies of work' written by his students. Biography. Early life  and background. Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917, where he was raised throughout his childhood by a Jewish family. Even though Garfinkel would help his father with the furniture dealer business, he desired to go to college rather than join the family business. Marriage and family. With the onset of World War II, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and served as a trainer at a base in Florida. When the war efforts wound down he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he met his wife and lifelong partner, Arlene Steinback whom  he married in 1945. He went on to have two children: his daughter, Leah Hertz (who married later on), and his son Mark Garfinkel. Harold Garfinkel's family grew larger with the birth of his three grandsons. Education and career. Harold Garfinkel went on to study business and accounting at the University of Newark, now known as Rutgers University, Newark. At the University of Newark, courses were predominately taught by Columbia graduate students, who brought more theoretical experiences to the classroom. The theoretical approach gained through this experience influenced Garfinkel's theories formed later on. In the summer following graduation , Garfinkel volunteered at a Quaker work camp in Cornelia, Georgia. This was an eye-opening experience for Garfinkel. His work with students from diverse backgrounds and a wide variety of interests influenced his decision to later take up sociology as a career. While volunteering in Georgia, Garfinkel learned about the sociology program at the University of North Carolina. This program specifically focused on public work projects like the one Garfinkel was working on. During his time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was introduced to the readings of Talcott Parsons, a huge influence on his later  work. Before graduating, he worked under the supervision of his graduate professor, Howard W. Odum. Garfinkel completed his Masters in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide. He eventually went on to gain his Ph.D. at Harvard while studying under Talcott Parsons. Harvard Department of Social Relations. Garfinkel's time at Harvard University's new Department of Social Relations, where he met Talcott Parsons, was highly influential towards his work. While Parsons studied and emphasized abstract categories and generalizations, Garfinkel's work was more focused on detailed description. "What set  Garfinkel apart from Parsons's other students and colleagues was his extreme commitment to "empirical studies." Rather than ask, for example, what kinds of normative networks are necessary to sustain family structures, Garfinkel would ask: 'What normative networks "are" there?' or 'Are there any normative networks?'" While Garfinkel continued to earn his degree at Harvard, sociologist, Wilbert E. Moore, invited Garfinkel to work on the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton University. Garfinkel accepted the offer and taught at Princeton University for two years. This brought him in contact with some of the most prominent scholars of the day in the  behavioral, informational, and social sciences including: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Paul Lazarsfeld, Frederick Mosteller, Philip Selznick, Herbert A. Simon, and John von Neumann. Garfinkel completed his dissertation, "The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order," in 1952. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, Garfinkel was asked to talk at an American Sociological Association meeting in 1954 and created the term "ethnomethodology, which later became his main focus of study". Additionally in 1954, he joined the sociology faculty at UCLA. Between 1963 and 1964, he served as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide . Later, Garfinkel spent the '75-'76 school year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As time went on, Garfinkel was a visiting fellow at Oxford University in 1979-1980. In 1995, he was awarded the "Cooley-Mead Award" from the American Sociological Association for his contributions to the field. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996. Garfinkel officially retired from UCLA in 1987, but continued as an emeritus professor until his death on April 21, 2011, in Los Angeles, California. Influences. Garfinkel was very intrigued by Parsons' study of social order . Parsons sought to offer a solution to the problem of social order (i.e., How do we account for the order that we witness in society?) and in doing so, provides a disciplinary foundation for research in sociology. Drawing on the work of earlier social theorists (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, Weber), Parsons postulated that all social action could be understood in terms of an "action frame" consisting of a fixed number of elements (an agent, a goal or intended end, the circumstances within which the act occurs, and its "normative orientation"). Agents make choices among possible ends, alternative means to these ends , and the normative constraints that might be seen as operative. According to Parsons, they conduct themselves in a fashion "analogous to the scientist whose knowledge is the principal determinant of his action." Order is then not imposed from above, but rather arises from rational choices made by the actor. Parsons sought to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how social order is accomplished through these choices. Ethnomethodology was not designed to supplant the kind of formal analysis recommended by Parsons. Garfinkel stipulated that the two programs are "different and unavoidably related." Both seek to give accounts of social life, but  ask different kinds of questions and formulate different claims. Sociologists operating within the formal program endeavor to produce objective (that is to say, non-indexical) claims similar in scope to those made in the natural sciences. To do so, they must employ theoretical constructs that pre-define the shape of the social world. Unlike Parsons, and other social theorists before and since, Garfinkel's goal was not to articulate yet another explanatory system; He expressed an "indifference" to all forms of sociological theorizing. Instead of viewing social practice through a theoretical lens, Garfinkel sought to explore the social world directly  and describe its autochthonous workings in elaborate detail. Durkheim famously stated, "[t]he objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental principle." Garfinkel substituted 'phenomenon' for 'principle', signaling a different approach to sociological inquiry. The task of sociology, as he envisions it, is to conduct investigations into just how Durkheim's social facts are brought into being. The result is an "alternate, asymmetric and incommensurable" program of sociological inquiry. Alfred Schütz, a European scholar and acquaintance of Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory: psychology and phenomenology. Similarly to Parsons, Schütz was concerned with establishing  a sound foundation for research in the social sciences. However, he took issue with the Parsonsian assumption that actors in society always behave rationally. Schütz made a distinction between reasoning in the 'natural attitude' and scientific reasoning. The reasoning of scientists builds upon everyday commonsense, but, in addition, employs a "postulate of rationality." Scientific reasoning imposes special requirements on their claims and conclusions (e.g., application of rules of formal logic, standards of conceptual clarity, compatibility with established scientific 'facts'). This has two important implications for research in the social sciences. First, it is inappropriate for sociologists to use scientific reasoning  as a lens for viewing human action in daily life, as Parsons had proposed, since they are distinct kinds of rationality. Secondly, the traditionally assumed discontinuity between the claims of science and commonsense understandings is dissolved since scientific observations employ both forms of rationality. This raises a flag for researchers in the social sciences, since these disciplines are fundamentally engaged in the study of the shared understandings that underlie the day-to-day functioning of society. How can we make detached, objective claims about everyday reasoning if our conceptual apparatus is hopelessly contaminated with commonsense categories and rationalities? Ethnomethodology. What  Is ethnomethodology? Garfinkel is known for founding the concept of ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology is "the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life." In other words, ethnomethodology is the study of everyday life and explains how significant mutual understanding, expectation and common sense are to the structure of society. Garfinkel's new sociological approach was very different from theories made by Marx, Weber and Durkheim due to how ethnomethodology lacks the, "excitement and revolutionary fervour of the more radical theories some left-wing sociologists have proposed ." Moreover, the 1950s consisted of sociological theories that were pretty abstract and not relevant to everyday lives or concerns until Garfinkel founded ethnomethodology.The word itself is compounded by the root word "ethno" meaning people and "methodology" meaning "the systematic performance of scientific and non-scientific practices" The roots of ethnomethodology. Garfinkel's concept of ethnomethodology started with his attempt at analyzing a jury discussion after a Chicago case in 1945 where he tried to understand the ways in which jurors knew how to act as jurors. With the jurors' discussion in mind, Garfinkel created the term "ethnomethodology" as a  way to describe how people use different methods in order to understand the society they live in. Garfinkel noticed through his study of ethnomethodology that the methods people use to understand the society they live in are very much fixed in people's natural attitudes. His main idea was that when thinking through a sociological lens, sociologists would be only thinking about outside sources (social facts) to explain a situation when trying to explain what is happening within it. Moreover, it is more common to use outside sources such as institutions to describe a situation, rather than the individual.Garfinkel  uses this point to emphasize how different ethnomethodology is from sociology and Durkheim's thinking in sociology. Rationality. Accepting Schütz's critique of the Parsonian program, Garfinkel sought to find another way of addressing the Problem of Social Order, which arises in the very ways that participants conduct themselves together. The sense of a situation arises from their interactions. Garfinkel writes, "any social setting [can] be viewed as self-organizing with respect to the intelligible character of its own appearances as either representations of or as evidences-of-a-social-order." The orderliness of social life, therefore, is produced through  the moment-to-moment work of society's members and ethnomethodology's task is to explicate just how this work is done. He wrote, "Members to an organized arrangement are continually engaged in having to decide, recognize, persuade, or make evident the rational, i.e., the coherent, or consistent, or chosen, or planful, or effective, or methodical, or knowledgeable character of [their activities]". At first glance, Garfinkel's proposal may not seem very different from Parsons' proposal, however their views on rationality are not compatible. For Garfinkel, society's character is not dictated by an imposed standard of rationality, either scientific  or otherwise. To Garfinkel, rationality is produced as a local accomplishment and is how members of society craft their moment-to-moment interaction. He writes: In Garfinkel's book, "Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967," the chapter titled, "The Rational Properties of Scientific and Common Sense Activities" discusses how there are various meanings of the term "rationality" in relation to the way people behave. Garfinkel mentions Schütz's paper on the issues of rationality and his various meanings of the term. Garfinkel discusses each of these "rationalities" and the "behaviors" that result, which are: Garfinkel notes that often, rationality refers to "the  person's feelings that accompany his conduct, e.g. 'affective neutrality,' 'unemotional,' 'detached,' 'disinterested,' and 'impersonal.'" For the theoretical tasks of this paper, however, the fact that a person may attend his environment with such feelings is uninteresting. It is of interest, however, that a person uses his feelings about his environment to recommend the sensible character of the thing he is talking about or the warrant of a finding." Reflexivity. Reflexivity means that individuals shape action in relation to context while the context itself is constantly being redefined through action. In other words, reflexivity is an important concept in Ethnomethodology  due to how it examines how the, "social order is not imposed from outside but is rather created by people in their reflections on, and talk about, the social world."Garfinkel regarded indexical expressions as key phenomena. For instance, indexical words like "here", "now", and "me" shift their meaning depending on when and where they are used. Philosophers and linguists refer to such terms as indexicals because they point into (index) the situational context in which they are produced. One of Garfinkel's contributions was to note that such expressions go beyond "here", "now," etc, and encompass any and all  utterances that members of society produce. As Garfinkel specified, "The demonstrably rational properties of indexical expressions and indexical actions [are] an ongoing achievement of the organized activities of everyday life". The pervasiveness of indexical expressions and their member-ordered properties means that all forms of action provide for their own understandability through the methods by which they are produced. That is, action has the property of reflexivity where such action is made meaningful in the light of the very situation within which it is produced. The contextual setting, however, should not be seen as a passive backdrop for the action . The initial insight into the importance of reflexivity occurred during the study of juror's deliberations, where the jurors had to reflexively organize the plausibility of what they were deciding. Other investigations revealed that parties did not always know what they meant by their own formulations; rather, verbal formulations of the local order of an event were used to collect the very meanings that gave them their coherent sense. Garfinkel declared that the issue of how practical actions are tied to their context lies at the heart of ethnomethodological inquiry. Using professional coffee tasting as an illustration here, taste descriptors  do not merely describe but also direct the tasting of a cup of coffee; hence, a descriptor is not merely the causal result of what is tasted, as in: Nor is it an imperialism of a methodology: Rather, the description and what it describes are mutually determinative: The descriptors operate reflexively by finding in the coffee what they mean, and each is used to make the other more explicit. Much the same may be said about rules-in-games or the use of accounts in ordinary action. This reflexivity of accounts is ubiquitous, and its sense has nearly nothing to  do with how the term "reflexivity" is used in analytic philosophy, in "reflexive ethnographies" that endeavor to expose the influence of the researcher in organizing the ethnography, or the way many social scientists use "reflexivity" as a synonym for "self-reflection." For ethnomethodology reflexivity is an actual, unavoidable feature of everyone's daily life. Service Lines. Garfinkel has frequently illustrated ethnomethodological analysis by means of the illustration of service lines. Everyone knows what it is like to stand in a line. Queues are a part of our everyday social life; they are something within which we all participate as we  carry out our everyday affairs. We recognize when someone is waiting in a line and, when we are "doing" being a member of a line, we have ways of showing it. In other words, lines may seem impromptu and routine, but they exhibit an internal, member-produced embodied structure. A line is "witnessably a produced social object;" it is, in Durkheimian terms, a "social fact." Participants' actions as "seeably" what they are (such as occupying a position in a queue) depend upon practices that the participant engages in relation to others' practices in the proximate vicinity. To recognize someone as  in a line, or to be seen as "in line" ourselves requires attention to bodily movement and bodily placement in relation to others and to the physical environment that those movements also constitute. This is another sense that we consider the action to be indexical—it is made meaningful in the ways in which it is tied to the situation and the practices of members who produce it. The ethnomethodologist's task becomes one of analyzing how members' ongoing conduct is a constituent aspect of this or that course of action. Such analysis can be applied to any sort of  social matter (e.g., being female, following instructions, performing a proof, participating in a conversation). These topics are representative of the kinds of inquiry that ethnomethodology was intended to undertake. In particular, Garfinkel conducted a famous case study on Agnes, a transgender woman in 1967. "Garfinkel view[ed] sexuality as a practical and ongoing accomplishment of members through their practical activities" and focused on how "Agnes 'passed' as a normal female despite the continuous risk that she would be revealed as a transsexual." Breaching experiments. According to George Ritzer, a sociologist, breaching experiments are experiments where "social reality is violated in order  to shed light on the methods by which people construct social reality." In Garfinkel's work, Garfinkel encouraged his students to attempt breaching experiments in order to provide examples of basic ethnomethodology. According to Garfinkel, these experiments are important because they help us understand '"the socially standardized and standardizing, 'seen but unnoticed,' expected, background features of everyday scenes.'" Moreover, breaching experiments allow individuals to understand the reasoning behind our behavior towards wanting to conform to societal norms as well as the power of socialization. He highlights many of these experiments in his books. The following is an example of one  of Garfinkel's breaching experiments from his book, Studies in Ethnomethodology."Breaching involves asking what can be done to make for trouble in everyday events, and shows that troublesome events are themselves revelatory of the ordinary practices whereby stability is achieved." Another example of a breach would be tic-tac-toe: "A tic-tac-toe1 exercise, for example, involves the experimenter inviting a subject to play the game. After the subject starts the game by placing an ‘‘X’’ in a square formed by the tic-tac-toe matrix, the experimenter puts an ‘‘O’’ on a line of the game matrix  rather than in a square. The trouble thereby created brings members’ methods to the fore as sources of order. These methods are manifest in the restorative or reparative efforts of participants. When a subject protests to the experimenter, ‘‘Is this a joke?’’, it shows that an ordinary game is to be engaged seriously and by respecting commonsense practices for placing Os and Xs—not any placement will do." Garfinkel also explored natural breaches found in everyday life. An example that Garfinkel provided in his book, "Studies of Ethnomethodology", consisted of a transsexual and their experience and how the world acted  towards them. This study was seen cited multiple times, highlighting the importance of Garfinkel's work and findings on breaching. Today, some textbooks in sociology often suggest that breaching experiments is the research method that ethnomethodologists use to explore the social organization of action. However, for Garfinkel breaching experiments mostly is a teaching tool that he describes as "tutorial exercises in Ethnomethodology's Program. Influence on later research. Garfinkel has contributed greatly to many areas of discipline through his work. Specifically, Garfinkel's contributions to the field of Gender Studies as seen with the natural breaching example of his study  on a transsexual individual discussed earlier on this page. Garfinkel was also able to contribute to theory as well as the field of social psychology. Garfinkel even won "the Cooley-Mead award by the ASA Social Psychology Section in 1995, and his address was published in Social Psychology Quarterly as ‘‘EM’s Program.’’ Garfinkel also contributed to the sociology of social problems, an area already invented but further supported by his work. Additionally, there are many papers and books hat mention and reference Garfinkel's work of Ethnomethodology. A substantial corpus of empirical work has developed exploring the issues raised  by Garfinkel's writings. Directly inspired by Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks undertook investigating the sequential organization of conversational interaction. This program, pioneered with colleagues Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff, has produced a large and flourishing research literature. A second, smaller literature has grown out of another of Sacks' interests having to do with social categorization practices. Sociologist, Emanuel A. Schegloff, used the concept of ethnomethodology to study telephone conversations and how they influence social interaction. Gail Jefferson used ethnomethodology to study laughter and how people know when it is appropriate to laugh in conversation. John Heritage and David Greatbach studied rhetoric  of political speeches and their relation to the amount of applause the speaker receives, whereas Steven Clayman studied how booing in an audience is generated. Philip Manning and George Ray studied shyness in an ethnomethodological way. Ethnomethodologists such as Graham Button, R. J Anderson, John Hughes, Wes Sharrock, Angela Garcia, Jack Whalen and D. H Zimmerman all study ethnomethodology within institutions. Early on, Garfinkel issued a call that ethnomethodology should be used to assist in informing investigations into the nature of work. This led to a wide variety of studies focusing on different occupations and professions including, laboratory science, law , police work, medicine, jazz improvisation, education, mathematics, philosophy, and others. Garfinkel's program strongly resonates in a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, gender studies, organization studies and management as well as in the technical sciences. In the technical sciences, ethnomethodology's influence can probably be ascribed to Lucy Suchman's analysis of learning to use a copy machine. It came to serve as an important critique of theories of planning in Artificial Intelligence. Selected publications. Garfinkel, although did not have a large amount of published work, greatly contributed to the field of sociology and ethnomethodology. He did not  only write his own works, but he also helped others with theirs. His students wrote "Studies of Work" which he helped edit. Garfinkel Wrote the short story, "Color Trouble" which discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia and was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940. His short story was based on the actual experience of civil rights attorney and activist, Pauli Murray, and her housemate, Adelene McBean, while traveling from Washington, D.C. to Murray’s childhood home in Durham, NC. A major contribution of his that he is known for is his  book, "Studies in Ethnomethodology." This book consists of a collection of articles explaining and describing ethnomethodology and is important in understanding his work's focus. The bulk of Garfinkel's original writings came in the form of scholarly articles and technical reports, most of which were subsequently republished as book chapters. To appreciate the sequential development of Garfinkel's thought it is important to understand when these pieces were actually written. Although published in 2006, "Seeing Sociologically" was actually written as an annotated version of a draft dissertation proposal two years after arriving at Harvard. "Toward a Sociological Theory of  Information" was also written while Garfinkel was a student and was based on a 1952 report prepared in conjunction with the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton. Some of Garfinkel's early papers on ethnomethodology were republished as "Studies in Ethnomethodology". This publication is well known by many sociologists. Garfinkel subsequently published and edited anthology showcasing selected examples of ethnomethodologically informed work. Later still, a mix of previously published papers and some new writing was released as "Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism". This latter collection, in conjunction with the "Studies," represent the definitive exposition of the ethnomethodological approach . Garfinkel had planned to publish a companion piece to "Ethnomethodology's Program", which was tentatively entitled, "Workplace and Documentary Diversity of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work and Sciences by Ethnomethodology's Authors: What did we do? What did we learn?". This project was never completed, but some preliminary notes were published in "Human Studies." His case studies on transgender people formed the basis for Chase Joynt's 2022 documentary film "Framing Agnes". Opposition. Although Harold Garfinkel's work is important, there is some opposition in the sense that his work is not recognized as theoretical. Garfinkel has criticized conventional theorizing, "arguing  that any researcher who ‘formulated’ research problems theoretically before entering the field could (in principle) not find the actual real-world problems of making action and objects mutually intelligible that people at the worksite faced everyday." Garfinkel tried to work in unconventional ways in order to gain the best results. He would analyze basic sociological ideas in order to redevelop them in order to establish a new understanding through his methods. "What it means to say that Garfinkel’s position is theoretical, while at the same time respecting Garfinkel’s own deep criticisms of theorizing, is that there are good  reasons why he would work in some ways and not others, and that these reasons have to do with deep noticings about how social things work, paired with some basic theoretical premises about the nature of social order generated by Garfinkel to explain those noticings."