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Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011)[2] was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program.[3][4][5] Moreover, during his time at University of Newark, which became Rutgers University, he enrolled in Theory of Accounts, a course that covered accounting and bookkeeping procedures. Where from this class "even in setting up an accounting sheet, he was theorizing the various categories into which the numbers would be placed" which furthered his understanding of accountability.[6]

Harold Garfinkel
Born(1917-10-29)October 29, 1917
DiedApril 21, 2011(2011-04-21) (aged 93)
Known forStudies in Ethnomethodology
SpouseArlene Steinbeck
Scientific career
Fields
Doctoral advisorTalcott Parsons[1]

Biography edit

Youth and education edit

Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917, where he grew up[7] in a Jewish family.[8] His father, a furniture dealer, had hoped his son would follow him into the family business,[7] but while he did work with his father, Garfinkel enrolled at the University of Newark to study accounting.[9] At the University of Newark, courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students, whose theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on.[9] In the summer following graduation, Garfinkel volunteered at a Quaker work camp in Cornelia, Georgia, where he worked with students from diverse backgrounds who demonstrated a wide variety of interests, influencing his decision to later take up sociology as a career.[10] While volunteering in Georgia, Garfinkel learned about the sociology program at the University of North Carolina.[9] This program specifically focused on public work projects like the one Garfinkel was working on.[9]

Garfinkel completed his master's in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide[9] under the supervision of Howard W. Odum. Garfinkel wrote the short story "Color Trouble", which was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940, and discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia.[11] 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, North Carolina.[12] 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. As the war effort wound down he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he met his wife and lifelong partner, Arlene Steinback. Harold passed away from congestive heart failure on April 21, 2011, in his home in Los Angeles leaving his wife Arlene behind.[13]

Harvard Department of Social Relations edit

After the war, Garfinkel went to study at Harvard and met Talcott Parsons at the newly formed Department of Social Relations at Harvard University.[14][9] While Parsons studied and emphasized abstract categories and generalizations, Garfinkel's work was more focused on detailed description.[9] "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 more likely ask: 'What normative networks are there?' or 'Are there any normative networks?'"[15] 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 taught at Princeton University for two years.[9] 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.[16] 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 a 1954 American Sociological Association meeting and created the term "ethnomethodology."[9] In addition, he was working alongside other people to listen to tape recordings and interview jurors for the University of Chicago's American Jury Project, which is led by Fred Strodtbeck which also furthered his research in Ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology became his main focus of study. It 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"[17] In 1954 he joined the sociology faculty at UCLA. During the period 1963–64 he served as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide.[18] Garfinkel spent the '75-'76 school year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and, in 1979–1980, was a visiting fellow at Oxford University. In 1995 he was awarded the "Cooley-Mead Award" from the American Sociological Association for his contributions to the field.[19] He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996. He officially retired from UCLA in 1987, though continued as an emeritus professor until his death on April 21, 2011.

Influences edit

Garfinkel was very intrigued by Parsons' study of social order.[20] 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 so doing, provide 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").[21] Agents make choices among possible ends, alternative means to these ends, and the normative constraints that might be seen as operative. They conduct themselves, according to Parsons, in a fashion "analogous to the scientist whose knowledge is the principal determinant of his action."[22] Order, by this view, is 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."[23] Both seek to give accounts of social life, but ask different kinds of questions and formulate quite different sorts of 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.[24] 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."[25] Garfinkel substituted 'phenomenon' for 'principle', signaling a different approach to sociological inquiry.[26] 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.[27]

Alfred Schütz, a European scholar and acquaintance of Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory, psychology and phenomenology.[28] Schütz, like Parsons, was concerned with establishing a sound foundation for research in the social sciences. He took issue, however, with the Parsonsian assumption that actors in society always behave rationally. Schütz made a distinction between reasoning in the 'natural attitude' and scientific reasoning.[29] The reasoning of scientists builds upon everyday commonsense, but, in addition, employs a "postulate of rationality."[30] 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. On the other hand, the traditionally assumed discontinuity between the claims of science and commonsense understandings is dissolved since scientific observations employ both forms of rationality.[31] 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?

The Roots of Ethnomethodology edit

Garfinkel's concept of ethnomethodology started with his attempt at analyzing a jury discussion after a Chicago case in 1945. Garfinkel was attempting to understand the way jurors knew how to act as jurors.[32] After attempting to understand the jurors' actions, Garfinkel created the term "ethnomethodology" as a way to describe how people use different methods in order to understand the society they live in.[32] 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.[32] 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. Garfinkel uses this point to emphasize how different ethnomethodology is from sociology and Durkheim's thinking. In sociology, it is more common to use outside sources such as institutions to describe a situation, rather than the individual.[33]

Rationality edit

Accepting Schütz's critique of the Parsonian program, Garfinkel sought to find another way of addressing the Problem of Social Order. Social order 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."[34] 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]".[35] On first inspection, this might 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 itself produced as a local accomplishment in, and as, the very ways that society's members craft their moment-to-moment interaction. He writes:

Instead of the properties of rationality being treated as a methodological principle for interpreting activity, they are to be treated only as empirically problematical material. They would have the status of data and would have to be accounted for in the same way that the more familiar properties of conduct are accounted for.[36]

In his chapter, "The Rational Properties of Scientific and Common Sense Activities" in his book, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967, Garfinkel 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:[37]

  1. Categorizing and Comparing: "Sometimes rationality refers to the fact that he searches the two situations with regard to their comparability, and sometimes to his concern for making matters comparable"[37]
  2. Tolerable error: "It is possible for a person to 'require' varying degrees of 'goodness of fit' between an observation and theory in terms of which he names, measures, describes, or otherwise intends the sense of his observation as a datum"[37]
  3. Search for "means": "Rationality is sometimes used to mean that a person reviews rules of procedure which in the past yielded the practical effects now desired"[37]
  4. Analysis of alternatives and consequences: "Frequently the term rationality is used to call attention to the fact that a person in assessing a situation anticipates the alterations which his actions will produce"[37]
  5. Strategy: "Prior to the actual occasion of choice a person may assign to a set of alternative courses of action the conditions under which any one of them is to be followed"[37]
  6. Concern for timing: "the concern for timing involves the extent to which he takes a position with regard to the possible ways in which events can temporally occur"[37]
  7. Predictability: "He may seek preliminary information about it in order to establish some empirical constants or he may attempt to make the situation predictable by examining the logical properties of the constructs he uses in 'defining' it ..."[37]
  8. Rules of procedure: "Sometimes rationality refers to rules of procedure and inference in terms of which a person decides the correctness of his judgments, inferences, perceptions, and characterizations"[37]
  9. Choice: "Sometimes the fact that a person is aware of the actual possibility of exercising a choice and sometimes the fact that he chooses are popular meanings of rationality"[37]
  10. Grounds of choice: "The grounds upon which a person exercises a choice among alternatives as well as the grounds he uses to legitimize a choice are frequently pointed out as rational features of an action"[37]
  11. Compatibility of ends-means relationships with principles of formal logic: "A person may treat a contemplated course of action as an arrangement of steps in the solution of a problem"[37]
  12. Semantic clarity and distinctness: "Reference is often made to a person's attempt to treat the semantic clarity of a construction as a variable with a maximum value which must be approximated as a required step in solving the problem of constructing a credible definition of a situation"[37]
  13. Clarity and distinctness "for its own sake": "Schütz points out that a concern for clarity and distinctness may be a concern for distinctness that is adequate for the person's purposes."[37]
  14. Compatibility of the definition of a situation with scientific knowledge: "A person can allow what he treats as 'matters of fact' to be criticized in terms of their compatibility with the body of scientific findings"[37]

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."[37]

Reflexivity edit

Reflexivity means that members shape action or want relation to context while the context itself is constantly being redefined through action.[38] Garfinkel regarded indexical expressions as key phenomena. 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".[39] 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.[40] That is, action has the property of reflexivity whereby 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, wherein what jurors had decided was used by them 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:

coffee ⇒ taste descriptor

Nor is it an imperialism of a methodology:

taste descriptor ⇒ coffee

Rather, the description and what it describes are mutually determinative:

taste descriptor ⇔ coffee

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.[41] 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 edit

Garfinkel has frequently illustrated ethnomethodological analysis by means of the illustration of service lines.[42] 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;"[43] 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."[44]

Breaching experiments edit

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."[9] In Garfinkel's work, he encouraged his students to attempt breaching experiments in order to provide examples of basic ethnomethodology.[9] 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.'"[20] He highlights many of these experiments in his books.

The following is an example [further explanation needed] of one of Garfinkel's breaching experiments from his book, Studies in Ethnomethodology.

Case 3: On Friday night my husband and I were watching television. My husband remarked that he was tired. I asked, 'How are you tired? Physically, mentally, or just bored?'

S: I don't know, I guess physically, mainly.

E: You mean that your muscles ache or your bones?

S: I guess so. Don't be so technical. (After more watching)

S: All these old movies have the same kind of old iron bedstead in them.

E: What do you mean? Do you mean all old movies, or some of them, or just the ones you have seen?

S: What's the matter with you? You know what I mean.

E: I wish you would be more specific.

S: You know what I mean! Drop dead![45]

Today, some textbooks in sociology often suggest that breaching experiments are the research method that ethnomethodologists use to explore the social organization of action. However, for Garfinkel breaching experiments mostly are a teaching tool that he [46] describes as "tutorial exercises in Ethnomethodology's Program.[47]

Influence on later research edit

A substantial corpus of empirical work has developed exploring the issues raised by Garfinkel's writings.

Directly inspired by Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks undertook to investigate the sequential organization of conversational interaction.[48] 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.[49]

Sociologist Emanuel A. Schegloff used the concept of ethnomethodology to study telephone conversations and how they influence social interaction.[9] Gail Jefferson used ethnomethodology to study laughter and how people know when it is appropriate to laugh in conversation.[9] 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.[9] Philip Manning and George Ray studied shyness in an ethnomethodological way.[9] 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.[9]

Early on, Garfinkel issued a call for ethnomethodologically informed investigations into the nature of work.[50] This led to a wide variety of studies focusing on different occupations and professions, including laboratory science,[51] law,[52][53] police work,[54] medicine,[55] jazz improvisation,[56] education,[57][58] mathematics,[59] philosophy,[60] 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.[47] In the technical sciences, ethnomethodology's influence can probably be ascribed to Lucy Suchman's analysis of learning to use a copy machine.[61] It came to serve as an important critique of theories of planning in Artificial Intelligence.

Selected publications edit

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, however, it is important to understand when these pieces were actually written. Although published in 2006, Seeing Sociologically[62] was actually written as an annotated version of a draft dissertation proposal two years after arriving at Harvard. Toward a Sociological Theory of Information[63] 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.[64] This publication is well known by many sociologists. Garfinkel subsequently published an edited anthology showcasing selected examples of ethnomethodologically informed work.[65] Later still, a mix of previously published papers and some new writing was released as Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism.[66] 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.[67]

Further reading edit

  • Allan, K. (2006). Organizing Ordinary Life. In Contemporary social and sociological theory: Visualizing social worlds. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press
  • Lemert, C. (2010). Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology. In Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Vol. 4, pp. 439–443). Philadelphia: Westview Press.
  • Psathas, G. (2004). Alfred Schutz's Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology. In Human Studies (Vol. 27, pp. 1–35). Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
  • Sica, Alan. 2005. "Harold Garfinkel: 1917." pp. 609–612 in Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
  • Vom Lehn, Dirk: Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology. Left Coast Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-61132-980-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-61132-754-0 (eBook)

Notes edit

  1. ^ Rawls, Anne Warfield (2002). "Editor's Introduction". Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism. By Garfinkel, Harold. Rawls, Anne Warfield (ed.). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-7425-7898-2.
  2. ^ Lynch, Michael (December 2011). "Harold Garfinkel (29 October 1917 – 21 April 2011): A remembrance and reminder". Social Studies of Science. 41 (6): 927–942. doi:10.1177/0306312711423434. ISSN 0306-3127. S2CID 144144921.
  3. ^ Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology's Program, Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield.
  4. ^ Garfinkel, H. (2006) Seeing Sociologically: The routine grounds of social action, Boulder CO, Paradigm Publishers.
  5. ^ Garfinkel, H. (2008) Toward a Sociological Theory of Information, Boulder CO, Paradigm Books.
  6. ^ Lynch, Michael (December 2011). "Harold Garfinkel (29 October 1917 – 21 April 2011): A remembrance and reminder". Social Studies of Science. 41 (6): 927–942. doi:10.1177/0306312711423434. ISSN 0306-3127. S2CID 144144921.
  7. ^ a b Sica, Alan (2005). "Harold Garfinkel: 1917". Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston: Pearson. pp. 608–612.
  8. ^ Rawls, Anne (2008). "Harold Garfinkel". In Ritzer, George (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists. John Wiley & Sons. p. 131.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Ritzer, George (2011). "Ethnomethodology". Sociological Theory (8 ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. pp. 391–415.
  10. ^ Rawls, Anne Warfield (2003). "Harold Garfinkel". In Ritzer, George (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 122–53.
  11. ^ Doubt, Keith (1989). "Garfinkel Before Ethnomethodology". The American Sociologist. Ipswich, MA. pp. 252–53.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ^ Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth (2009). Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950. New York: W.W. Norton. pp. 315–329.
  13. ^ Maynard, Douglas W. (February 2012). "Memorial Essay: Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011): A Sociologist for the Ages: Memorial Essay: Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011)". Symbolic Interaction. 35 (1): 88–96. doi:10.1002/symb.4.
  14. ^ Maynard, Douglas W.; Heritage, John (2023). "Ethnomethodology's Legacies and Prospects". Annual Review of Sociology. 49 (1): 59–80. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-020321-033738. ISSN 0360-0572. S2CID 258491799.
  15. ^ Hilbert, Richard. 1992. The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel, p. 3. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
  16. ^ Rawls, Anne Warfield. "Editor's Introduction." In Harold Garfinkel's Toward a Sociological Theory of Information , 1-100. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008.
  17. ^ Lemert, C. (2010). Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology. In Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Vol. 4, pp. 439-443). Philadelphia: Westview Press.
  18. ^ Shneidman, Edwin S., ed. Essays in Self-Destruction . New York: Science House, 1967.
  19. ^ Maynard, Douglas. Introduction of Harold Garfinkel for the Cooley-Mead award. Social Psychology Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1996): 1-4.
  20. ^ a b Allan, Kenneth. 2006. "Organizing Ordinary Life: Harold Garfinkel (1917-)." Pp. 51–71 in "Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory." Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
  21. ^ Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.
  22. ^ Parsons, 1937, p. 58.
  23. ^ Garfinkel, 1967, 115.
  24. ^ Garfinkel, H., and Harvey Sacks. "On Formal Structures of Practical Actions." In Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, edited by J.C. McKinney and E. Tiryakian, 337-66. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, 345.
  25. ^ Durkheim, Émile. "The Rules of Sociological Method." In The Rules of Sociological Method, edited by Steven Lukes, 31-163. New York: Free Press, 1982.
  26. ^ Garfinkel, 1967, vii.
  27. ^ Garfinkel, 2002, 122.
  28. ^ Psathas, G. (2004). Alfred Schutz's Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology. In Human Studies (Vol. 27, pp. 1-35). Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
  29. ^ Schütz, Alfred. "The Problem of Rationality in the Social World." Economica 10, no. 38 (1943): 130-149.
  30. ^ Schütz, 1943, p. 147
  31. ^ Sharrock, Wes. "What Garfinkel Makes of Schutz: The Past, Present and Future of an Alternate, Asymmetric and Incommensurable Approach to Sociology." Theory & Science 5, no. 1 (2004): 1-13.
  32. ^ a b c Mann, Douglass. 2008. "Society as Symbols or Constructs." Pp. 210-212 in Understanding Society: A Survey of Modern Social Theory. Ontario, Canada: Oxford University Press.
  33. ^ Allan, K. (2006). Organizing Ordinary Life. In Contemporary social and sociological theory: Visualizing social worlds. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press. 49-71.
  34. ^ Garfinkel, 1967, p. 33
  35. ^ Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 32.
  36. ^ Garfinkel, 1967, p. 282, author's emphasis.
  37. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Sica, Alan. 2005. "Harold Garfinkel: 1917." Pp. 609-612 in Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
  38. ^ Heritage, John. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984, p. 242.
  39. ^ Garfinkel, 1967, p. 34
  40. ^ Maynard, Douglas W., and Steven E. Clayman. "The Diversity of Ethnomethodology." Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991): 397-98.
  41. ^ Wieder, D. Lawrence. Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
  42. ^ Garfinkel 2002, 255-258. See also, Livingston, Eric. Making Sense of Ethnomethodology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, 4-6, 13-15, 82.
  43. ^ Livingston, op cit, 13.
  44. ^ Kwang-ki, Kim. 2011. "Harold Garfinkel." Pp. 118-119 in Order and agency in modernity:Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel. Palo Alto, CA.
  45. ^ Garfinkel, Harold. 2011. "Harold Garfinkel: Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities." Pp. 287-295 in Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism. 6th Ed., edited by James Farganis. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
  46. ^ Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. "Ethnomethodology's Program: Working out Durkheim's Aphorism. Rowman-Littlefield
  47. ^ a b vom Lehn, Dirk 2014. Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
  48. ^ Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992.
  49. ^ Sacks, Harvey. "An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology." In Studies in Social Interaction, edited by David Sudnow, 31-63. New York: Free Press, 1972.
  50. ^ Garfinkel, Harold. Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
  51. ^ Lynch, Michael. "Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science." New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  52. ^ Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and Drew, Paul. "Order in court: The organization of verbal interaction in judicial settings." London: Macmillan, 1979.
  53. ^ Travers, M., and Manzo, J. F., eds. Law in Action: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Approaches to Law. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 1997.
  54. ^ Bittner, Egon. "Police Discretion in Emergency Apprehension of Mentally Ill Persons." Social Problems 14, no. 3 (1967): 278-92.
  55. ^ Heritage, John, and Douglas Maynard, eds. Communication in Medical Care: Interactions between Primary Care Physicians and Patients. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  56. ^ Sudnow, David. Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
  57. ^ Payne, G. C. F., and Cuff, Ted, eds. Doing Teaching: The Practical Management of Classrooms. London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., 1982.
  58. ^ Hester, Stephen, and David Francis, eds. Local Educational Order: Ethnomethodological Studies of Knowledge in Action. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2000.
  59. ^ Livingston, Eric. The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
  60. ^ Liberman, Kenneth. Husserl's Criticism of Reason with Ethnomethodological Specifications. Lanham, MD: Lexington Book, 2007.
  61. ^ Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  62. ^ Garfinkel, Harold, Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
  63. ^ Garfinkel, Harold, Toward a Sociological Theory of Information. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008.
  64. ^ First published by Prentice-Hall in 1967 and later reissued in an expanded edition by Paradigm Publishers (Boulder, CO, forthcoming).
  65. ^ Garfinkel, 1986.
  66. ^ Garfinkel, 2002.
  67. ^ Garfinkel, Harold. Lebenswelt origins of the sciences: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Human Studies 30 (2007): 9-56.

External links edit

  • Obituary in the New York Times
  • Obituary in the Guardian

harold, garfinkel, october, 1917, april, 2011, american, sociologist, ethnomethodologist, taught, university, california, angeles, having, developed, established, ethnomethodology, field, inquiry, sociology, probably, best, known, studies, ethnomethodology, 19. Harold Garfinkel October 29 1917 April 21 2011 2 was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist who taught at the University of California Los Angeles Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology 1967 a collection of articles Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology s Program 3 4 5 Moreover during his time at University of Newark which became Rutgers University he enrolled in Theory of Accounts a course that covered accounting and bookkeeping procedures Where from this class even in setting up an accounting sheet he was theorizing the various categories into which the numbers would be placed which furthered his understanding of accountability 6 Harold GarfinkelBorn 1917 10 29 October 29 1917Newark New Jersey USDiedApril 21 2011 2011 04 21 aged 93 Los Angeles California USKnown forStudies in EthnomethodologySpouseArlene SteinbeckScientific careerFieldsSociological theorysocial theoryDoctoral advisorTalcott Parsons 1 Contents 1 Biography 1 1 Youth and education 1 2 Harvard Department of Social Relations 2 Influences 2 1 The Roots of Ethnomethodology 2 2 Rationality 2 3 Reflexivity 2 4 Service Lines 2 5 Breaching experiments 3 Influence on later research 4 Selected publications 5 Further reading 6 Notes 7 External linksBiography editYouth and education edit Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark New Jersey on October 29 1917 where he grew up 7 in a Jewish family 8 His father a furniture dealer had hoped his son would follow him into the family business 7 but while he did work with his father Garfinkel enrolled at the University of Newark to study accounting 9 At the University of Newark courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students whose theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on 9 In the summer following graduation Garfinkel volunteered at a Quaker work camp in Cornelia Georgia where he worked with students from diverse backgrounds who demonstrated a wide variety of interests influencing his decision to later take up sociology as a career 10 While volunteering in Georgia Garfinkel learned about the sociology program at the University of North Carolina 9 This program specifically focused on public work projects like the one Garfinkel was working on 9 Garfinkel completed his master s in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide 9 under the supervision of Howard W Odum Garfinkel wrote the short story Color Trouble which was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940 and discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia 11 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 North Carolina 12 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 As the war effort wound down he was transferred to Gulfport Mississippi where he met his wife and lifelong partner Arlene Steinback Harold passed away from congestive heart failure on April 21 2011 in his home in Los Angeles leaving his wife Arlene behind 13 Harvard Department of Social Relations edit After the war Garfinkel went to study at Harvard and met Talcott Parsons at the newly formed Department of Social Relations at Harvard University 14 9 While Parsons studied and emphasized abstract categories and generalizations Garfinkel s work was more focused on detailed description 9 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 more likely ask What normative networks are there or Are there any normative networks 15 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 taught at Princeton University for two years 9 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 16 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 a 1954 American Sociological Association meeting and created the term ethnomethodology 9 In addition he was working alongside other people to listen to tape recordings and interview jurors for the University of Chicago s American Jury Project which is led by Fred Strodtbeck which also furthered his research in Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology became his main focus of study It 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 17 In 1954 he joined the sociology faculty at UCLA During the period 1963 64 he served as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide 18 Garfinkel spent the 75 76 school year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and in 1979 1980 was a visiting fellow at Oxford University In 1995 he was awarded the Cooley Mead Award from the American Sociological Association for his contributions to the field 19 He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996 He officially retired from UCLA in 1987 though continued as an emeritus professor until his death on April 21 2011 Influences editGarfinkel was very intrigued by Parsons study of social order 20 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 so doing provide 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 21 Agents make choices among possible ends alternative means to these ends and the normative constraints that might be seen as operative They conduct themselves according to Parsons in a fashion analogous to the scientist whose knowledge is the principal determinant of his action 22 Order by this view is 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 23 Both seek to give accounts of social life but ask different kinds of questions and formulate quite different sorts of 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 24 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 25 Garfinkel substituted phenomenon for principle signaling a different approach to sociological inquiry 26 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 27 Alfred Schutz a European scholar and acquaintance of Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory psychology and phenomenology 28 Schutz like Parsons was concerned with establishing a sound foundation for research in the social sciences He took issue however with the Parsonsian assumption that actors in society always behave rationally Schutz made a distinction between reasoning in the natural attitude and scientific reasoning 29 The reasoning of scientists builds upon everyday commonsense but in addition employs a postulate of rationality 30 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 On the other hand the traditionally assumed discontinuity between the claims of science and commonsense understandings is dissolved since scientific observations employ both forms of rationality 31 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 The Roots of Ethnomethodology edit Garfinkel s concept of ethnomethodology started with his attempt at analyzing a jury discussion after a Chicago case in 1945 Garfinkel was attempting to understand the way jurors knew how to act as jurors 32 After attempting to understand the jurors actions Garfinkel created the term ethnomethodology as a way to describe how people use different methods in order to understand the society they live in 32 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 32 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 Garfinkel uses this point to emphasize how different ethnomethodology is from sociology and Durkheim s thinking In sociology it is more common to use outside sources such as institutions to describe a situation rather than the individual 33 Rationality edit Accepting Schutz s critique of the Parsonian program Garfinkel sought to find another way of addressing the Problem of Social Order Social order 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 34 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 35 On first inspection this might 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 itself produced as a local accomplishment in and as the very ways that society s members craft their moment to moment interaction He writes Instead of the properties of rationality being treated as a methodological principle for interpreting activity they are to be treated only as empirically problematical material They would have the status of data and would have to be accounted for in the same way that the more familiar properties of conduct are accounted for 36 In his chapter The Rational Properties of Scientific and Common Sense Activities in his book Studies in Ethnomethodology 1967 Garfinkel discusses how there are various meanings of the term rationality in relation to the way people behave Garfinkel mentions Schutz 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 37 Categorizing and Comparing Sometimes rationality refers to the fact that he searches the two situations with regard to their comparability and sometimes to his concern for making matters comparable 37 Tolerable error It is possible for a person to require varying degrees of goodness of fit between an observation and theory in terms of which he names measures describes or otherwise intends the sense of his observation as a datum 37 Search for means Rationality is sometimes used to mean that a person reviews rules of procedure which in the past yielded the practical effects now desired 37 Analysis of alternatives and consequences Frequently the term rationality is used to call attention to the fact that a person in assessing a situation anticipates the alterations which his actions will produce 37 Strategy Prior to the actual occasion of choice a person may assign to a set of alternative courses of action the conditions under which any one of them is to be followed 37 Concern for timing the concern for timing involves the extent to which he takes a position with regard to the possible ways in which events can temporally occur 37 Predictability He may seek preliminary information about it in order to establish some empirical constants or he may attempt to make the situation predictable by examining the logical properties of the constructs he uses in defining it 37 Rules of procedure Sometimes rationality refers to rules of procedure and inference in terms of which a person decides the correctness of his judgments inferences perceptions and characterizations 37 Choice Sometimes the fact that a person is aware of the actual possibility of exercising a choice and sometimes the fact that he chooses are popular meanings of rationality 37 Grounds of choice The grounds upon which a person exercises a choice among alternatives as well as the grounds he uses to legitimize a choice are frequently pointed out as rational features of an action 37 Compatibility of ends means relationships with principles of formal logic A person may treat a contemplated course of action as an arrangement of steps in the solution of a problem 37 Semantic clarity and distinctness Reference is often made to a person s attempt to treat the semantic clarity of a construction as a variable with a maximum value which must be approximated as a required step in solving the problem of constructing a credible definition of a situation 37 Clarity and distinctness for its own sake Schutz points out that a concern for clarity and distinctness may be a concern for distinctness that is adequate for the person s purposes 37 Compatibility of the definition of a situation with scientific knowledge A person can allow what he treats as matters of fact to be criticized in terms of their compatibility with the body of scientific findings 37 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 37 Reflexivity edit Reflexivity means that members shape action or want relation to context while the context itself is constantly being redefined through action 38 Garfinkel regarded indexical expressions as key phenomena 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 39 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 40 That is action has the property of reflexivity whereby 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 wherein what jurors had decided was used by them 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 coffee taste descriptor Nor is it an imperialism of a methodology taste descriptor coffee Rather the description and what it describes are mutually determinative taste descriptor coffee 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 41 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 edit Garfinkel has frequently illustrated ethnomethodological analysis by means of the illustration of service lines 42 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 43 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 44 Breaching experiments edit 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 9 In Garfinkel s work he encouraged his students to attempt breaching experiments in order to provide examples of basic ethnomethodology 9 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 20 He highlights many of these experiments in his books The following is an example further explanation needed of one of Garfinkel s breaching experiments from his book Studies in Ethnomethodology Case 3 On Friday night my husband and I were watching television My husband remarked that he was tired I asked How are you tired Physically mentally or just bored S I don t know I guess physically mainly E You mean that your muscles ache or your bones S I guess so Don t be so technical After more watching S All these old movies have the same kind of old iron bedstead in them E What do you mean Do you mean all old movies or some of them or just the ones you have seen S What s the matter with you You know what I mean E I wish you would be more specific S You know what I mean Drop dead 45 Today some textbooks in sociology often suggest that breaching experiments are the research method that ethnomethodologists use to explore the social organization of action However for Garfinkel breaching experiments mostly are a teaching tool that he 46 describes as tutorial exercises in Ethnomethodology s Program 47 Influence on later research editA substantial corpus of empirical work has developed exploring the issues raised by Garfinkel s writings Directly inspired by Garfinkel Harvey Sacks undertook to investigate the sequential organization of conversational interaction 48 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 49 Sociologist Emanuel A Schegloff used the concept of ethnomethodology to study telephone conversations and how they influence social interaction 9 Gail Jefferson used ethnomethodology to study laughter and how people know when it is appropriate to laugh in conversation 9 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 9 Philip Manning and George Ray studied shyness in an ethnomethodological way 9 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 9 Early on Garfinkel issued a call for ethnomethodologically informed investigations into the nature of work 50 This led to a wide variety of studies focusing on different occupations and professions including laboratory science 51 law 52 53 police work 54 medicine 55 jazz improvisation 56 education 57 58 mathematics 59 philosophy 60 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 47 In the technical sciences ethnomethodology s influence can probably be ascribed to Lucy Suchman s analysis of learning to use a copy machine 61 It came to serve as an important critique of theories of planning in Artificial Intelligence Selected publications editThe 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 however it is important to understand when these pieces were actually written Although published in 2006 Seeing Sociologically 62 was actually written as an annotated version of a draft dissertation proposal two years after arriving at Harvard Toward a Sociological Theory of Information 63 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 64 This publication is well known by many sociologists Garfinkel subsequently published an edited anthology showcasing selected examples of ethnomethodologically informed work 65 Later still a mix of previously published papers and some new writing was released as Ethnomethodology s Program Working Out Durkheim s Aphorism 66 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 67 Further reading editAllan K 2006 Organizing Ordinary Life In Contemporary social and sociological theory Visualizing social worlds Thousand Oaks Calif Pine Forge Press Lemert C 2010 Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology In Social Theory The Multicultural and Classic Readings Vol 4 pp 439 443 Philadelphia Westview Press Psathas G 2004 Alfred Schutz s Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology In Human Studies Vol 27 pp 1 35 Netherlands Kluwer Academic Sica Alan 2005 Harold Garfinkel 1917 pp 609 612 in Social Thought From the Enlightenment to the Present Boston MA Pearson Education Vom Lehn Dirk Harold Garfinkel The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology Left Coast Press 2014 ISBN 978 1 61132 980 3 paperback ISBN 978 1 61132 754 0 eBook Notes edit Rawls Anne Warfield 2002 Editor s Introduction Ethnomethodology s Program Working Out Durkheim s Aphorism By Garfinkel Harold Rawls Anne Warfield ed Lanham Maryland Rowman amp Littlefield Publishers p 4 ISBN 978 0 7425 7898 2 Lynch Michael December 2011 Harold Garfinkel 29 October 1917 21 April 2011 A remembrance and reminder Social Studies of Science 41 6 927 942 doi 10 1177 0306312711423434 ISSN 0306 3127 S2CID 144144921 Garfinkel H 2002 Ethnomethodology s Program Lanham MD Rowman and Littlefield Garfinkel H 2006 Seeing Sociologically The routine grounds of social action Boulder CO Paradigm Publishers Garfinkel H 2008 Toward a Sociological Theory of Information Boulder CO Paradigm Books Lynch Michael December 2011 Harold Garfinkel 29 October 1917 21 April 2011 A remembrance and reminder Social Studies of Science 41 6 927 942 doi 10 1177 0306312711423434 ISSN 0306 3127 S2CID 144144921 a b Sica Alan 2005 Harold Garfinkel 1917 Social Thought From the Enlightenment to the Present Boston Pearson pp 608 612 Rawls Anne 2008 Harold Garfinkel In Ritzer George ed The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists John Wiley amp Sons p 131 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Ritzer George 2011 Ethnomethodology Sociological Theory 8 ed New York NY McGraw Hill pp 391 415 Rawls Anne Warfield 2003 Harold Garfinkel In Ritzer George ed The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists Oxford Blackwell pp 122 53 Doubt Keith 1989 Garfinkel Before Ethnomethodology The American Sociologist Ipswich MA pp 252 53 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Gilmore Glenda Elizabeth 2009 Defying Dixie The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919 1950 New York W W Norton pp 315 329 Maynard Douglas W February 2012 Memorial Essay Harold Garfinkel 1917 2011 A Sociologist for the Ages Memorial Essay Harold Garfinkel 1917 2011 Symbolic Interaction 35 1 88 96 doi 10 1002 symb 4 Maynard Douglas W Heritage John 2023 Ethnomethodology s Legacies and Prospects Annual Review of Sociology 49 1 59 80 doi 10 1146 annurev soc 020321 033738 ISSN 0360 0572 S2CID 258491799 Hilbert Richard 1992 The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology Durkheim Weber and Garfinkel p 3 Chapel Hill NC The University of North Carolina Press Rawls Anne Warfield Editor s Introduction In Harold Garfinkel s Toward a Sociological Theory of Information 1 100 Boulder CO Paradigm Publishers 2008 Lemert C 2010 Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology In Social Theory The Multicultural and Classic Readings Vol 4 pp 439 443 Philadelphia Westview Press Shneidman Edwin S ed Essays in Self Destruction New York Science House 1967 Maynard Douglas Introduction of Harold Garfinkel for the Cooley Mead award Social Psychology Quarterly 59 no 1 1996 1 4 a b Allan Kenneth 2006 Organizing Ordinary Life Harold Garfinkel 1917 Pp 51 71 in Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory Thousand Oaks CA Pine Forge Press Parsons Talcott The Structure of Social Action A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers New York McGraw Hill 1937 Parsons 1937 p 58 Garfinkel 1967 115 Garfinkel H and Harvey Sacks On Formal Structures of Practical Actions In Theoretical Sociology Perspectives and Developments edited by J C McKinney and E Tiryakian 337 66 New York Appleton Century Crofts 1970 345 Durkheim Emile The Rules of Sociological Method In The Rules of Sociological Method edited by Steven Lukes 31 163 New York Free Press 1982 Garfinkel 1967 vii Garfinkel 2002 122 Psathas G 2004 Alfred Schutz s Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology In Human Studies Vol 27 pp 1 35 Netherlands Kluwer Academic Schutz Alfred The Problem of Rationality in the Social World Economica 10 no 38 1943 130 149 Schutz 1943 p 147 Sharrock Wes What Garfinkel Makes of Schutz The Past Present and Future of an Alternate Asymmetric and Incommensurable Approach to Sociology Theory amp Science 5 no 1 2004 1 13 a b c Mann Douglass 2008 Society as Symbols or Constructs Pp 210 212 in Understanding Society A Survey of Modern Social Theory Ontario Canada Oxford University Press Allan K 2006 Organizing Ordinary Life In Contemporary social and sociological theory Visualizing social worlds Thousand Oaks Calif Pine Forge Press 49 71 Garfinkel 1967 p 33 Garfinkel Harold Studies in Ethnomethodology Englewood Cliffs NJ Prentice Hall 1967 p 32 Garfinkel 1967 p 282 author s emphasis a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Sica Alan 2005 Harold Garfinkel 1917 Pp 609 612 in Social Thought From the Enlightenment to the Present Boston MA Pearson Education Heritage John Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology Cambridge UK Polity Press 1984 p 242 Garfinkel 1967 p 34 Maynard Douglas W and Steven E Clayman The Diversity of Ethnomethodology Annual Review of Sociology 17 1991 397 98 Wieder D Lawrence Language and Social Reality The Case of Telling the Convict Code The Hague Mouton 1974 Garfinkel 2002 255 258 See also Livingston Eric Making Sense of Ethnomethodology London Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1987 4 6 13 15 82 Livingston op cit 13 Kwang ki Kim 2011 Harold Garfinkel Pp 118 119 in Order and agency in modernity Talcott Parsons Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel Palo Alto CA Garfinkel Harold 2011 Harold Garfinkel Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities Pp 287 295 in Readings in Social Theory The Classic Tradition to Post Modernism 6th Ed edited by James Farganis New York NY McGraw Hill Garfinkel Harold 2002 Ethnomethodology s Program Working out Durkheim s Aphorism Rowman Littlefield a b vom Lehn Dirk 2014 Harold Garfinkel The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology Walnut Creek CA Left Coast Press Sacks Harvey Lectures on Conversation Oxford UK Blackwell 1992 Sacks Harvey An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology In Studies in Social Interaction edited by David Sudnow 31 63 New York Free Press 1972 Garfinkel Harold Ethnomethodological Studies of Work London Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1986 Lynch Michael Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science New York Cambridge University Press 1993 Atkinson J Maxwell and Drew Paul Order in court The organization of verbal interaction in judicial settings London Macmillan 1979 Travers M and Manzo J F eds Law in Action Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Approaches to Law Aldershot Hants England Ashgate Dartmouth 1997 Bittner Egon Police Discretion in Emergency Apprehension of Mentally Ill Persons Social Problems 14 no 3 1967 278 92 Heritage John and Douglas Maynard eds Communication in Medical Care Interactions between Primary Care Physicians and Patients Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 2006 Sudnow David Ways of the Hand A Rewritten Account Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 Payne G C F and Cuff Ted eds Doing Teaching The Practical Management of Classrooms London Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd 1982 Hester Stephen and David Francis eds Local Educational Order Ethnomethodological Studies of Knowledge in Action Philadelphia PA John Benjamins 2000 Livingston Eric The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics London Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1986 Liberman Kenneth Husserl s Criticism of Reason with Ethnomethodological Specifications Lanham MD Lexington Book 2007 Suchman Lucy Human Machine Reconfigurations Plans and Situated Actions New York Cambridge University Press 2007 Garfinkel Harold Seeing Sociologically The Routine Grounds of Social Action Boulder CO Paradigm Publishers 2006 Garfinkel Harold Toward a Sociological Theory of Information Boulder CO Paradigm Publishers 2008 First published by Prentice Hall in 1967 and later reissued in an expanded edition by Paradigm Publishers Boulder CO forthcoming Garfinkel 1986 Garfinkel 2002 Garfinkel Harold Lebenswelt origins of the sciences Working out Durkheim s aphorism Human Studies 30 2007 9 56 External links editUCLA Department of Sociology Obituary in the New York Times Obituary in the Guardian Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Harold Garfinkel amp oldid 1206264252, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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