Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011) 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 Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program.Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology's Program, Lanham MD,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. 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. Garfinkel realized 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.
Biography Youth and education Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917, where he grew up in a Jewish family. His father, a furniture dealer, had hoped his son would follow him into the family business, but while he did work with his father, Garfinkel enrolled at the University of Newark to study accounting. At the University of Newark, courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students, whose theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on. 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. 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.
Garfinkel completed his master's in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide 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. 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. 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 died from congestive heart failure on April 21, 2011, in his home in Los Angeles, leaving his wife Arlene behind.
Harvard Department of Social Relations
After the war, Garfinkel went to study at Harvard and met Talcott Parsons at the newly formed Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. 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 more likely ask: 'What normative networks are there?' or 'Are there any normative networks?'"Hilbert, Richard. 1992. The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel, p. 3. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 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. 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.Rawls, Anne Warfield. "Editor's Introduction." In Harold Garfinkel's Toward a Sociological Theory of Information , 1-100. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. 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." 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"Lemert, C. (2010). Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology. In Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Vol. 4, pp. 439-443). Philadelphia: Westview Press. 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.Shneidman, Edwin S., ed. Essays in Self-Destruction . New York: Science House, 1967. 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.Maynard, Douglas. Introduction of Harold Garfinkel for the Cooley-Mead award. Social Psychology Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1996): 1-4. 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 Garfinkel was very intrigued by Parsons' study of social order.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 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").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. 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."Parsons, 1937, p. 58. 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."Garfinkel, 1967, 115. 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.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. 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."Durkheim, Émile. "The Rules of Sociological Method." In The Rules of Sociological Method, edited by Steven Lukes, 31-163. New York: Free Press, 1982. Garfinkel substituted 'phenomenon' for 'principle', signaling a different approach to sociological inquiry.Garfinkel, 1967, vii. 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.Garfinkel, 2002, 122.
Alfred Schütz, a European scholar and acquaintance of Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory, psychology and phenomenology.Psathas, G. (2004). Alfred Schutz's Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology. In Human Studies (Vol. 27, pp. 1-35). Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. 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.Schütz, Alfred. "The Problem of Rationality in the Social World." Economica 10, no. 38 (1943): 130-149. The reasoning of scientists builds upon everyday commonsense, but, in addition, employs a "postulate of rationality."Schütz, 1943, p. 147 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.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. 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