Harold Garfinkel Biography

Harold Garfinkel became known as the founder of ethnomethodology with his 1976 publication Studies in Ethnomethodology.The term "ethnomethodology" occurred to Garfinkel while he was writing up a study of jury deliberations. He observed that the jurors were preoccupied with a variety of methodological matters, such as the distinction between fact and opinion. The jurors worked with these distinctions methodically incoherently organized ways, counting upon one another's abilities to use them and make sense of them. Garfinkel recognized that these distinctions were made by reference to common-sense considerations. Thus, he defined ethnomethodology as the study of common-sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations by means of which the ordinary members of society make sense of, find theirway about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves.Ethnomethodology, translated as members' methods or folk methods, refers to the methods that ordinary people use to make sense of their everyday social world. Garfinkel recognized the influence of American sociologist Talcott Parsons, Austrian-born sociologist Alfred Schutz, and phenomenological philosophers Aron Gurwitsch and Edmund Husserl on his work in the development of ethnomethodology.

Born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey, Harold Garfinkel became a doctoral student at Harvard University in 1946 and completed his Ph.D. in 1952. Early in his career, Garfinkel spent two years teaching at Ohio State and conducting research at the University of Chicago where he developed the framework for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel spent the bulk of his career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was professor emeritus at the close of the twentieth century. As a result of his leadership, UCLA is considered a training center for ethnomethodologists.

There are three major concepts associated with ethnomethodology: reflexivity, accounts, and indexicality. Reflexivity refersto the process by which groups create social reality via thoughts and actions. Ethnomethodologists reject the idea that order comes from conformity to norms and argue that order is the social actors' awareness of options and their ability to anticipate how others are going to react in social situations. Hence, human interaction is reflexive in that humans interpret cues, gestures,words, and other information from one another in order to sustain reality. By accounts and/or accounting, ethnomethodologists mean ways in which social actors interpret or reflect upon social situationsand offer an account of the situation to others. This accounting helps to explain social order. Indexicality refers to the context-specific meaning of social situations. Ethnomethodologists argue that all social behavior must be interpreted within the context of biography, intention, setting, time, etc. Other terms associated with ethnomethodology include etcetera principle, natural language, and conversation analysis.

Garfinkel became well known for his use of breeching experiments. In breeching experiments, researchers violate normal codes of behavior and observe the reaction of the subjects as they attempt to reestablish order or make sense of the situation. Garfinkel's student sused breeching experiments to illustrate the basic principles of ethnomethodology. An example is the boarder assignment in which students imagined that theywere boarders or guests in their own homes and acted in ways congruent with this identity. Family members were often perplexed by such behavior and expressed emotions which ranged from shock to anger. They often tried to make sense of the situation and reestablish order by demanding explanations for such strange behavior. According to ethnomethodologists, these reactions illustrate the importance of individuals acting according to the common-sense principles of how they are supposed to act. In another breeching experiment, students were asked to engage in conversations in which they insisted that others clarify their common-sense remarks. For example, when asked, "How are you"" and given the reply, "I'm tired," students would insist that subjects specify their meaning of the word "tired." Subjects became frustrated and made attempts to restore order. These experiments have become know as "garfinkeling" and reveal that in ordinary, everyday situations, people assume that others share the same expectations. When asked, "How are you"" we expect a particular response, such as "Fine." When these expectations are violated, there is confusion. Attempts to restore order to the situation reveal something about how the structure of everyday life is produced and maintained.