Harold Garfinkel

Works

• 1967Studies in Ethnomethodology

  Jurors, clinic files, breaching experiments and the case of Agnes: how members produce the orderliness of everyday life.

Position

Parsons explained social order by shared values that people internalise. Garfinkel thought this made actors into “judgmental dopes” who merely follow rules. Drawing on Alfred Schutz and on Husserl’s phenomenology, he asked how people in fact produce order: how a juror decides what counts as a fact, how clinic staff keep records that make sense to colleagues, how a conversation proceeds when much is left unsaid. Everyday actions are “accountable”: people make them recognisable and reportable as what they are, and the meaning of their words depends on the occasion (indexicality). The order is not behind these practices but in them. To make it visible, he had students “breach” routines, for instance by behaving as lodgers in their parents’ home; the anger and confusion they met showed how much is taken for granted. The best-known case in Studies in Ethnomethodology is Agnes, a young trans woman who in 1958–59 sought surgery at UCLA and whose work of “passing” revealed how sex membership is routinely produced; she later disclosed that she had taken oestrogen since adolescence, which complicated the clinical account. Lewis Coser, in his 1975 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, dismissed ethnomethodology as trivial. Others, including Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas, took it up, and Harvey Sacks, his collaborator, developed conversation analysis from it.

Life & context

Harold Garfinkel was born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a Jewish furniture dealer, and studied business and accounting at the University of Newark. In 1940 he published a short story, “Color Trouble”, about the arrest of two Black women on a segregated bus in Virginia, based on an experience of Pauli Murray. He took a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina in 1942 with a study of homicide trials across the colour line, served in the Army Air Forces and then went to Harvard, where he took his doctorate under Talcott Parsons in 1952. After two years at Princeton he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1954 and taught there until he retired in 1987. Working on recordings of jury deliberations in the mid-1950s, he coined the term “ethnomethodology” for the methods by which ordinary people make sense of what they do. Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) made him known and controversial. He died in Los Angeles in 2011.

Further main works

• Color Trouble (short story, 1940)
• Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (2002)
• Seeing Sociologically (written 1948, published 2006)