Garfinkel, Harold

Born on October 29, 1917, in Newark, New Jersey, Harold Garfinkel is widely known as the father of ethnomethodology (EM). Scholars associated with EM work in all areas of intellectual enterprise, including most subdisciplines of sociology and many other disciplines as well. Popular research areas typically associated with micro, or qualitative, sociology, usually thought of as quite distinct, are often closely associated with EM.

Garfinkel's groundbreaking approach toward social practices, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s was the first to take up Durkheim's idea that the key to social order in modern times was the study of social practices. In explaining what he meant by practices that could not be reduced to propositions, Durkheim ([1893]1933) focused on science, arguing “that to gain an exact idea of a science one must practice it, and, so to speak, live with it…. [I]t does not entirely consist of some propositions” (p. 362). He argued that along with theoretical science, “there is another, concrete and living, which is in part ignorant of itself, and yet seeks itself; besides acquired results there are hopes, habits, instincts, needs presentiments so obscure that they cannot be expressed in words, yet so powerful that they sometimes dominate the whole life of the scholar” (p. 362). Durkheim's emphasis on practice was largely ignored until Garfinkel. The close study of practices now making headway in many disciplines owes much to Garfinkel's pioneering work. Terms such as workplace studies, the shop floor problem, conversational sequencing, and the presentational self appeared originally in Garfinkel's writings. However, because much of this work remained unpublished, and highly controversial, Garfinkel is often not adequately cited by developing areas of research that he has directly inspired.

As a student of Talcott Parsons in the late 1940s, Garfinkel was one of the first to challenge Parsons's view of social order as based on the relationship between individuals and institutional beliefs and values. Garfinkel argued, by contrast, that each next situation posed constraints of its own, and that the key to social order was to document those constraints, not treat the alleged beliefs and values of actors as evidence of the efficacy of institutional orders of belief. Garfinkel insisted on the adequacy of description and a focus on contingent empirical detail. Parsons relied on conceptual categories and generalization. The clash between their two positions would develop into one of the most important theoretical debates of the twentieth century. In his doctoral thesis, Garfinkel took on Parsons more or less directly. However, Garfinkel later withdrew from the conceptual debate, maintaining that his position could only be demonstrated empirically.

While Garfinkel is generally classified as a thinker of the late 1960s and coupled with Erving Goffman's interactionism, most likely because of the impact of Studies in Ethnomethodology in 1967, his position has its roots in an earlier period. Although interpretations of Garfinkel's work often attempt to derive it from the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the theory of accounts of C. Wright Mills, or cast it as a reaction to Parsons, Garfinkel was more a contemporary of Wittgenstein and Mills, doing his first writing in the late 1930s, than a student of their work, and his position had already been conceived, at least in outline, before he went to Harvard to work with Parsons.

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