Harold Garfinkel (1917-)

From Studyplace

Categories  Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help	Pathways Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help
Key tabs
article tab edit tab move tab	study tab history tab watch tab

Contents 1 Garfinkel's life 2 Garfinkel's work 2.1 Ethnomethodology 2.2 Indexicality 2.3 Conversation analysis 3 Further Reading 4 References

[edit] Garfinkel's life

Harold Garfinkel was born in October 29th 1917 in Newark, New Jersey^[1]. Although Garfinkel's initial interest was in becoming a surgeon, the conditions of the Great Depression pushed him to study business in order to help his father's furniture business. His courses in accounting at the University of Newark influenced him in his later work when he became interested in how people made account reports "accountable".

During his time at the University of Newark, he met a group of students from there and from Columbia University, who got him interested in sociology. After graduating, he got away from New Jersey and went to a Quaker work camp in Georgia, where he met even more students at universities. At the end of the summer in 1939, he attended the University of North Carolina and completed a thesis using his early notion of accountable actions to describe race relations and homicide. He also began reading the works of theorists who would come to influence his position on social action, including Talcott Parsons, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, C. Wright Mills, and Kenneth Burke.

As the United States entered World War II, Garfinkel joined the air force, where he taught strategies to troops for warfare against tanks. This training took place at a golf course in Miami, and since the real tanks were at war, he and the troops had to imagine the tanks and seek ways of describing actions using imaginary scenarios.

After the war, Garfinkel went to Harvard to study with Talcott Parsons. American sociology was coming under the heavy influence of Parsons and the emphasis of making sociology into a more "scientific" field. Sociologists were interested in generating statistics and quantitative analyses as a way of describing society and its issues. Garfinkel was interested in the view of the social actor as it is made "orderly" in social interaction. Hence, their positions were in direct conflict with one another. However, Parsons eventually allowed Garfinkel to pass his dissertation in 1952.

In 1948, Garfinkel wrote a dissertation proposal entitled Prospectus for an exploratory study of communicative effort and the modes of understanding in selected types of dyadic relationships^[2]. This proposal was never completed, but was distributed as a mimeograph and read among graduate students at Harvard. Among these were future sociologists and linguists such as Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks, who later make their own contributions to the social sciences. In this manuscript, Garfinkel laid down his view on situated action as well as his theoretical influences. It has since been published in Seeing sociologically in 2006.

In 1954, Garfinkel joined the faculty at UCLA, where he would continue his discussions with Harvey Sacks as well as Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, who were develop conversational analysis, a method of analyzing the details of conversational data. Garfinkel would stay in UCLA until his retirement in 1987. He remains there as an active emeritus professor.

[edit] Garfinkel's work

[edit] Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel's writings are often hard to understand, especially for readers approaching him for the first time. It may be because his ideas are unconventional from the traditional approaches to sociology, or that his writing style is deliberately complex. A number of his colleagues and followers, such as Anne Rawls,^[1][2] John Heritage^[3], Eric Livingston^[4], and Michael Lynch^[5]., have written books that present Garfinkel's ideas in a more comprehensible form.

At the time Garfinkel was first developing his vision of sociology, the field itself was undergoing transforming. It was beginning to turn its focus on understanding and resolving the ills of society by employing what it believed to be a more "scientific" approach. Garfinkel's approach was a considerable departure from the accepted notions of sociology.

Ethnomethodology literally means "member's methods" and refers to the routine methods of reasoning that people engage in their everyday lives.

Ethnomethodology has come to influence studies of workplaces, business practices, science, technology, sociology, and other disciplines^[1].

[edit] Indexicality

[edit] Conversation analysis

[edit] Further Reading

• Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0199255776
• Garfinkel, H. & Rawls, A. (2002) Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0742516423
• Heritage, J. (1991) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0745600611
• Lynch, M. (1993). Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and social studies of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521597420

[edit] References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Garfinkel, H., & Rawls, A. W. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
2. ↑ ^2.0 2.1 Garfinkel, H., & Rawls, A. W. (2006). Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
3. ↑ Heritage, J. (1991) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing
4. ↑ Livingston, E. (1987). Making sense of ethnomethodology. New York: Routledge.
5. ↑ Lynch, M. (1993). Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and social studies of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press