It has been reported (use of passive intentional -- I have not located any official announcement or obituary) that the sociologist Harold Garfinkel passed away this week at age 94. Garfinkel founded the school of thought known as "ethnomethodology," the study of the methods people use to account for everyday actions.
The founding text in the field is the 1967 collection Studies in Ethnomethology, an collection of case studies and theoretical essays. Perhaps the most famous of these is "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities."
Even students whose only exposure to sociology is an introductory course probably know of the most famous concept associated with Garfinkel: "breaching experiments" in which tacit and taken-for-granted rules of everyday interaction are exposed by breaking them (a sort of sociological Candid Camera). Facing in rather than out in an elevator may be the most well known (dozens of examples on You-tube).
Garfinkel studied with Talcott Parsons at Harvard in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this time he encountered several recently immigrated European thinkers, including Alfred Schutz, from whom he learned about new ideas in social theory, psychology and, especially, phenomenology. His ethnomethodology developed somewhat in parallel with Schutz' work as two of the dominant branches in micro-sociology (the other being symbolic interactionism).
Garfinkel's career was spent at UCLA from which he retired in 1987. His most direct legacy today shows up in the fields of conversation analysis and related hyper-micro-sociologies. Many who work in the subfield of symbolic interaction would also cite his work. The painstakingly detailed observation of interaction also appears in research on product design, marketing, and human-machine interface design. His last book Toward a Sociological Theory of Information
was published in 2008 but had been written in the 1950s.
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