Garfinkel, Harold

Bio Sketch

Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was an American sociologist and the founder of ethnomethodology, the study of the "organized artful practices of everyday life." Combining Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of common sense with a critique of Parsonian structural-functionalism, he studied the taken-for-granted, "seen-but-unnoticed" background expectancies of everyday practice. He matters to Geoffrey's research as the theorist who rejects the "cultural dope" model of the actor and treats ordinary practice as an active, methodical accomplishment.

Key Works

• Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) — the "cultural dope"; the routine grounds of everyday activities; the practical actor as "lay sociologist."

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Background Expectations — the taken-for-granted, tacit understandings that produce social order; the invisible structure of the everyday.
• Everyday Life — the everyday as the taken-for-granted, "seen-but-unnoticed" background of practical action.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Garfinkel's rejection of the "cultural dope" — the actor who merely complies with pre-established cultural alternatives — offers a third way in Geoffrey's Theories of the Everyday debate. Against both the critical theorists' dualism (action/structure, rulers/ruled) and the cultural-studies celebration of resistance, ethnomethodology treats ordinary practice as an active, methodical accomplishment. His account of the everyday as "familiar scenes... known in common with others, and with others taken for granted" parallels Berger & Luckmann's "paramount reality" and Upton's habitus.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki that draw on Garfinkel:

• Daily Life as a Phenomenon of Modern Philosophical Discourse
• Culturally 'Doped' or Not? (Conroy) — the "cultural dope"; ethnomethodology vs. critical theory.
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (with Goffman's dramaturgical approach) named as a principal engine of the anthropological turn that "canonized" the everyday: the sociology of everyday life as the inquiry into how people make sense of and construct the social world.