Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel: The Sociologist Who Broke the Rules

In 1954, at a meeting of the American Sociological Association, a young researcher used a word nobody had heard before: ethnomethodology. It sounded like jargon and it was, but it named something real — the idea that ordinary people are not passive carriers of social rules but working sociologists themselves, ceaselessly manufacturing the order they appear merely to inhabit. Harold Garfinkel spent the next fifty-seven years proving it, largely by wrecking the ordinary in order to see what held it up.

Newark, Accounting, and an Unlikely Start

Garfinkel was a furniture dealer's son from Newark, New Jersey, born on 29 October 1917 into a Jewish family that expected him to join the business. He compromised: he studied accounting at the University of Newark, where the courses happened to be taught by Columbia graduate students carrying fashionable theory from uptown. The ledger and the social theory arrived together, and the pairing stuck. Garfinkel would spend his career asking how the books of everyday life get balanced — how, moment by moment, people make their conduct add up.

Before he was a sociologist he was briefly a writer. In 1940 the journal *Opportunity* published his short story "Color Trouble," on the victimization of segregated Black women, drawn from the experience of the civil rights attorney Pauli Murray. It was not an idle detour: his 1942 master's thesis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supervised by Howard W. Odum, examined interracial homicide. The early Garfinkel was already interested in how categories — of race, of guilt, of normality — are applied by real people under pressure, and what happens when they fail.

War, Harvard, and the Quarrel with Parsons

The war interrupted him. Drafted into the Army Air Corps, Garfinkel served as a trainer at a Florida base and, as the fighting ended, was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he met Arlene Steinback, whom he married and who survived him. Afterwards he went to Harvard's newly formed Department of Social Relations and into the orbit of Talcott Parsons, then the most powerful theoretical mind in American sociology. His 1952 dissertation, "The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order," was both homage and mutiny.

Parsons built grand systems and asked what normative structures a society must possess to hold together. Garfinkel turned the question around and asked, flatly, what normative networks actually exist, here, in this room, right now. He also broke with the Parsonian assumption of a single universal rationality, drawing on the phenomenology of Alfred Schütz to argue that the reasoning of everyday life and the reasoning of scientific analysis are different animals, and that sociology had been mistaking one for the other for decades.

He carried this through two years at Princeton on the Organizational Behavior Project, alongside Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Paul Lazarsfeld and John von Neumann; his 1952 report there eventually surfaced in print as *Toward a Sociological Theory of Information* (2008). At the University of Chicago he joined Fred Strodtbeck's American Jury Project, listening to tape recordings of deliberations and interviewing jurors. What he heard became one of his foundational insights: jurors did not reason their way to a decision and then announce it. They used the decision, reflexively, to organize the plausibility of the reasoning that appeared to have produced it.

Breaching: Sociology by Sabotage

In 1954 Garfinkel joined the sociology faculty at UCLA, where he stayed for the rest of his working life, retiring officially in 1987 and continuing as emeritus until his death. There he devised the demonstrations for which he is universally, and to his own irritation, remembered.

The breaching experiments violated the unspoken conventions that make interaction possible, in order to expose them. Students were sent home to behave as polite lodgers in their own families. Conversations were derailed by relentless demands that every casual phrase be defined precisely. The results were reliably explosive — bafflement, then anger, then moral outrage — and the outrage was the finding. Social order, Garfinkel argued, is not a structure sitting behind behaviour but an achievement continuously produced by people personally invested in producing it, who react to its disruption as to an assault. He came to resent the way textbooks made these the centre of his work. They were, he insisted, "tutorial exercises" in ethnomethodology's programme — teaching devices, not the method. The method was harder: sustained, technically exacting study of how competent members do whatever they do.

Indexicality, Reflexivity, Accountability

The three concepts carrying his argument sound forbidding and are in fact simple. Indexicality is the observation that words such as "here," "now" and "me" shift meaning with the situation; Garfinkel's radical move was to extend this to every utterance, making all speech irreducibly local. Reflexivity, in his hands, is not philosophical self-examination but a plain feature of daily life — an action and the situation producing it are mutually determinative, the way a description of a taste and the coffee being tasted constitute each other. Accountability names the endless work by which members make their conduct visibly coherent, planful and methodical, so that anyone can see and report it.

*Studies in Ethnomethodology* (1967), the collection that made his name, gathered these arguments alongside his most contested chapter: the case of Agnes, a transgender woman whose sustained "passing" Garfinkel read as evidence that sex and gender are practical, ongoing accomplishments rather than settled facts — decades before gender studies caught up with him. Later work, notably *Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism* (2002) and *Seeing Sociologically* (2006), pushed further. He also imposed on followers the "unique adequacy requirement": to study a practice, you must first become genuinely competent in it. It separated the committed from the tourists, and kept the school small.

Why Harold Is Called a Genius

The case for Garfinkel rests on a single, very rare cognitive act: he noticed something that was in front of everyone and that no one could see, because seeing it required suspending the entire apparatus of professional sociology. His gift was for the deliberate estrangement of the obvious — for treating a greeting, a queue, a jury room or a laboratory bench as a genuine puzzle rather than as background noise. "We're onto something very big," he told colleagues, and the subsequent history of conversation analysis, workplace studies and human–computer interaction suggests he was right; Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson built an entire discipline on the ground he cleared, and Lucy Suchman's demolition of planning models in artificial intelligence descends directly from it. The American Sociological Association gave him its Cooley-Mead Award in 1995; Nottingham gave him an honorary doctorate in 1996.

The counter-case is serious. His prose is punitively difficult — one memorialist noted that it resists "hasty or schematic reading," a generous way of saying many capable readers cannot get through it. He published little and slowly, and much of his best material was unpublished at his death. Ethnomethodology never consolidated within academic sociology; it remains a respected sect rather than a mainstream. And critics argue that the programme, having shown order is locally accomplished, has trouble saying anything about power, inequality or history. Garfinkel was a genius of attention rather than of system-building — and he professed indifference to system-building on principle, which makes the charge both fair and beside the point.

Legacy

Garfinkel died of congestive heart failure at his Los Angeles home on 21 April 2011. His influence spread far beyond the discipline that never quite absorbed him: into linguistics, gender studies, organization studies, and the design of machines that must cope with human beings. Anne Rawls continues to edit unpublished manuscripts into print, so his bibliography still grows. What survives most durably is a habit of mind — the refusal to take the ordinary for granted, and the conviction that the deepest social facts hide in the least remarkable places.

Achievements

• Held posts at University of California, Los Angeles
• Fields: sociological theory and ethnomethodology