Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was an American sociologist who founded ethnomethodology, the study of how people produce and understand social order in everyday life.

Ethnomethodology: A sociological approach that studies how people use practical methods to produce and recognize social order. Garfinkel founded this approach and developed its central research program.
Breaching experiment: A research exercise that violates an ordinary social expectation to reveal the rules people use to restore intelligibility. Garfinkel used breaches to expose the assumptions sustaining familiar interactions.
Alfred Schutz: An Austrian-American philosopher and sociologist whose phenomenological sociology examined the structures of everyday experience. Schutz’s account of shared knowledge strongly shaped Garfinkel’s questions about ordinary understanding.
Studies in Ethnomethodology: Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 book presenting ethnomethodology through theoretical essays and empirical studies. This collection established his approach and includes several of its best-known investigations.
Harvey Sacks: An American sociologist who founded conversation analysis through the systematic study of recorded interaction. Sacks developed a distinct analytic program from questions Garfinkel helped make prominent.
Indexicality: The dependence of an expression’s meaning on the situation in which it is used. Garfinkel showed how everyday statements rely on shared context rather than fixed meanings.
Crisis experiment: An ethnomethodological exercise that disrupts routine expectations and observes participants’ efforts to repair the resulting confusion. Garfinkel used these disruptions to study how people defend everyday social order.
Talcott Parsons: An American sociologist who developed a major theory of social action and social systems. Garfinkel studied with Parsons and reworked the problem of how social order is achieved.
Agnes (intersex case study): A case study of a transgender woman whose interactions Garfinkel analyzed in a 1967 ethnomethodological paper. Garfinkel used Agnes’s account to examine the practical work involved in sustaining gender identity.
Aaron Cicourel: An American sociologist whose work examined the practical reasoning and language involved in social classification. Cicourel helped extend ethnomethodological concerns into language, institutions, and social knowledge.

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