Bio: (1917-2011) American sociologist. Harold Garfinkel received his doctorate in 1952 and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, a direction that developed on the legacy of symbolic interactionism. The term itself comes from the title of Garfinkel's book Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Although half of the texts in this book were published earlier, the year of its publication is mostly taken as the year of the direction's origin. The term itself, as well as the whole theory, refers to the methods that people use in ordinary, everyday life, to create meaning and achieve common sense through the interpretation of these events. Ethnomethodology sought to question the sociological conception of the self, developed by symbolic interactionism.

Garfinkel believes that how individuals cope in everyday situations is identical to the procedures that these individuals use to explain those situations to themselves. Individuals use already existing, common sense knowledge about the same type of situation, to explain, to themselves, the situation in which they currently find themselves. Individuals are, at the same time, actors in situations, but also interpreters of those situations, and the knowledge acquired in these activities is fluid and never complete. Because people have the knowledge and experience of these everyday situations, they take their own competence for granted, that is, they do not think about the way they came to acquire that knowledge. Sociological knowledge itself is a product of common sense knowledge, so the concepts and theories that sociologists create have no priority over other forms of knowledge.

Ethnomethodology in its study starts from several key assumptions. The first is that common sense knowledge is created, above all, through linguistic communication. Another assumption is that in everyday speech one should distinguish between contextually neutral expressions and those whose meaning changes in accordance with the specific context and situation. The third is that the explanation of practical action is always reflexive. The fourth assumption is that purposeful behavior, within a context, should be studied as a practical achievement.

Talcott Parsons was Garfinkel's professor and mentor for his doctoral dissertation, and Parsons' book The Structure of Social Action influenced the further development of Garfinkel's approach. Garfinkel radicalized Parsons' theories of action. According to Garfinkel, the social order is not a simple product of socialization, because the actors are active and reflective about the norms, and create values ​​and meanings in creative ways. The choice of goals, made by the actors, is based on the empirical everyday knowledge available to them. Garfinkel believes that the sociological theory of action must include the actor's own view of an activity. Individuals are constantly striving to establish new rules, when they are in a situation, and ethnomethodology should reveal these implicit rules and the planned nature of everyday life. The actors, while acting, pay attention to the other actors and plan the next moves. If the situation does not go according to their plan, then they strive to repair the damage and restore normalcy. Society consists of reflective social activities that contain a variety of meanings.

In the empirical study of everyday speech, Garfinkel studied how people use the context of the situation they are in to understand what is not explicitly said in a speech, so they can get a full understanding of the message. Studying the queues that form in public places, he found that even such an unstructured situation requires an active and reflective approach. The most famous example of Garfinkel's application of the ethnomethodological approach in empirical research is a case study he conducted in 1967 and represented in the book Studies in Ethnomethodology. He studied an intersex woman named Agnes, who had genitals of both sexes but looked completely feminine on the outside. In her daily life, Agnes managed to "pass" as a woman, although she was constantly at risk of someone discovering that she was an intersex person. Garfinkel concluded that sexual and gender identity is, in essence, a constant endeavor that represents "accomplishment", achieved through practical activities.

Main works

Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967);

Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (2002);

Seeing Sociologically (2005);

Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (2008).