Harold Garfinkel

The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology

Dirk vom Lehn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315427638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a concise intellectual biography of Harold Garfinkel, a key figure in 20th-century social science. Garfinkel is practically synonymous with ethnomethodology, an approach that since the 1960s has led to major analytic and methodological developments in sociology and other disciplines. This introduction to Garfinkel explores how he developed ethnomethodology under the influence of Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz, situates it within sociology generally, and demonstrates its important influence on recent developments in the discipline, particularly the sociology of science and technology, gender studies, organization studies, and the computer sciences. The book will be of wide interest in the social sciences and a useful supplement to courses on intellectual history and methodology.

17Chapter 1
Sociology as a “Love Affair”

Harold Garfinkel was born on October 29, 1917 in Newark, New Jersey. The early 1920s were dominated by the First World War, ethnic tensions, and economic uncertainty. His father, Abraham Garfinkel, was a furniture trader in the large Jewish community of Newark, which, at that time, was characterized by a large number of immigrants who were concerned about their social and economic well-being. Like the rest of the USA, the world economic crisis of the 1920s hit this community badly and increased social and economic uncertainty among people. These developments also affected Garfinkel’s upbringing and life-experience as a young person. From an early age onward, Garfinkel experienced what it meant to live in a marginal community with people, “who were struggling not only to find a place in American society but to formulate that place in their own terms” (Rawls 2002: 9). An interest in social issues therefore came naturally to him.

When in 1935, at the age of seventeen, Garfinkel proposed that he would like to study at university, his father was concerned that his son should learn a trade that could earn him a living (Rawls 2003a: 18). When the matter of the young Garfinkel’s career was discussed in the family, a non-Jewish in-law, who was seen as knowledgeable regarding job prospects outside the Newark Jewish community, was asked for advice. He spoke with Garfinkel Junior, who, at the time had an interest in becoming a surgeon, a profession that, in the view of the in-law, was like “driving taxicabs”; it was the Depression (Rawls 2003a: 11). A compromise was found and Garfinkel agreed to work in his father’s business in the evenings, while during the day he attended an unaccredited program at the University of Newark (today known as the Newark Campus of Rutgers University), majoring in business and accounting. Here, Garfinkel was introduced to the “theory of accounting” 18and double-entry bookkeeping. He learned that the placing of items in the columns of accounts not only constructs accounts, but also is a practice that is accountable to superiors and other agencies (Rawls 2002: 10). Later, Garfinkel considered his studies of accounting and bookkeeping as being more important for his later work on accounts than his studies of C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke’s social theories of accounts (ibid.).

As suggested by Rawls (2003a: 19), there are quite obvious connections between the approach to accounting that Garfinkel was taught at the University of Newark and his later work. As Garfinkel developed as a sociologist, he related the accounting knowledge he had acquired at Newark and in his father’s business to the analysis of everyday interaction. Just as the accountant is accountable for his work, the everyday actor is accountable for her/his action. Everyday actions are accounts and accountable just like the inputting of data by accountants; they are “observable-and-reportable” (Garfinkel 1967c: 1) actions that actors are accountable for, because they are visible as the producers of the action.¹ In later chapters, I return to Garfinkel’s concepts of account and accounting as practical action and their implications for Garfinkel’s sociology.

At the University of Newark, Garfinkel developed friendships with students and tutors who became important for his later career (Rawls 2002: 11). They included Melvin Tumin (later an anthropologist at Princeton), Herbert McClosky (later a political scientist at Berkeley), and Seymour Sarason (later a psychiatrist at Yale University). He also made the acquaintance of Philip Selznick (later a sociologist at UCLA) and Paul Lazarsfeld, who taught a course on social statistics at the University of Newark and, since the 1940s, has become famous for the foundation of what today would be called scientific sociology and empirical research methods. In discussion with his fellow students and friends, Garfinkel developed an interest in sociology and philosophy (Rawls 2002: 11).

After graduating from the University of Newark in 1939, Garfinkel attended a Quaker work camp in Georgia, and used the time to decide 19about his future. He discussed possibilities with Morris Mitchell, from the Columbia School of Education, who recommended the sociology department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to him. In Chapel Hill, Howard Odum had founded the Department of Sociology in 1920 and the Institute for Research in Social Science in 1924 (Brazil 1988). I return to Garfinkel’s studies at Odum’s Institute in North Carolina and to his master’s thesis in 1942, his first formal sociological study, in later chapters.

In the summer of 1939, Garfinkel purchased Talcott Parsons’ classic two-volume book The Structure of Social Action (1937). His reading of this book immediately drew him to sociology, and he became involved in sociological debates and thinking: “According to Garfinkel it was a ’love affair’ from the beginning” (Rawls 2002: 13). At the time, sociology was a discipline that included a range of theories and methods. Odum’s teaching in Chapel Hill highlighted the social action theory of Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas, as well as the pragmatist theories of action and interaction developed by Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead.

Garfinkel pursued his studies in sociology and developed an interest in studies of social justice and the social organization of everyday life. This emerging interest in sociology is reflected in his prizewinning short story entitled “Color Trouble” (Garfinkel 1940) that he wrote in the late 1930s. The story describes how passengers on a public bus negotiate the public order defined by racial segregation with the bus driver and police. As the passengers, driver, and police officers discuss and challenge the reasoning for the public order, they make intelligible the foundation of the social order on the bus.

At this point, Garfinkel had not yet developed a sociological vocabulary to explain the events on the bus. He did not yet talk of a “pluralism of worlds” (Garfinkel 1952: 97) or of “accounts” (Garfinkel 1967a) that later defined some of his studies (Doubt 1989; Rawls 2013). I return to the events Garfinkel described in this short story and their relevance to his sociology in more detail in the next chapter, “Hitchhiking to Sociology.”

20Following the completion of his MA thesis at North Carolina in 1942, Garfinkel joined the US Air Force and undertook a field study concerning “the effects of temporary military industry on the social organization of the town of Bastrop Texas” (Rawls 2008b: 6) for the sociologist Wilbert Moore (1914–1987), whom he met again later in his career, in the early 1950s. Having joined the US Air Force, Garfinkel was given the task of training soldiers on a golf course on Miami Beach in preparation for tank combat in Europe (Rawls 2002: 14–15).

In 1946, after the war, Garfinkel moved to Harvard and began his studies for a PhD with Talcott Parsons and in 1952 completed his dissertation, The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order (Rawls 2002: 15). In this dissertation he critically assessed Parsons’ social theory by drawing on Alfred Schutz’s (1967b [1932]) phenomenological analysis. While undertaking his studies, Garfinkel regularly met with Schutz and also with Aron Gurwitsch in New York to discuss phenomenological questions and their relevance to sociology (Barber 2004; Psathas 2004; Rawls 2002). The influence of these discussions on Garfinkel’s sociological thinking is clearly visible throughout his work. He used Schutz and Gurwitsch’s phenomenological analyses to develop a novel approach to explore social order. His approach was not determined by phenomenology, but he creatively used the phenomenological focus on the actor’s point of view to create a sociological attitude to analyze the social world that later he called ethnomethodology.

The development of Garfinkel’s sociological attitude became apparent in a manuscript that Anne Rawls recently published under the title, Seeing Sociologically (Garfinkel 2006 [1948]). In this book, Garfinkel argued for the need to adopt this particular sociological attitude to enable the analysis of how actors in the natural attitude produce and experience social order (Garfinkel 2006 [1948]: 127–129). Here, he drew on Alfred Schutz (1945b), who had developed the concept of natural attitude to understand how an actor in ordinary circumstances acts in and upon, and experiences the everyday world. In later chapters, in particular when discussing Seeing Sociologically and Garfinkel’s PhD dissertation, I examine how Schutz’s concept of natural attitude 21provided Garfinkel with the basis for the development of the sociological attitude that underpins ethnomethodology. I explore how Garfinkel used Schutz’s interpretation of phenomenology in his PhD dissertation to develop an independent sociological perspective that differed from that of his doctoral advisor, Talcott Parsons.

While Garfinkel studied for his PhD, he taught for two years at Princeton University (New Jersey) and, in 1952, together with Richard Snyder and Wilbert Moore, organized a conference entitled, “Problems in Model Construction in the Social Sciences” (Rawls 2003a: 23). The theme of the conference arose from the context of a project funded by the Ford Foundation and it was attended by major social scientists of the time, including Talcott Parsons, Paul Lazarsfeld, Herbert Simon, Kenneth Burke, Alfred Schutz, and Kurt Wolff. During his time at Princeton, Garfinkel also worked on various manuscripts, some of which were recently published by Anne Rawls under the title, Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (Garfinkel 2008).

Meeting Kurt Wolff at the Princeton conference may well have helped Garfinkel a few years later to find a job at the University of Ohio, where Wolff was directing a research project concerned with leadership in organizations. Having received his PhD from Harvard, Garfinkel joined Wolff in Ohio for a two-year position (Rawls 2003a: 23). However, when this project was curtailed due to budget cuts, his friend Fred Strodtbeck, a classmate from Harvard, asked Garfinkel to join him and Saul Mendlovitz at the University of Wichita (Kansas) to work on a research project that has become known as the “Jury Project” (Kalven 1966; Rawls 2003a: 23). As part of the project, Garfinkel studied the organization of jury deliberations in courts and analyzed audio-recordings of jury deliberations that Strodtbeck had produced as data for the project. In summer 1954, Garfinkel and his colleagues Strodtbeck and Mendlovitz presented parts of their research at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Here, they used for the first time the term ethnomethods to describe actions that become intelligible as “methods” used by a particular group (“ethnos”), i.e., jury members, because the group members 22produce the actions in ways jury members do for their practical purposes.

In 1954, following the ASA conference, Garfinkel was once again looking for work and a more permanent position. His subsequent move to UCLA, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, was supported by his friends Philip Selznick (1919–2010) and Melvin Tumin (1919–1994), whom he had first met while studying at Newark. By then Selznick had become an influential sociologist at UCLA and had moved to UC Berkeley in 1952, while Tumin developed his career at Princeton. They both persuaded the then chair of the Department of Sociology at UCLA to hire Garfinkel in 1954 as an Assistant Professor (Rawls 2003: 24).

One of the best known of Garfinkel’s colleagues, Harvey Sacks (1935–1975), invented the study of conversation (Silverman 1998) and together with Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff further developed what now is known as conversation analysis (Sacks 1992; Schegloff 1989, 2007a). Sacks studied for a bachelor’s degree at Columbia College and after its completion in 1955 was awarded a scholarship at Yale Law School, where in 1959 he earned an undergraduate law degree (LLB). As he studied the law, he became interested in “how the law as an institution worked” rather “than in making it work as an attorney himself” (Schegloff 1992: xii-xiii). With this intellectual interest, Sacks enrolled in Political Science at MIT and worked as a research assistant in the Department of Economics and Social Science. He attended seminars by Noam Chomsky at MIT and advanced his interests in how decisions are made in judicial processes and how to adequately describe these processes sociologically (Silverman 1998). Through this interest he was spurred to attend a seminar given by Talcott Parsons in Cambridge, where he met Garfinkel, who was spending a sabbatical at Harvard (1959) (Schegloff 1992: xiii).

Sacks and Garfinkel liked each other and developed an intellectual relationship that lasted until Sacks’ premature death in 1975 (Schegloff 1992: xiii). They discussed questions of social order, judicial processes, and sociological descriptions that were at the heart of Garfinkel’s current 23and early studies. Sacks did not see how he could effectively pursue these questions at MIT and decided to move to Berkeley and study sociology. He made this decision in light of his discussions with Garfinkel and on the advice of Harold Lasswell (1902–1978), a professor of law with expertise in political science and communications theory, whom he knew from his studies at Yale (Schegloff 1992: xiii).

In 1960, Sacks moved to Berkeley where he continued to pursue his interest in judicial processes and later became the first graduate fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Society that Philip Selznick founded and chaired from 1961 to 1972. His PhD advisor, however, was not Selznick, but Erving Goffman, whose influence on Sacks’ intellectual development is visible in publications such as “Notes on police assessment of moral character” (Sacks 1972) and in many of his lectures (Silverman 1998: 32–36). Nevertheless, Garfinkel remained a key influence on Sacks’ academic work and he stayed in close contact with him throughout his doctoral project. He invited Garfinkel to Berkeley where he, as well as other ethnomethodologists like Egon Bittner (1921–2011) and Aaron Cicourel, talked at the Graduate Sociology Club. Sacks also attended conferences at UCLA organized by Garfinkel and his colleague Edward Rose of the University of Colorado and read and privately circulated Garfinkel’s then still-unpublished manuscripts among graduate students in sociology (Schegloff 1992: xiv-xv).

Garfinkel’s manuscripts provided Sacks and his colleagues at Berkeley with a wealth of material to discuss (Schegloff 1992). These colleagues included David Sudnow, who studied the organization of dying in a hospital and also became well known for his research on piano playing (Sudnow 1967, 1979); Roy Turner, who published the first collection of ethnomethodological articles (Turner 1974); Emanuel Schegloff, who later cooperated with Sacks and Gail Jefferson on the development of conversational analysis², and others. In 1963/64, Garfinkel encouraged Sacks to move to UCLA and take up a position as Acting Assistant Professor of Sociology (Schegloff 1992: xv). Here, they cooperated on a research project as Fellows at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide in Los Angeles, under the sponsorship of its 24director, Edwin Shneidman (Schegloff 1992: xv). As part of the project, Sacks examined short fragments of telephone conversations in great detail. This analysis of calls to the Suicide Prevention Center formed the basis of Sacks’ doctoral research and can be regarded as the origin of conversation analysis (Sacks 1966; Schegloff 1992).

At the same time, Garfinkel worked on at least two book manuscripts that remain unpublished to the present day. The first of these is Parsons’ Primer, an examination of Parsons’ investigation of the problem of social order. The manuscript reflected Garfinkel’s admiration for the work of his doctoral advisor and dismissed critiques of Parsons’ theory as trivial and irrelevant. However, it also revealed that Garfinkel, now forty-three years old, was not entirely in agreement with Parsons. As Rawls (2013: 310) suggests, Garfinkel criticized Parsons for developing a theory of social action from the actor’s point of view that loses both the interaction and the actor.

The second unpublished manuscript (1962) is a collection of articles entitled Some Sociological Methods for Making Everyday Activities Observable. It comprises eighteen chapters that discussed theoretical, methodological, and empirical questions (Schegloff 1999). Some of the chapters from this manuscript were later published in academic journals and in Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967a). A number of these chapters, as well as different versions of Parsons’ Primer, circulate as gray, still unpublished literature among ethnomethodologists.³

In 1967 Garfinkel published Studies in Ethnomethodology, the book that ever since has defined ethnomethodology. While some of the chapters in this book had largely been ignored when they were published in academic journals, their publication in Studies stimulated vigorous, sometimes hostile debates at conferences and workshops (Coser 1975; Gellner 1975; Goldthorpe 1973), as well as a large number of book reviews in major journals (Coleman, Bruyn, and Wallace 1968; Busfield 1968; Swanson, Wallace, and Coleman 1968; Wilkins 1968). While some berated Garfinkel as a “charlatan” and leader of a sect (Coser 1975),⁴ others considered ethnomethodology to be in intellectual 25opposition to Parsons’ functionalism and the growth of quantitative empirical social research. This polarization of ethnomethodology and “traditional” or “conventional” sociology was reinforced by the sometimes polemical tone Garfinkel and his colleagues used in some of their publications (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). Up to the present day, textbooks of sociology consider ethnomethodology as an important strand within the discipline, but see Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists as marginal and often characterize ethnomethodology inadequately, by arguing that Garfinkel ignores sociological theory. In later chapters of this book, I discuss the relationship of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology to “traditional” sociological theories and methods.

In the 1970s, Garfinkel spent sabbaticals in Manchester (1973), Stanford (1975/76), and Oxford (1979/80).⁵ During his sabbaticals he further developed his approach to teaching and research in sociology and became interested in studying the work practices of scientists. Together with Michael Lynch and Eric Livingstone, Garfinkel established the ethnomethodological studies of science that reveal the social production of scientific discoveries (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981; Lynch, Garfinkel, and Livingston 1983). Drawing on his analysis of the work of scientists, Garfinkel also developed a further interest in the sociology of work and edited a book entitled Ethnomethodological Studies of Work (Garfinkel 1986). This volume included an article that he had previously published with Harvey Sacks (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970) and contributions by some of his studen...