By
Cole Hippen
Danielle Yates
Kit Mason
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Harold Garfinkel was born in
Newark, New Jersey, on October 29,
1917. His father was a businessman
and hoped that Harold would learn
the trade, but Harold wanted to
attend college.
He attended the University of
Newark beginning in 1935 and
became a student of economics. He
graduated in 1939.
He spent the summer in a Quaker
work camp in rural Georgia where
he was later accepted into the
program with a fellowship and
chose Guy Johnson as his thesis
adviser. He then received a M.A.
From the University of North
Carolina in 1942.
http://ecsocman.edu.ru/images/pubs/2003/12/08/0000138583/i
mage.Garfinkelx202001.jpg
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After serving in WWII he attended Harvard University to
study with Talcott Parsons. While a doctoral studen he
taught for two years at Princeton, and after obtaining his
Ph.D. He taught for two years at Ohio State University
He joined a project researching juries in Wichita, Kansas ,
and in preparing a talk for the 1954 American Sociologiacal
Association meetings he came up with the term
ethnomethodology to describe what fascinated him about
the jury deliberations and social life more generally.
He accepted a position as assistant professor at UCLA,
where he continued to conduct research in the field of
ethnomethodology.
His career at UCLA is a distinguished one as he is now a
professor emeritus and in 1995 he received the Cooley-Mead
award for lifetime contributions to the intellectual and
scientific advancement of sociology and social psychology.
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Ethnomethodology is influenced by
phenomenology, linguistics, anthropology,
symbolic interactionism, and other mainstream
concepts found in sociology. In Studies in
Ethnomethodology (1967) he wrote that his work
had been particularly influenced by Talcott
Parsons, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and
Edmund Husserl.
As Ritzer (2000c) stated, “While Parsons stressed
the importance of abstract categories and
generalizations, Garfinkel was interested in
detailed description.”
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The Structure of Social Action is that all the
carious social sciences essentially deal with
systems of social action. 1. An Actor: The agent
of the act. 2.An end: A future state of affairs
which the actor seeks to bring about by the act.
3. Action: A current situation within which the
actor acts and which he or she seeks to
transform by his or her behavior. 4. Means: A
mode of orientation.
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Shutz concluded that each indicidual carries with
him or hear a “stock of knowledge at hand”
consisting of constructs and categories that are
common sense and of social origin when
interacting with others in the social world.
Branching out from ethnomethodology, Garfinkel
became famous for his “breaching experiments.”
Garfinkel argued , one must “breach” constitutive
expectancies in radical ways, since the natural
attitude guarantees that people assimilate
“strange” into “familiar”, without dismantling the
presuppositions underlying a shared world.
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Ethnomethodology is an approach to
understanding social interaction and is “based on
the assumption that social reality is the reasult of
our agreement to agree with one another.
Ethnomethodology, given its greek roots literally
means the methods of ordianry people that are
used on a daily basis to accomplish their everyday
needs.
Wallace and wolf stated, “If we translate the
“ethno” part of the term as “member” or “folk” or
“people” then ethnomethodology can be defined
as members' methods of making sense of their
social world. Ethnomethodology interest is in how
people make sense of everyday activities.
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Garfinkel believed that life consists of many ordered things
and activities. “Ethnomethodology's fundamental
phenomenon and its standing technical preoccupation in its
studies is to find, collect, specify, and make instrutably
observable the local endogenous production and natural
accountability of immortal familiar society's most ordinary
organizational things in the world, and to provide for them
both and simultaneously as objects and procedurally as
alternate methodologies. The identity of objects and
methodologies is key.”
In other words ethnomethodology is concerned with the
organization of everyday, ordinary life
Ethnomethodology attempts to reveal the subjective nature
of human interaction. It has a microfocus on daily life and
on the thoughts and actions of human behavior.
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“Accounting is the process by which people offer
accounts in order to make sense of the world.
Ethnomethodologist devote a lot of attention to
analyzing peoples accounts, as well as to the ways
in which accounts are offered and accepted (or
rejected) by others.
Garfinkel (1967) stated that “sociologists
distinguish the “product” from the “process”
meanings of a common understanding. As
“product, a common understanding is thought to
consist of a shared agreement on a substantive
matters; as “process” it consists of various
methods whereby something that a person says or
does is recognized to accord with a rule.
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Ethnomethodology is concerned with an
interruption of daily life in order to reveal
standard rules
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In order to reveal rules that are a natural part of
society, Garfinkel believes that we must disrupt the
natural process of reality construction in order to
reveal deep set rules.
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Breaching Experiments
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The breaching experiment is a type of empirical inquiry in which normal
interaction is interrupted
Social reality is violated in order to reveal the methods of reality
construction
This research is based on these foundations:
 Production of social life occurs all the time
 Participants are unaware that they are engaging in such actions
Breaching must be radical because people will naturally assimilate strange
situations into familiar ones, and in order to cause disruption, one must
create a radical enough breach that it cannot be normally constructed
 Individuals attempt to normalize imbalances in the breaching
experiment. Seeking balance is a normal constant and is an attempt at
putting meaning to the world
Breaching experiments can be done in fairly casual settings
 One example is the tic-tac-toe experiment, in which the researcher
places their mark between lines, confusing the subject, who attempts to
rationalize the actions of the researcher
 Breaching experiments will often cause the subjects to become confused,
angry, and upset
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Garfinkel's definition of communication is a means
of clarifying or repairing social problems created
by human communication.
Garfinkel believes that a greater aspect of
communication is what goes unsaid, rather than
what is said
Anticipatory knowledge from previous
interactions guide the conversation
Without this knowledge, conversations would spend all
their time explaining history of interactions
 Language is a tool for interpreting and clarifying social
interactions
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Order over chaos
Rational thinking reinforces need for social
order
Social order is an ongoing process subject to
constant change and even misinterpretation
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Identify is influenced by:
 Internal reflection
 External projection
Degradation ceremonies are public attempts to inflict identity
alteration
They are purposeful attempts at embarrassment rather than
accidental
Status forcing is a planned event in which the subject will know
that they are in for a loss of self credibility
Unplanned embarrassment is different than the degradation
ceremony because it is accidental and unplanned, while still
resulting in a loss of face
 Examples would be Don Imus racial slurs, Bill Clinton's
sexual affair etc…
The degradation ceremony is calculated and would more
include the public backlash at the embarrassment in which the
subject can foresee this and anticipate their own loss of face
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Both event and perpetrator must be removed from the realm of character
and be made to look out of the ordinary
Both event and perpetrator must be placed in a scheme that shows no
preferences were given
The denouncer must identify themselves to all witnesses that during
denunciation the perpetrator is a publicly known person, and not
privately known by the denouncer, clearing possible bias
The denouncer must make the dignity of the values of the group salient
and viewable. The denunciation must be done in the name of the people
The denouncer must arrange to be invested with the right to speak in the
name of the values of the group-the denouncer represents society
The denouncer must be recognized as this societal representor
The denouncer must maintain proper social distance from the accused
perpetrator and witnesses
The denounced person must be ritually separated from a place in the
legitimate order. They must be classified as an outsider
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Talking the convict code in an inmate halfway
house (1974)
Designing a Xerox copier to ensure complaintfree operation by office personnel(1985)
Learning to play jazz piano(1978)
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Belief that quantitative research methods does
not guarantee more objective research study
Renamed his brand of ethnomethodology as
Cognitive Sociology
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Goal: uncover the universal interpretive procedures
that humans use to give meaning to social situations
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Attempted to integrate ethnomethodology with
symbolic interactionism
She focuses on conversation and focuses on the
verbal talking aspect of conversations
Coined the term interactional analysis
She attempts to highlight the importance of the
thought process involved in conversation
People don’t only react to talk, but interpret it.
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He also studies talk
He wants to discover universal forms of
interactions that apply to all conversations
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Conventional sociologists use the everyday
social world as a topic.
Zimmerman, Pollner, Wieder reject the
conventional view and treat the world as a
resource
They are concerned with how members of
society:
 See
 Describe
 Explainin
 Social behavior
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Theoretical perspective that seeks to understand
human behavior by examining the methods that
people employ to make sense of the world
Study of the everyday practices of people
Not considered mainstream sociology
Has not produced “laws” of general behavior
Greatest contribution is conversation analysis
Degradation ceremony research relevant
Ignores macrostructural factors in microinteractions