Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was an American sociologist whose creation of ethnomethodology significantly reshaped philosophical understandings of social order, normativity, and practical reasoning. Trained at Harvard under Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel rejected abstract, top‑down models of society in favor of close, empirical attention to how people in everyday life make sense of one another. His famous breaching experiments and detailed analyses of talk‑in‑interaction showed that what philosophers call “social facts” and “norms” are not pre‑given structures but fragile, ongoing accomplishments of ordinary actors. In his major work, "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (1967), Garfinkel argued that members of society are skilled practical theorists who use background knowledge and methods to produce intelligible action. Drawing deeply on phenomenology (Husserl, Schutz) while engaging with analytic concerns about rule‑following and meaning, he insisted that social order is indexical, situated, and reflexively accountable. His later studies of work and technology anticipated practice‑oriented approaches in philosophy of science and science and technology studies. Though positioned within sociology, Garfinkel’s meticulous focus on everyday methods of reasoning, language use, and cooperation made him a central figure for philosophers of social science, social ontology, and ordinary language, influencing conversation analysis, ethnomethodological studies of science, and contemporary practice theory.
At a Glance
- Field
- Thinker
- Born
- 1917-10-29 — Newark, New Jersey, United States
- Died
- 2011-04-21 — Los Angeles, California, United StatesCause: Natural causes (age-related)
- Active In
- United States, North America
- Interests
- EthnomethodologySocial orderEveryday practicesAccountability and reflexivityMethodology of the social sciencesInteraction and language use
Social order is not a pre‑given structure or set of external norms, but an ongoing, locally organized accomplishment of ordinary members’ methods for making actions intelligible, accountable, and mutually recognizable in situ.
Studies in Ethnomethodology
Composed: Early 1960s–1967
Ethnomethodological Studies of Work
Composed: 1970s–1986
Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action
Composed: 1950s lectures, published 2006
Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism
Composed: 1970s–1990s, published 2002
A Conception of, and Experiments with, 'Trust'
Composed: early 1960s–1963
"Ethnomethodology's fundamental phenomenon is the 'seen but unnoticed' background features of everyday scenes."— Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967.
He defines the central focus of ethnomethodology as the routine, taken‑for‑granted features of ordinary life that actors normally do not thematize but rely upon to produce social order.
"Members are not merely judgmental dopes; they are skillful and practical reasoners."— Paraphrased from Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967.
Garfinkel rejects models that treat ordinary actors as passive rule‑followers, emphasizing instead their inventive, competent methods for making sense of situations.
"Social facts are accomplishments of members' procedures for making activities observable‑and‑reportable, i.e., accountable."— Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism, 2002.
Here he recasts Durkheim’s idea of social facts as things by insisting that they are ongoing, methodic accomplishments rendered visible and describable through members’ own practices.
"Indexical expressions are not defects to be eliminated but essential resources of practical action and reasoning."— Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967.
Contrary to approaches that treat context‑dependence as a problem for clarity, he argues that indexicality is a constitutive feature of language in use and central to social order.
"For ethnomethodology, the problem is not to explain social order by theories, but to discover how members do social order in and as their everyday affairs."— Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism, 2002.
He summarizes the ethnomethodological shift from theory‑driven explanation to empirical study of the practices through which social reality is constituted.
Formative Years and Pragmatic Sensibilities (1917–1945)
Garfinkel’s early life in a small family business during the Great Depression fostered a sensitivity to mundane problem‑solving and practical reasoning. During his undergraduate and wartime years he became interested in social psychology and pragmatist themes about action and meaning, laying the groundwork for his later focus on ordinary practices rather than abstract structures.
Harvard Training and Critique of Functionalism (1945–1954)
At Harvard, working with Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel absorbed structural‑functional theory but grew critical of its reliance on macro‑level norms and stable value systems. Influenced by phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz) and by empirical case studies in law and juries, he began to formulate the idea that social order is an ongoing achievement of members’ methods rather than an imposed structure.
Founding Ethnomethodology at UCLA (1954–late 1960s)
After joining UCLA, Garfinkel developed ethnomethodology through seminars, experiments, and collaborative studies. He introduced breaching experiments and analyses of everyday conversations, culminating in "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (1967). This phase defines his core philosophical stance: that social facts are locally produced, indexical accomplishments made observable and reportable by members themselves.
Collaboration with Conversation Analysis (late 1960s–1970s)
Working alongside Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, Garfinkel contributed to the emergence of conversation analysis. Detailed examination of turn‑taking, repair, and sequence organization provided strong empirical support for his claims about reflexivity and accountability, and intersected with philosophical concerns about language, meaning, and rule‑governed practice.
Studies of Work, Technologies, and Science (1980s–2011)
In his later career Garfinkel focused on “studies of work,” including scientific, legal, and technical practices. These hybrid studies of work and technologies illuminated how formal systems (e.g., mathematical models, software, legal rules) depend on embodied, local methods. This phase greatly influenced practice‑oriented philosophy of science and science and technology studies by foregrounding the situated, methodic character of expert reasoning.
1. Introduction
Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) is widely regarded as the founder of ethnomethodology, a research program that investigates how ordinary people, in the course of everyday life, produce and recognize social order. Working largely within sociology but drawing on phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language, he redirected attention from abstract structures and macro‑systems to the fine‑grained practices through which actors make actions intelligible.
Garfinkel’s central concern was how what social theorists call “social facts”, norms, and institutions come to be experienced as real, stable, and binding. Rather than treating these as pre‑existing entities that simply constrain individuals, he examined the methods by which members of society display, interpret, and repair conduct so that it counts as following a rule, enacting a norm, or participating in an institution. This shift has been viewed as both a sociological innovation and a substantial intervention in social ontology and the methodology of the social sciences.
His work is best known through Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), which introduced notions such as indexicality, reflexivity, and accountability as inherent features of social action. Garfinkel’s analyses of conversation, juries, and experimental “breaches” of everyday expectations demonstrated how fragile and yet resilient ordinary social order is.
Subsequent collaborations, especially with Harvey Sacks and colleagues in conversation analysis, and later studies of work and technology, extended these insights into detailed empirical programs. Across these domains, Garfinkel’s ideas have influenced sociology, linguistics, philosophy of social science, and science and technology studies, while also provoking ongoing debates about theory, method, and the nature of explanation in the social sciences.
2. Life and Historical Context
2.1 Early Life and Education
Harold Garfinkel was born on 29 October 1917 in Newark, New Jersey, into a Jewish immigrant family that operated a small shop. Commentators often connect his later interest in mundane competences to these early experiences with practical problem‑solving and customer interaction, though such links remain interpretive rather than demonstrably causal.
He studied at the University of Newark and later pursued graduate work in sociology and social psychology. During World War II he was involved in administrative and research roles related to wartime mobilization, an experience that acquainted him with organizational routines and practical reasoning in bureaucratic settings.
From 1945 he studied at Harvard University, completing his PhD in sociology in 1948 under Talcott Parsons. This placed him at a major center of structural‑functionalism, then a dominant framework in American sociology.
2.2 Academic Career and Institutional Setting
In 1954 Garfinkel joined the sociology department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he remained for most of his career. UCLA provided both relative intellectual autonomy and a base for graduate seminars that became crucial sites for the development of ethnomethodology.
The postwar expansion of American higher education, the growth of survey research, and the prestige of quantitative “theory‑testing” sociology formed the backdrop against which Garfinkel’s methodologically heterodox program emerged. His insistence on detailed, qualitative analysis of naturally occurring activities contrasted with then‑prevailing ideals of variable‑based explanation.
2.3 Broader Intellectual Context
Garfinkel worked in an era marked by:
| Context | Relevance for Garfinkel |
|---|---|
| Dominance of structural‑functionalism | Provided the primary target for his alternative account of social order. |
| Influence of phenomenology (Husserl, Schutz) | Offered conceptual resources for examining lived experience and the “lifeworld.” |
| Rise of analytic philosophy of language | Paralleled his focus on rule‑following, indexicality, and ordinary language. |
These currents situated Garfinkel at the intersection of sociology, phenomenology, and analytic concerns about meaning and rules, shaping both the content and reception of his work.
3. Intellectual Development
3.1 Formative Pragmatic Sensibilities
Commentators often describe Garfinkel’s early intellectual orientation as marked by pragmatist themes. His exposure to everyday problem‑solving in family commerce and wartime organizational work appears to have fostered an interest in how people “get things done” together. Although he did not identify as a classical pragmatist, his later emphasis on practice, action, and situated reasoning resonates with this background.
3.2 Harvard and the Critique of Functionalism
At Harvard, Garfinkel absorbed Talcott Parsons’s structural‑functionalism, which stressed shared norms and value systems as the basis of social order. Garfinkel’s dissertation research on juries, however, led him to question explanations that posited macro‑norms without examining how participants themselves made verdicts accountable and legitimate.
Influenced strongly by Alfred Schutz, he drew on phenomenology to refocus attention on the lifeworld and actors’ stocks of knowledge. This period consolidated his conviction that social theory must address the methods by which actors produce a sense of order, rather than presuppose that order as a starting point.
3.3 Founding Ethnomethodology at UCLA
After moving to UCLA, Garfinkel developed ethnomethodology through intensive seminars and empirical projects. Early in this phase he introduced breaching experiments and detailed analyses of everyday conversations, crystallizing the idea that social order is continuously accomplished through members’ methods.
The 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology marked the public articulation of this program. Many scholars view this as a decisive break with mainstream sociology; others see it as a radicalization of questions already present in Weberian interpretive sociology and Schutz’s phenomenology.
3.4 Later Extensions: Conversation and Work
From the late 1960s through the 1970s, collaboration with Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson contributed to the emerging field of conversation analysis, deepening Garfinkel’s interest in the fine‑grained organization of talk‑in‑interaction.
In the 1980s and beyond, he turned increasingly to “studies of work” and “hybrid studies of work and technologies,” examining scientific, legal, and technical practices. This phase extended ethnomethodology into domains later associated with science and technology studies and practice theory, while maintaining his long‑standing focus on members’ methods.
4. Major Works
4.1 Overview of Principal Publications
| Work | Period / Publication | Main Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Studies in Ethnomethodology | Early 1960s; pub. 1967 | Foundational essays on members’ methods, indexicality, breaching experiments, and everyday order. |
| A Conception of, and Experiments with, “Trust” | c. 1963 | Presentation of breaching experiments to investigate trust and the fragility of taken‑for‑granted norms. |
| Ethnomethodological Studies of Work | 1970s–1986; pub. 1986 | Empirical studies of professional and technical work, co‑authored with various collaborators. |
| Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism | 1970s–1990s; pub. 2002 | Systematic statement of the ethnomethodological program and its Durkheimian inspiration. |
| Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action | Lectures 1950s; pub. 2006 | Early lectures outlining themes later developed in ethnomethodology. |
4.2 Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967)
This collection is generally regarded as Garfinkel’s seminal work. It includes essays on juries, common‑sense knowledge, the documentary method of interpretation, and the organization of everyday activities. The book introduces central concepts such as ethnomethodology, indexical expressions, and accountability, and reports the famous breaching experiments.
“Ethnomethodology's fundamental phenomenon is the ‘seen but unnoticed’ background features of everyday scenes.”
— Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology
4.3 Studies of Work and Later Programmatic Texts
Ethnomethodological Studies of Work gathers investigations of activities such as medical work, airline operations, and scientific practice. These studies emphasise the situated, methodic character of expert reasoning.
Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism offers a retrospective and programmatic account. It reinterprets Durkheim’s dictum that “social facts are things” by arguing that they are ongoing accomplishments rendered observable and reportable through members’ procedures.
Seeing Sociologically presents early lectures in which Garfinkel works out how routine practices underpin sociological phenomena, revealing continuities across his career.
5. Core Ideas and Theoretical Framework
5.1 Ethnomethodology and Members’ Methods
At the core of Garfinkel’s framework is ethnomethodology, defined as the study of the methods (“ethno‑methods”) that ordinary members use to produce, recognize, and sustain social order. Instead of beginning with theoretical constructs such as “norms” or “structures,” ethnomethodology examines how participants themselves make activities intelligible and describable.
5.2 Indexicality
Indexicality refers to the inherent context‑dependence of expressions and actions. For Garfinkel, meanings are inseparable from the local circumstances and shared background knowledge in which they are used. He opposed idealizations that treat context‑free formulations as the standard of meaning, arguing that real social practices rely on indexical expressions as essential resources.
5.3 Reflexivity
Garfinkel’s notion of reflexivity (distinct from later, more psychological uses of the term) designates how actions and accounts both draw upon and simultaneously constitute the social order they describe. For example, describing a meeting as “orderly” uses existing expectations of order while also contributing to the meeting’s being treated as orderly. This circularity is seen as a structural feature of action, not a defect.
5.4 Accountability
Accountability names the property of actions being organized so that they are observable and reportable. Members design conduct in ways that allow others to recognize “what is going on” and to offer descriptions, explanations, or criticisms. Ethnomethodologists treat these member‑produced accounts as primary data for understanding how social facts are accomplished.
5.5 Social Order as Accomplishment
Bringing these ideas together, Garfinkel’s framework portrays social order as an ongoing, locally organized accomplishment rather than a pre‑given structure. Proponents emphasize that this reconceptualization shifts theoretical attention from external constraints to the situated, methodic practices through which norms, rules, and institutions become operative in everyday life.
6. Methodology and Research Practices
6.1 Orientation to Data
Garfinkel advocated intensive study of naturally occurring activities, such as conversations, institutional encounters, or work settings. Rather than imposing external coding schemes, researchers are encouraged to discover how participants themselves categorize and organize events.
He emphasized detailed records—audio, video, transcripts, and fieldnotes—allowing close analysis of sequential organization and practical reasoning.
6.2 Breaching Experiments
One distinctive methodological innovation is the breaching experiment, in which researchers deliberately violate taken‑for‑granted norms to reveal the ordinarily invisible rules that sustain interaction. Examples include treating family members as strangers or asking for clarification of obviously understood remarks.
“The operations that sustain the normal appear most clearly when they are threatened or violated.”
— Paraphrased from Garfinkel, A Conception of, and Experiments with, “Trust”
Proponents view these experiments as powerful demonstrations of the fragility and repair of social order; critics have raised ethical questions and doubts about their generalizability.
6.3 Ethnomethodological Indifference
Garfinkel recommended “ethnomethodological indifference”: a principled stance of bracketing conventional sociological explanations, moral evaluations, and policy concerns in order to focus on members’ methods. The aim is not to correct or improve practices but to describe how they are accomplished.
6.4 Analytical Practices
Ethnomethodological analysis often involves:
- Repeated, collaborative inspection of recordings or transcripts.
- Attention to sequence, turn‑taking, and repair in interaction.
- Tracing how participants display their understandings moment by moment.
This approach overlaps with, but is not identical to, conversation analysis, which some see as a specialization of ethnomethodology and others treat as a distinct methodology.
6.5 Relation to Conventional Methods
Garfinkel’s stance toward surveys, experiments, and variable analysis was ambivalent. He did not reject them outright but argued that their use presupposes members’ methods for filling out forms, following instructions, and treating instruments as meaningful. His research practices aimed to make these background competences an explicit topic of inquiry.
7. Key Contributions to Philosophy
7.1 Social Ontology and the Nature of Social Facts
Garfinkel’s reconceptualization of social facts as accomplishments of members’ procedures has been influential in practice‑based social ontology. Rather than treating norms, institutions, or roles as fixed structures, his work highlights how they are produced, recognized, and sustained in situated interaction. Philosophers influenced by this view emphasize the primacy of practices in constituting social reality.
7.2 Rule‑Following and Ordinary Language
In dialogue—explicit and implicit—with Wittgensteinian concerns, Garfinkel contributed to debates on rule‑following. His analyses suggest that rules are not self‑interpreting schemas but depend on members’ situated methods for applying them in particular cases. This has been used to support accounts of meaning grounded in interactional practice and to question sharp distinctions between “following a rule” and “merely acting in accordance with” it.
7.3 Indexicality and Context‑Dependence
Philosophically, Garfinkel’s treatment of indexicality challenges ideals of fully context‑independent meaning. By arguing that indexical expressions are not defects but essential resources, he provided empirical grounding for positions that accord a central role to context, background knowledge, and presuppositions in semantics and pragmatics.
7.4 Reflexivity and Self‑Constitution of Order
His notion of reflexivity—whereby actions both rely on and constitute social order—has informed philosophical discussions of normativity and practical reasoning. Some accounts of self‑referential systems, institutional facts, and the circularity of justification draw on or parallel this idea.
7.5 Methodology of the Social Sciences
Garfinkel’s insistence that social science should study members’ methods rather than impose external theoretical constructs has been interpreted as a significant contribution to the philosophy of social science. It raises questions about explanation versus description, the status of lay versus expert knowledge, and the possibility of theory‑neutral observation. Supporters see ethnomethodology as an alternative paradigm; critics view it as overly restrictive or descriptivist.
8. Influence on Sociology and Conversation Analysis
8.1 Reorientation of Sociological Inquiry
Within sociology, Garfinkel’s work contributed to a shift from macro‑structural models toward interactional and micro‑sociological approaches. His emphasis on everyday practices influenced fields such as symbolic interactionism, studies of deviance, and organizational sociology, though relationships between these traditions remain debated.
Some sociologists view ethnomethodology as a radical critique of mainstream sociology’s reliance on variables and statistical modeling; others consider it a complementary, qualitatively oriented perspective.
8.2 Conversation Analysis
Garfinkel played a formative role in the emergence of conversation analysis (CA), particularly through his support for Harvey Sacks and collaboration with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. CA developed systematic procedures for analyzing turn‑taking, sequence organization, repair, and action formation in talk‑in‑interaction.
| Aspect | Ethnomethodology | Conversation Analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Members’ methods in any activity | Organization of talk‑in‑interaction |
| Typical data | Work practices, institutions, everyday settings | Audio/video recordings of conversations |
| Relation | Broader program | Often seen as a specialized branch or allied field |
Some practitioners emphasize CA’s independence and its own methodological canons; others stress its grounding in ethnomethodological principles of accountability and sequential analysis.
8.3 Institutional and Subdisciplinary Impact
Garfinkel’s seminars at UCLA attracted students who carried ethnomethodological and CA approaches into various subfields: medical sociology, law and society, education, and organizational studies. His influence can be seen in detailed studies of courtroom interaction, doctor‑patient consultations, classroom talk, and bureaucratic procedures.
Debates persist over the extent to which ethnomethodology should engage with conventional theoretical questions (e.g., inequality, power) versus remaining focused on members’ methods. Nonetheless, its impact on sociological attention to interactional detail and the organization of everyday life is widely acknowledged.
9. Impact on Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies
9.1 Studies of Scientific and Technical Work
From the 1970s onward, Garfinkel’s studies of work examined how scientists, engineers, and other professionals accomplish their tasks through situated practices. Analyses of laboratory work, mathematical modeling, and technical troubleshooting highlighted the interplay between formal representations and embodied, local methods.
These investigations showed how ostensibly abstract operations—such as applying a formula or reading an instrument—depend on practical know‑how, shared repertoires, and interactional coordination.
9.2 Influence on Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Garfinkel’s approach influenced early laboratory ethnographies and ethnomethodological studies of science, such as those by Michael Lynch and colleagues. These works contributed to STS by emphasizing:
- The local, contingent character of scientific practice.
- The role of inscriptions, instruments, and artifacts in organizing work.
- The accountability and reflexivity of scientific descriptions.
Some STS scholars adopted ethnomethodological principles directly; others drew selectively on its emphasis on practice and interaction while incorporating broader theoretical frameworks (e.g., actor‑network theory, constructivist epistemology).
9.3 Practice‑Oriented Philosophy of Science
In philosophy of science, Garfinkel’s focus on practice over theory has been linked to practice‑based accounts that foreground experimentation, modeling, and material engagement rather than solely logical structure. His work has been cited in discussions about how scientific reasoning is embedded in work routines and technological infrastructures.
Proponents argue that ethnomethodological studies provide fine‑grained empirical material for rethinking concepts such as explanation, evidence, and objectivity. Critics contend that the descriptive focus makes it difficult to address normative questions about scientific rationality or to compare alternative theories.
9.4 Hybrid Studies of Work and Technologies
Garfinkel’s notion of “hybrid studies of work and technologies” underscored how technological systems and human competences are mutually configured. This perspective has been taken up in research on human‑computer interaction, aviation, and infrastructure, contributing to understandings of how complex socio‑technical systems are locally managed and made accountable.
10. Critiques and Debates
10.1 Accusations of Descriptivism and Anti‑Theoreticism
A recurring criticism holds that ethnomethodology is overly descriptive, avoiding explanation, causality, or structural analysis. Critics argue that Garfinkel’s insistence on studying members’ methods sidelines questions about power, inequality, and large‑scale social change.
Proponents respond that detailed description is a prerequisite for any adequate theory and that ethnomethodology offers a different kind of explanation—one that shows how social phenomena are produced in practice rather than attributing them to abstract variables.
10.2 Scope and Relevance
Some sociologists contend that Garfinkel’s focus on micro‑interaction cannot address macro‑level issues such as class, gender, or the state. Others maintain that macro‑phenomena are themselves constituted through local practices, so studying those practices is directly relevant.
Debates continue over whether ethnomethodology should remain a specialized niche concerned with technical analyses of interaction, or whether its principles can be generalized to broader social theory.
10.3 Relation to Conversation Analysis
Within the ethnomethodological community, there have been disagreements about the relationship between ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Some view CA as a faithful development of Garfinkel’s program; others argue that CA’s formalization and methodological codification depart from or narrow the original ethnomethodological agenda.
10.4 Ethical and Practical Concerns
Breaching experiments have raised ethical questions, particularly regarding informed consent and potential distress to participants. While early work predated contemporary ethical standards, later commentators have reassessed these methods in light of current norms.
10.5 Engagement with Other Theoretical Traditions
Garfinkel’s stance of ethnomethodological indifference has been criticized for limiting dialogue with other perspectives, including critical theory, feminism, and Bourdieu’s practice theory. Some scholars attempt to integrate ethnomethodological insights into these frameworks; others argue that such syntheses risk diluting its distinctive methodological commitments.
11. Legacy and Historical Significance
11.1 Position within 20th‑Century Social Thought
Harold Garfinkel occupies a distinctive place in postwar social theory. He is often grouped with figures who shifted attention from macro‑structures to everyday practices, alongside, but not simply aligned with, symbolic interactionism, Goffman’s dramaturgy, and later practice theories. His work is frequently cited as a major challenge to structural‑functionalism and survey‑based sociology.
11.2 Enduring Concepts and Programs
Concepts such as ethnomethodology, indexicality, reflexivity, and accountability remain part of the vocabulary of sociology, linguistics, and philosophy of social science. Conversation analysis and ethnomethodological studies of work constitute enduring research programs that continue to generate empirical findings and methodological innovations.
11.3 Influence Across Disciplines
Garfinkel’s ideas have influenced:
| Field | Forms of Influence |
|---|---|
| Sociology | Micro‑sociology, interaction studies, organizational analysis. |
| Linguistics | Pragmatics, discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics. |
| Philosophy | Social ontology, philosophy of social science, rule‑following debates. |
| STS and HCI | Studies of laboratories, infrastructures, and user–technology interaction. |
This cross‑disciplinary reach has contributed to his reputation as both a sociologist and a thinker of broader philosophical importance.
11.4 Reception and Reassessment
Initially, ethnomethodology was sometimes regarded as esoteric or marginal within sociology. Over time, its empirical rigor and distinctive stance have been more widely recognized, even by those who do not adopt its full program. Recent historical and theoretical reassessments situate Garfinkel as a central figure in the turn toward practice, interaction, and the constitutive role of members’ methods.
His legacy is thus characterized by both ongoing specialist development and a broader, more diffuse impact on how scholars conceptualize social order, meaning, and the everyday foundations of institutional life.
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title = {Harold Garfinkel},
author = {Philopedia},
year = {2025},
url = {https://philopedia.com/thinkers/harold-garfinkel/},
urldate = {December 11, 2025}
}Note: This entry was last updated on 2025-12-10. For the most current version, always check the online entry.