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Harold Garfinkel is Professor Emeritus in sociology at Harvard University. Garfinkel is one of the key developers of the phenomenological tradition in American sociology.
His own development of this tradition (which he terms ethnomethodology) emphasises the extent to which social life is (or can be) chaotic, and the way in which we create social meanings in the face of this potential chaos. He emphasises the indexicality of much social behaviour and action, and the extent to which we interpret other people's actions in line with pre-existing social rules or schema.
Ethnomethodologists tend to concentrate on very small scale studies of specific social interactions, in an attempt to show how our social world is created, and how we create meaningful worlds for ourselves.
Selection of works by Harold Garfinkel:
1946 "Color trouble." in Primer for white folks. Edited by B. Moon, 269-286. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran
1956 "Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies." American Journal of Sociology 61: 420-424.
1956 "Some sociological concepts and methods for psychiatrists." Psychiatric Research Reports 6: 181-198.
1963 "A conception of, and experiments with, 'trust' as a condition of stable concerted actions." in Motivation and social interaction. Edited by O.J. Harvey,
187-238. New York: The Ronald Press
1967 Studies in ethnomethodology . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
1967 "Practical sociological reasoning: Some features in the work of the Los Angeles suicide prevention center." in Essays in self-destruction. Edited by E. Shneidman, 171-186. New York: Science House
1968 "Discussion: The origin of the term 'ethnomethodology'." in Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Edited by R. Hill and K. Grittenden, 15-18. Institute Monograph Series #1
1972 "A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four 'Pre-Theoretical' Problems byTalcott Parsons and Alfred Sc hultz" in . Edited by , . ms.. [first published in 1960]
1972 "Studies in the routine grounds of everyday activities." in Studies in social interaction. Edited by D. Sudnow, 1-30. New York: The Free Press. [first published in 1964]
1972 "Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies." in Symbolic Interactionism. Edited by J. Manis and B. Meltzer, 201-208. New York: Allyn and Bacon
1976 "An introduction, for novices, to the work of studying naturally organized ordinary activities." in . Edited by , . ms.
1981 "The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar." Philosophy and the Sociology of Science 11: 131-158.
1970 "On formal structures of practical actions." in Theoretical sociology: Perspectives and developments. Edited by J. McKinney and E. Tiryakian, 337-366. New York: Meredith
2002 Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
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