22 Facts About Harold Garfinkel

1.

Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles.

2.

Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29,1917, where he grew up in a Jewish family.

3.

Harold Garfinkel wrote the short story "Color Trouble", which was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940, and discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia.

4.

Harold Garfinkel completed his dissertation, "The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order," in 1952.

5.

Harold Garfinkel received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996.

6.

Harold Garfinkel officially retired from UCLA in 1987, though continued as an emeritus professor until his death on April 21,2011, in Los Angeles, California.

7.

Harold Garfinkel was very intrigued by Parsons' study of social order.

8.

Unlike Parsons, and other social theorists before and since, Harold Garfinkel's goal was not to articulate yet another explanatory system.

9.

Harold Garfinkel expressed an "indifference" to all forms of sociological theorizing.

10.

Alfred Schutz, a European scholar and acquaintance of Harold Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory, psychology and phenomenology.

11.

Harold Garfinkel took issue with the Parsonsian assumption that actors in society always behave rationally.

12.

Harold Garfinkel was attempting to understand the way jurors knew how to act as jurors.

13.

Harold Garfinkel noticed through his study of ethnomethodology that the methods people use to understand the society they live in are very much fixed in people's natural attitudes.

14.

Harold Garfinkel uses this point to emphasize how different ethnomethodology is from sociology and Durkheim's thinking.

15.

Harold Garfinkel discusses each of these "rationalities" and the "behaviors" that result, which are:.

16.

One of Harold Garfinkel's contributions was to note that such expressions go beyond "here", "now," etc.

17.

Harold Garfinkel declared that the issue of how practical actions are tied to their context lies at the heart of ethnomethodological inquiry.

18.

Harold Garfinkel has frequently illustrated ethnomethodological analysis by means of the illustration of service lines.

19.

In particular, Harold Garfinkel conducted a famous case study on Agnes, a transgender woman in 1967.

20.

Early on, Harold Garfinkel issued a call for ethnomethodologically informed investigations into the nature of work.

21.

Toward a Sociological Theory of Information was written while Harold Garfinkel was a student and was based on a 1952 report prepared in conjunction with the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton.

22.

Harold Garfinkel subsequently published an edited anthology showcasing selected examples of ethnomethodologically informed work.