Harold Garfinkel

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Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel (born October 29, 1917 in Newark , New Jersey , † April 21, 2011 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American sociologist . He founded the ethnomethodology .

Life

Garfinkel became a pupil, then a doctoral student and later assistant to Talcott Parsons at Harvard University in 1952 and studied with the phenomenologists Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schütz . He later became a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles . As an emeritus he rarely lectured, but continued to take part in international conferences. 1988 awarded him Nottingham University , the honorary doctorate .

plant

Even with the dissertation, Garfinkel clearly set himself apart from the school of action and systems theory of his teacher Parsons. Garfinkel is the founder of ethnomethodology, in which he empirically implemented parts of Alfred Schütz's methodological program. This dealt with the question of how people orientate themselves mutually in the social structures of everyday life and act according to everyday knowledge that seems natural to them. Garfinkel's contribution consists primarily in making behavior that appears natural and familiar to be examined in detail and made accessible to sociological research. To this end, he directed, among other so-called crisis experiments ( breaching experiments ) in which consciously with the rules of everyday interaction is broken. In contrast to an interest in supra or extra-individual structures, Garfinkel's central research interest lay in the constant (re) construction of the rules of everyday life by the members of a social context themselves - i.e. not in the reconstruction of the rules by an external observer.

Garfinkel is the author of the standard work Studies in Ethnomethodology from 1967, but has also written some short stories (e.g. Color Trouble from 1941).

Selection of works

  • Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs / NJ 1967.
  • The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar (with Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston). In: Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 11, No. 2, 1981, ISSN  0048-3931 , doi: 10.1177 / 004839318101100202 , pp. 131-158.
  • Respecification: Evidence for the locally produced order *, logic *, reason *, meaning *, method *, etc. in and of the essentially haecceity of immortal ordinary society. In: Graham Button (Ed.): Ethnomethodology and the human sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York 1991, ISBN 0-521-38952-6 , pp. 10-19.
  • Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkeim's Aphorism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham / MD 2002, ISBN 0-7425-1642-3 .
  • Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action (with Anne Warfield Rawls). Paradigm Publishers, Boulder / CO 2006, ISBN 1-59451-093-8 .
  • Studies in ethnomethodology. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2020, ISBN 978-3-593-50739-2 .

literature

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Liberman, Kenneth (2007). Husserl's criticism of reason: With ethnomethodological specifications. Lanham / MD: Lexington Books. P. 89
personal data
SURNAME Garfinkel, Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 2011
Place of death Los Angeles , California