By Cole Hippen Danielle Yates Kit Mason

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ethnomethodology is concerned with an interruption of daily life in order to reveal standard rules

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.

Breaching Experiments

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

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

Order over chaos Rational thinking reinforces need for social order Social order is an ongoing process subject to constant change and even misinterpretation

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

1.

2.
3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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

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)

Belief that quantitative research methods does not guarantee more objective research study Renamed his brand of ethnomethodology as Cognitive Sociology

Goal: uncover the universal interpretive procedures that humans use to give meaning to social situations

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 dont only react to talk, but interpret it.

He also studies talk He wants to discover universal forms of interactions that apply to all conversations

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

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