Harold Garfinkel - Biography

Biography

Harold Garfinkel born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917 and was raised there throughout his childhood. His father, a furniture dealer, had hoped his son would follow him into the family business. Although he did help his father out with the family business, Garfinkel decided to also attend college and study accounting at the University of Newark. At the University of Newark, courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students, who brought more theoretical experiences to the classroom. This theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on in his theories he formed. In the summer following graduation, Garfinkel worked as a volunteer at a Quaker work camp in Cornelia, Georgia. This was an eye-opening experience for Garfinkel. He worked there with students with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds, and this experience influenced his decision to later take up sociology as a career. While volunteering in Georgia, Garfinkel learned about the sociology program at the University of North Carolina. This program specifically focused on public work projects like one Garfinkel was working on. Garfinkel wrote his master's thesis on interracial homicide and completed his Masters in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With the onset of World War II, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and served as a trainer at a base in Florida. As the war effort wound down he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi. There he met Arlene Steinbach who was to become his wife and lifelong partner.

After the war, Garfinkel went to study at Harvard and met Talcott Parsons at the newly-formed Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Parsons studied and emphasized abstract categories and generalizations, where Garfinkel focused on detailed description. While still a student at Harvard, Garfinkel was invited by the sociologist Wilbert Ellis Moore to work on the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton University. Garfinkel taught at Princeton University for two years. This brought him in contact with some of the most prominent scholars of the day in the behavioral, informational, and social sciences including: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Paul Lazarsfeld, Frederick Mosteller, Philip Selznick, Herbert A. Simon, and John von Neumann. Garfinkel's dissertation, "The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order," was completed in 1952.

After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, Garfinkel worked at Ohio State studying leadership on airplanes and submarines. Garfinkel also worked on the American Jury Project for which he did fieldwork in Arizona. Garfinkel was asked to talk at a 1954 American Sociological Association meeting and created the term "ethnomethodology." In 1954 he joined the sociology faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. During the period 1963-64 he served as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide. Garfinkel spent the ’75-’76 school year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and, in 1979-1980, was a visiting fellow at Oxford University. In 1995 he was awarded the Cooley-Mead Award from the American Sociological Association for his contributions to the field. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1996. He officially retired from UCLA in 1987, though continued as an emeritus professor until his death on April 21, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.