Harold Garfinkel - Influence On Later Research

Influence On Later Research

A substantial corpus of empirical work has developed exploring the issues raised by Garfinkel’s writings.

Directly inspired by Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks undertook to investigate the sequential organization of conversational interaction. This program, pioneered with colleagues Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff, has produced a large and flourishing research literature. A second, smaller literature has grown out of another of Sacks' interests having to do with social categorization practices.

Sociologist Emanuel A. Schegloff used the concept of ethnomethodology to study telephone conversations and how these they influence social interaction. Gail Jefferson used ethnomethodology to study laughter and how people know when it is appropriate to laugh in conversation. John Heritage and David Greatbach studied rhetoric of political speeches and their relation to the amount of applause the speaker receives, whereas Steven Clayman studied how booing in an audience is generated. Philip Manning and George Ray studied shyness in an ethnomethodological way. Ethnomethodologists such as Button, Anderson, Hughes, Sharrock, Angela Garcia, Whalen and Zimmerman all study ethnomethodology within institutions.

Early on, Garfinkel issued a call for ethnomethodologically-informed investigations into the nature of work. This led to a wide variety of studies focusing on different occupations and professions including, laboratory science, law, police work, medicine, jazz improvisation, education, mathematics, philosophy, and others.

Lucy Suchman, an anthropologist, did an ethnomethodologically-informed analysis of learning to use a copy machine. It came to serve as an important critique of theories of planning in Artificial Intelligence.