Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was an American sociologist who founded ethnomethodology, the study of how people produce and maintain social order through everyday sense-making practices. Trained at Harvard under Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel rebelled against the structural-functionalism of his teacher, arguing that social order is not imposed by macro-structures but achieved locally by members in their routine conduct.

Garfinkel's key methodological innovation was the breaching experiment, a deliberate disruption of everyday routines designed to make visible the normally invisible methods by which social reality is constituted. His 1967 book Studies in Ethnomethodology remains the foundational text of the field.

Garfinkel's work connects to phenomenology through his interest in how members' practical reasoning produces the sense of an objective social world. It connects to systems theory through his insistence that order is emergent — produced by local interactions rather than designed by central structures.

Garfinkel's lasting contribution is not a theory of society but a refusal of theory in the conventional sense. He showed that sociology's attempt to explain social order by positing invisible structures is a category error: the order is visible in the practices, if only we look closely enough.