This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel’s contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of the production and coordination of ‘methods’ in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyday activities, Garfinkel and his students also investigated practices in the natural and social sciences that elude formal methodological prescriptions and reports. Garfinkel’s work sometimes is acknowledged as a precursor to early ethnographies of scientific laboratories, but this essay argues that his conceptual and methodological innovations continue to have a pervasive, though often unacknowledged, place in science and technology studies and related fields.
BittnerE (1965) The concept of organization. Social Research32: 239–255.
3.
BittnerE (1967) The police on skid row: A study of peace keeping. American Sociological Review32: 699–715.
4.
BjelicDLynchM (1994) Goethe’s ‘Protestant Reformation’ as a textual demonstration: Comment on Jackson. Social Studies of Science24(4): 703–724.
5.
BloorD (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
6.
ButtonGDourishP (1998) On ‘technomethodology’: Foundational relationships between ethnomethodology and system design. Human–Computer Interaction13(4): 395–432.
7.
CollinsH MEvansR (2002) The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience. Social Studies of Science32(2): 235–296.
8.
CollinsHMPinchT (1982) Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
9.
CoulterJ (1989) Mind in Action. Oxford: Polity Press.
10.
FoucaultM (1989) The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge.
11.
GarfinkelH (1941) Color trouble, a short story. In: O’BrienEJ (ed.) The Best Short Stories of 1941: The Yearbook of the American Short Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
12.
GarfinkelH (1960) A comparison of decisions on four pre-theoretical problems by Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz. Unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles.
GarfinkelH (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
16.
GarfinkelH (2007) Four relations between literatures of the social science movement and their specific ethnomethodological alternates. In: HesterSFrancisD (eds) Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge. Aldershot: Ashgate, 13–29.
17.
GarfinkelH (2008) Toward a Sociological Theory of Information. Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers.
18.
GarfinkelHLynchMLivingstonE (1981) The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences11(2): 131–158.
19.
GarfinkelHSacksH (1986 [1970]) On formal structures of practical actions. In: GarfinkelH (ed.) Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 158–189. (Originally in: McKinney JC and Tiryakian EA (eds) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Development. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 337–366.)
20.
HillR JCrittendenK S (eds) (1968) Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Purdue, IN: Institute for the Study of Social Change, Department of Sociology, Purdue University.
21.
JeffersonG (1983) Issues in the transcription of naturally-occurring talk: Caricature versus capturing pronunciational particulars. Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature, No. 34: 1–12. Available at: www.liso.ucsb.edu/Jefferson/Caricature.pdf (accessed 7 July 2011).
22.
JeffersonG (1988) On the sequential organization of troubles talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems35: 418–441.
23.
KnorrK (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon.
24.
Knorr-CetinaK (1983) The ethnographic study of scientific work: Towards a constructivist sociology of science. In: Knorr-CetinaKMulkayM (eds) Science Observed. London: Sage Publications, 115–140.
25.
KuhnT (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
26.
LatourBWoolgarS (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage Publications.
27.
LatourB (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28.
LivingstonE (1986) The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
29.
LivingstonE (1999) Cultures of proving. Social Studies of Science29(6): 867–888.
30.
LynchM (1985) Art and Artifact in Laboratory Work: A Study of Shop Talk and Shop Work in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
31.
LynchM (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
32.
MacbethD (1996) The discovery of situated worlds: Analytic commitments, or moral orders?Human Studies19(3): 267–287.
33.
ParsonsT (1949 [1937]) The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1: Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, 2nd edition.London and New York: Macmillan.
34.
PollnerM (1987) Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
35.
PollnerM (1991) Left of ethnomethodology: The rise and decline of radical reflexivity. American Sociological Review56: 370–80.
36.
RawlsA (2002) Editor’s introduction to: Garfinkel H, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1–64.
37.
SacksH (1992) Lectures on Conversation, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.
38.
SharrockWAndersonB (1991) Epistemology: Professional scepticism. In: ButtonG (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51–76.
39.
SuchmanL (1987) Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
40.
SudnowD (1965) Normal crimes: Sociological features of a penal code in a public defender’s office. Social Problems12: 255–276.
41.
SudnowD (1967) Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
42.
SudnowD (1972) Temporal parameters of interpersonal observation. In: SudnowD (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press, 259–279.
43.
SudnowD (1978 [2001]) Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Revised edn: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
44.
TraweekS (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
45.
WeizenbaumJ (1976) Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
46.
WiederDL (1974) Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton.
47.
WiederDL (1980) Behavioristic operationalism and the life-world: Chimpanzees and chimpanzee researchers in face-to-face interaction. Sociological Inquiry50(3/4): 75–103.
WoolgarS (ed.) (1988) Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Sage Publications.
50.
ZimmermanDHPollnerM (1970) The everyday world as a phenomenon. In: DouglasJD (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. Chicago: Aldine, 80–103.
