Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist who founded ethnomethodology, an approach that studies the ordinary, taken-for-granted methods people use to produce and recognize a sense of orderly social life in everyday interaction. Rather than treating social order as something imposed by external structures, Garfinkel examined how members of society actively and continuously accomplish it through practical reasoning, most famously through breaching experiments that deliberately violated ordinary expectations to reveal the normally invisible work of sustaining them. His major statement, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), established a distinct research tradition that influenced conversation analysis and the sociology of everyday life.