Garfinkel’s Politics: Collaborating with Parsons to Document Taken-for-Granted Practices for Assembling Cultural Objects and their Grounding in Implicit Social Contract

Abstract

From his 1940–1942 studies of Race, through his 1967 study of an “inter-sexed” person called Agnes, Garfinkel’s research was always politically engaged. When Garfinkel was Parsons’ PhD student at Harvard (1946–1952) and later during a period of collaboration with Parsons (1958–1964), both theorized culture as a domain of social interaction independent from social structure and resting on its own implicit social contract. This conception of culture grounded their respective “voluntaristic” and “reciprocity” based approaches to specifying assembly processes for making social categories in a way that put the empirical assembly of categories under a microscope and made social justice a scientific concern. Garfinkel emphasized the importance of social contract aspects of Parsons’ theory – adapted from Durkheim – and with his studies in ethnomethodology, planned to contribute an empirical foundation for aspects of Parsons’ position that were criticized for their abstraction. Nevertheless, important differences remained. Parsons’ model required assimilation and consensus, thus inadvertently enforcing existing inequalities. Garfinkel, by contrast, was deeply concerned with “structural problems” like inequality, and treated assimilationist positions as scientifically and ethically unsound. His research documented reciprocity as a pre-requisite for successful interaction, while treating “troubles” generated by inequality as an important key to understanding social order writ large.

“Machine Down”: making sense of human–computer interaction—Garfinkel’s research on ELIZA and LYRIC from 1967 to 1969 and its contemporary relevance

“…Accordingly, Garfinkel's early studies reveal the cooperative practices standing at the core of media and technology (Schüttpelz 2023), allowing for the re-specification of things, such as "ELIZA effect", "confirmation bias", and "cognitive dissonance", in terms of the constitutive social practices of their human users-the methods through which these phenomena are ordinarily produced and made recognizable (cf. Rawls and Turowetz 2021;Turowetz and Rawls 2021).…”

“…Being himself from a Jewish background, Garfinkel was interested in socially marginalized people-and aware of how troubles could produce heightened awareness (Duck and Rawls 2023). Those for whom trouble is a constant feature of everyday experience, Garfinkel treated as "natural experiments" and as sources of information about how to deal with the potentially problematic character of practices that are ordinarily taken for granted (Rawls and Turowetz 2021;Eisenmann and Rawls 2023), such as in his later study of "Agnes" (pseudonym for a transperson he interviewed in 1959-1960see Garfinkel 1967).…”

Queering Doing Gender: The Curious Absence of Ethnomethodology in Gender Studies and in Sociology

“…While Garfinkel’s (1967) notion of ethnomethodological indifference suggests an apolitical stance, this concept should be taken as an analytic methodological stance —a way of looking, not an inability to recognize deployments of power in social relations. EM and “Doing Gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) can and do address power (Cook 2006; Rawls and Turowetz 2021; Rosenberg and Howard 2008; West and Fenstermaker 2002), albeit perhaps less overtly than many queer and queer of color texts. Indeed, West and Zimmerman (1987) finish their original text with an explicit section on power.…”

“…Rawls and Turowetz (2021:133) argue that Garfinkel’s work follows a Du Boisian tradition of illuminating hidden power relations:In making inequality and the interactional troubles that follow from it the key to revealing how “normal” social order works, Garfinkel placed the minority experience of trouble and inequality at the center of sociological theory and research, making ethnomethodology an intrinsically political approach.…”

Impact of practice-centered learning on the development of students' professional identities: Learning outcomes

“…The theory of social identity translation without using the term "identity" revealed the structure and processes of constructing the individual's "social essence." According to this theory, in traditional societies, a person's identity is formed directly from the present culture and is followed by norms and values that are common and specific to the type of social organization (Kurtz, 2022;Rawls & Turowetz, 2021).According to the sociologist, the term "identity" refers to two interconnected aspects of a person's place in society: knowledge of the system in which they operate awareness of the problem and norm of self-determination and their place in the normative space. In this case, identity is not a state but a structural characteristic of a person (Sugimura, Gmelin, van der Gaag, & Kunnen, 2022).…”