Harold Garfinkel

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Harold Garfinkel

• He wants you to question the reality of the
  social world

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Background

• Spencer, Durkheim, Comte
• social world is real
• Social facts are real
• People arent important (socially) unless they
  are part of that world
• People play roles in important institutions
  (organs?) but are mainly replaceable

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Question How do we know what the social world is
really like?

• The invisibility problem we dont directly
  see what the world is like
• No two situations or examples we see (e.g.,
  families) are identical
• We know the social world via our ideas about it
• Alfred Schutz, the phenomenological philosopher
  (who liked Weber) called these typifications

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Typifications

• Apply to people
• What is the person youre sitting next to like?
• Information
• Surface impressions (e.g., Goffman presentation
  of self)
• Information from others
• Information from documents and other artifacts
• Five categories of knowing people
• Myself (the one you know the best)
• We relationships (you see him or her all the
  time)
• Contemporaries (others who live at this time)
• Predecessors (those who are gone)
• Successors (those who arent here yet)

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Typifications (cont)

• Apply to social situations
• Schutz calls situations the lifeworld the
  world as we know and experience it
• We each have a stock of knowledge from our
  experiences
• We use this to define situations (remember
  this?)
• Things directly experienced are more real to us
  but rare
• Every situation varies from every other one by
• Time
• Place
• Specific events, etc.
• We get by a lot on
• recipes
• Habits
• Routine knowledge
• We dont ( and couldnt) think through every
  detail of every situation

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To sum (from Schutz)

• We constantly must try to understand the people
  we meet
• We constantly must try to understand the
  situations we are in
• We draw on hunches, what weve heard, what weve
  seen, whats worked in the past recipes for
  understanding and action
• We dont test these much were not like
  scientists testing theories

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Harold Garfinkel

• So how does the social world keep existing at
  all?
• It doesnt unless we act like it does
• We create and recreate it by acting as though it
  exists though it exists only as typifications
• Dont believe me? Garfinkel shows, via
  experiments, that people can make a new social
  reality exist by acting as though it exists.
• Ethnomethodology the methods people use to
  understand the world and thereby to create it
  anew in every situation

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Harold Garfinkel

• The things he says people do to make a situation
  fall into a routine category
• Look at the counselor experiment Pp. 187-195
• Documentary method looking for and counting
  up reasons to accept that the situation is what
  you already think it is.
• Etc. clause assuming that info you dont have
  would support your belief, and that you know
  enough for the moment.

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Implications?

• For everything
• Tomorrow Labeling theory
• Categorizing everything and issues of
  false-positives and false-negatives.
• Example

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