Former university professor Harold Garfinkel passed away from congestive heart failure last month at his Pacific Palisades, Calif., home at the age of 93.
Garfinkel, a sociologist, devoted his career to the study of common sense, examining how society members work together to create social order. He developed the theories that led to the development of ethnomethodology, a subset of sociology examining society’s shared knowledge and reasoning procedures.
“His point of view wasn’t that rules aren’t important, but that how they get interpreted and applied is a matter of mutual negotiation,” John Heritage, professor at University of California, Los Angeles and the author of the 1984 study titled “Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology,” told The New York Times. “We have to have common resources for any form of coordinated action of human beings, and we use these common resources just to exist in a shared world. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition.”
After serving as a noncombatant in the Army during World War II and then working at Princeton and Ohio State briefly at the beginning of his career, Garfinkel joined the faculty at UCLA in 1954. He worked at the sociology department there for over 50 years.
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