Harold Garfinkel (29 October 1917 – 21 April 2011): A remembrance and reminder

Abstract

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.