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Classic theoretical arguments by seven Black and Jewish sociologists—informed by their experience of “double-consciousness”—comprise an important legacy in sociology. Approaches that ignore the role of racism and slavery in the rise of Western societies suppress and distort this legacy in favor of a White Christian Hero narrative. By contrast, Durkheim, a Jewish sociologist, took Roman enslaved and immigrant guild-workers as a starting point, positing the “constitutive practices” of their occupations as media of cooperation for achieving solidarity across diversity. His argument marks a transition from the treatment of social facts as durable symbolic residue in homogeneous cultures, to the qualitative study of constitutive social fact making in interaction in diverse social situations. Because making social facts in interaction requires mutual reciprocity, troubles occur frequently in contexts of inequality. Like W.E.B. DuBois, who first theorized double consciousness as a heightened awareness produced by racial exclusion, Harold Garfinkel looked to troubles experienced by the marginalized as clues to the taken-for-granted practices for making social order, calling them “ethno-methods.” Together with other Black and Jewish sociologists—Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Erving Goffman, and Harvey Sacks—they challenge popular interpretations of classical social theory, center Race and marginality, and explain how features of practice that unite/divide can be both interactional and institutionalized.

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel’s work with ELIZA and a related program LYRIC from 1967 to 1969. AI researchers have tended to treat successful human–machine interaction as if it relied primarily on non-human machine characteristics, and thus the often-reported attribution of human-like qualities to communication with computers has been criticized as a misperception—and humans who make such reports referred to as “deluded.” By contrast Garfinkel, building on two decades of prior research on information and communication, argued that the ELIZA and the LYRIC “chatbots” were achieving interactions that felt human to many users by exploiting human sense-making practices. In keeping with his long-term practice of using “trouble” as a way of discovering the taken-for-granted practices of human sense-making, Garfinkel designed scripts for ELIZA and LYRIC that he could disrupt in order to reveal how their success depended on human social practices. Hence, the announcement “Machine Down” by the chatbot was a desired result of Garfinkel’s interactions with it. This early (but largely unknown) research has implications not only for understanding contemporary AI chatbots, but also opens possibilities for respecifying current information systems design and computational practices to provide for the design of more flexible information objects.

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 prerequisite for successful interaction, while treating “troubles” generated by inequality as an important key to understanding social order writ large.

This book-never before published-is eminent sociologist Harold Garfinkel's earliest attempt, while at Harvard in 1948, to bridge the growing gap in American sociology. This gap was generated by a Parsonian paradigm that emphasised a scientific approach to sociological description, one that increasingly distanced itself from social phenomena in the increasingly influential ways studied by phenomenologists. It was Garfinkel's idea that phenomenological description, rendered in more empirical and interactive terms, might remedy shortcomings in the reigning Parsonian view. Garfinkel soon gave up the attempt to repair scientific description, and his focus became increasingly empirical until, in 1954, he famously coined the term \"Ethnomethodology.\" However, in this early manuscript can be seen more clearly than in some of his later work the struggle with a conceptual and positivist rendering of social relations that ultimately informed Garfinkel's position. Here we find the sources of his turn toward ethnomethodology, which would influence subsequent generations of sociologists. Essential reading for all social theory scholars and graduate students and for a wider range of social scientists in anthropology, ethnomethodology, and other fields.

According to Lizardo (2016), the concept of culture, as it originated with Parsons, is one of the “foundational notions” of modern sociology, such that “the most basic theoretical debates in the discipline…now take place largely under the auspices of ‘cultural theory.’” Unfortunately, to the extent that contemporary conceptions of culture are traced to Parsons, contradictions in cultural theory are also blamed on his legacy: with cultural theorists turning to anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy for solutions. We argue instead that problems in cultural theory are not a consequence of Parsons’ legacy per se, but of a one-sided focus on his early work that ignores the interactionism of Parsons’ later position. The resulting emphasis on the symbolic side of Parsons’ legacy, as developed in anthropology by Geertz (Parsons’ PhD student, 1950–1956), to the exclusion of the social practice-oriented side developed in sociology by the later Parsons and Garfinkel (Parsons’ PhD student, 1946–1952), has left cultural theory in a state of incompleteness. We propose a rapprochement between Garfinkel’s interactionism, which treats the order properties of practices as interactional media of cooperation in the making of culture, and the prevailing symbolic approach, to reintegrate the two sides of Parsons’ conception of culture.

Resumo A Editora Vozes publicou uma tradução em português da nova segunda edição de Estudos de etnometodologia. Para comemorar essa realização, falarei hoje a respeito da importância desse livro, da obra de Garfinkel em geral, em termos teóricos, metodológicos e políticos. Argumentarei que Garfinkel se dedicou ao projeto durkheimiano de fazer com que a sociologia se tornasse singularmente adequada para o estudo da modernidade, e que isso explica muitas das incompreensões sofridas por esta obra. Quero também anunciar as atividades do Arquivo Garfinkel (Garfinkel Archive), do qual sou hoje diretora e executora intelectual. Há materiais no arquivo que deverão se tornar o foco de importantes teses de pós-graduação e livros. O trabalho com esses arquivos vem sendo apoiado pelo governo alemão por meio de um centro na Universidade de Siegen, na Alemanha, denominado Mídia da Cooperação. O argumento de Garfinkel, assim como o de Durkheim, modifica o território epistemológico da ciência social e, com ele, o território teórico da argumentação social. Ele reorienta o domínio dos objetos, fazendo com que eles deixem de ser objetos naturais para se tornarem objetos sociais; vem como o domínio das práticas sociais relevantes, que deixam de ser normas, regras tradicionais e consensos, para se tornarem práticas constitutivas. Em razão da magnitude dessa reorientação, a etnometodologia só pode ser entendida por pessoas que já tenham uma compreensão teórica do que ela envolve. De outra forma, surgiriam contradições, o que de fato já aconteceu. A consequência do argumento de Garfinkel para entender a política democrática moderna é que quaisquer desigualdades ou exclusões que impeçam as pessoas de estar em condições de cumprir as condições de reciprocidade de uma interação (suas famosas “condições de confiabilidade”) são uma ameaça à coerência, ao significado e à identidade da vida pública democrática moderna. Abstract Editora Vozes has published a Portuguese translation of the new second edition of Studies in ethnomethodology. To celebrate that achievement I will talk about the importance of that book and of Garfinkel’s work more generally; in theoretical, methodological and political terms. I will argue that Garfinkel took up Durkheim’s project to make Sociology uniquely suited to the study of modernity and that this explains much of the misunderstanding of his work. I also want to announce the existence of Garfinkel’s Archive of which I am the Director and Intellectual Executor. There are materials in the Archive that should become the focus of important graduate theses and books. Work on the archive is being supported by the German government through a center at Siegen University in Germany called Media of Cooperation. Garfinkel’s argument - like Durkheim’s - changes the epistemological terrain of social science, and hence the theoretical terrain of social argumentation. It shifts the domain of objects from natural to social objects - and the relevant social practices from norms, traditional rules and consensus - to constitutive practices. Because of the enormity of this shift, Ethnomethodology can only be understood by those with a theoretical grasp of what is involved. Otherwise, contradictions follow: as they have. The consequence of Garfinkel’s argument for understanding modern democratic politics is that any inequalities or exclusions that prevent people from being able to fulfill reciprocity conditions in interaction (his famous “Trust Conditions”) are a threat to coherence, meaning, and identity in modern democratic public life.

This article reports on a study of interaction between Americans who self-identify as Black and White that reveals underlying expectations with regard to conversation that differ between the two groups. These differences seem not to have much to do with class or gender, but rather vary largely according to self-identification by \"race.\" The argument of this paper will be that the social phenomena of \"race\" are constructed at the level of interaction whenever Americans self-identified as Black and White speak to one another. This is because the Interaction Order expectations with regard to both self and community vary between the two groups. Because the \"language games\" and conversational \"preferences\" practiced by the two groups are responsive to different Interaction Orders, the \"working consensus\" is substantially different, and as a consequence, conversational \"moves\" are not recognizably the same. It will be argued that a great deal of institutional discrimination against African Americans can be traced to this source.

This article examines the effects of \"tacit\" expectations about race, which are institutionalized in an Interaction Order that frames how we \"see\" high-status occupational identity. There is an essential moment in presenting Self before Other(s) when it is the turn of the Other(s) to recognize, respond to, and ratify that presentation. The Self is a social accomplishment that requires mutual cooperation from others. Failure to recognize and ratify competent presentations of self, reported frequently by black men, can strip those presentations of the social identity they claim and the dignity, power, and authority associated with that identity. We argue that these \"tacit\" expectations about identity follow black men wherever they go-no matter how successful they are. Using accounts drawn from interviews, we examine the persistent failure of Others to recognize and ratify high-status black male identities and the legitimate authority they carry.

The United States is having an “interrogation moment,” where increasing attention is being paid to what happens when suspects are questioned by the police. The manner in which confessions are secured can go directly to a society’s sense of justice and fairness, as nowhere are positions of power and vulnerability so pronounced as in the interrogation room. This paper contributes to our understanding of police interrogation through discussing what we refer to as playing the interrogation game. We explore how rapport-building helps to create a sense of collaboration between suspect and police. However, once a suspect agrees to answer questions and waives Miranda rights, the game changes. The new game can be more adversarial, aiming for the suspect to give a confession usable toward prosecution. We discuss how police, by knowing and shaping the rules of the interrogation game, have an advantage in the game which makes it very difficult for the suspect to win. Finally, we propose a number of recommendations that could foster a better balance in playing the game. A video abstract is available at https://tinyurl.com/ycqvp94k