[9] At the University of Newark, courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students, whose theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on.

[9] Garfinkel completed his master's in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide[9] under the supervision of Howard W. Odum.

Garfinkel wrote the short story "Color Trouble", which was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940, and discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia.

[12] With the onset of World War II, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and served as a trainer at a base in Florida.

As the war effort wound down he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he met his wife and lifelong partner, Arlene Steinback.

Harold passed away from congestive heart failure on April 21, 2011, in his home in Los Angeles leaving his wife Arlene behind.

[9] This brought him in contact with some of the most prominent scholars of the day in the behavioral, informational, and social sciences including: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Paul Lazarsfeld, Frederick Mosteller, Philip Selznick, Herbert A. Simon, and John von Neumann.

After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, Garfinkel was asked to talk at a 1954 American Sociological Association meeting and created the term "ethnomethodology.

"[9] In addition, he was working alongside other people to listen to tape recordings and interview jurors for the University of Chicago's American Jury Project, which is led by Fred Strodtbeck which also furthered his research in Ethnomethodology.

[18] Garfinkel spent the '75-'76 school year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and, in 1979–1980, was a visiting fellow at Oxford University.

Drawing on the work of earlier social theorists (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, Weber), Parsons postulated that all social action could be understood in terms of an "action frame" consisting of a fixed number of elements (an agent, a goal or intended end, the circumstances within which the act occurs, and its "normative orientation").

Sociologists operating within the formal program endeavor to produce objective (that is to say, non-indexical) claims similar in scope to those made in the natural sciences.

[27] Alfred Schütz, a European scholar and acquaintance of Garfinkel introduced the young sociologist to newly emerging ideas in social theory, psychology and phenomenology.

First, it is inappropriate for sociologists to use scientific reasoning as a lens for viewing human action in daily life, as Parsons had proposed, since they are distinct kinds of rationality.

On the other hand, the traditionally assumed discontinuity between the claims of science and commonsense understandings is dissolved since scientific observations employ both forms of rationality.

[31] This raises a flag for researchers in the social sciences, since these disciplines are fundamentally engaged in the study of the shared understandings that underlie the day-to-day functioning of society.

How can we make detached, objective claims about everyday reasoning, if our conceptual apparatus is hopelessly contaminated with commonsense categories and rationalities?

[33] Accepting Schütz's critique of the Parsonian program, Garfinkel sought to find another way of addressing the Problem of Social Order.

Garfinkel writes, "any social setting [can] be viewed as self-organizing with respect to the intelligible character of its own appearances as either representations of or as evidences-of-a-social-order.

He wrote, "Members to an organized arrangement are continually engaged in having to decide, recognize, persuade, or make evident the rational, i.e., the coherent, or consistent, or chosen, or planful, or effective, or methodical, or knowledgeable character of [their activities]".

[39] The pervasiveness of indexical expressions and their member-ordered properties means that all forms of action provide for their own understandability through the methods by which they are produced.

Such analysis can be applied to any sort of social matter (e.g., being female, following instructions, performing a proof, participating in a conversation).

"[9] In Garfinkel's work, he encouraged his students to attempt breaching experiments in order to provide examples of basic ethnomethodology.

[45]Today, some textbooks in sociology often suggest that breaching experiments are the research method that ethnomethodologists use to explore the social organization of action.

[48] This program, pioneered with colleagues Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff, has produced a large and flourishing research literature.

[9] Ethnomethodologists such as Graham Button, R. J. Anderson, John Hughes, Wes Sharrock, Angela Garcia, Jack Whalen, and D. H. Zimmerman all study ethnomethodology within institutions.

[51] This led to a wide variety of studies focusing on different occupations and professions, including laboratory science,[52] law,[53][54] police work,[55] medicine,[56] jazz improvisation,[57] education,[58][59] mathematics,[60] philosophy,[61] and others.

The bulk of Garfinkel's original writings came in the form of scholarly articles and technical reports, most of which were subsequently republished as book chapters.

Although published in 2006, Seeing Sociologically[63] was actually written as an annotated version of a draft dissertation proposal two years after arriving at Harvard.

Toward a Sociological Theory of Information[64] was also written while Garfinkel was a student and was based on a 1952 report prepared in conjunction with the Organizational Behavior Project at Princeton.