Harold Garfinkel (born 29 October 1917) is Professor Emeritus in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Garfinkel was a student of Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schütz[1] and is one of the key developers of the phenomenological tradition in American sociology.

His own development of this tradition (which he terms ethnomethodology) is widely misunderstood. In contrast to the social constructionist version of phenomenological sociology, he emphasises a focus on radical phenomena, rather than on the various ways they are interpreted. His recommendation that sociologists suspend their assumption of social order is often wrongly taken to mean that he believes social life to be chaotic, or that members of society are free agents. However, this suspension (bracketing in the phenomenological jargon) is merely an analytic move designed to bring the existing social order more clearly into focus. He emphasises the indexicality of language and the difficulties this creates for the production of objective accounts of social phenomena. This means that such accounts are reflexive to the settings in which they are produced (they depend upon that setting for their meaning).

Ethnomethodological studies come in a wide variety of forms, including: the sequential analysis of conversation (Conversation Analysis); the study of social categorization practices (membership category analysis); studies of workplace settings and activities (studies of work).