Goffman Was an Intense Perfectionist about His Writing, Putting Sheet after Sheet into the Typewriter and Then Throwing Each Away

Dr. Ann Swidler, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote this memoir at the request of Dmitri Shalin and gave her permission to post the present version in the Erving Goffman Archives

Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing

Abstract Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. Keywords Interviewing . Ethnography . Methodology . Cultural sociology . Methodological pluralism . Theory Between 1984 and 2010, the number of undergraduate students who received a degree in sociology rose from 12,000 to 29,000 in the United States. 1 This period of relative prosperity occurred at the same time as our discipline dug itself out of the sectarian methodological fights that had plagued the sixties and seventies, particularly those opposing micro and qualitative to macro and quantitativ

Conversations Into Texts: A Method for Studying Public Culture

Sociology has long struggled to develop methods adequate to its theoretical understanding of society as a reality sui generis (Durkheim, 1982). While culture is widely understood as the most collective aspect of societies, the methods sociologists use keep pulling us back toward an image of culture as produced by the interaction of individual minds. To try to capture more effectively what is genuinely collective about culture, we focus here on conversational interactions—the voices and actions that constitute the relational space among actors. Conversational journals provide us with a method: the analysis of texts produced by cultural insiders who keep journals of who-said-what-to-whom in conversations they overhear or events they participate in during the course of their daily lives. We describe the method, distinguishing it from other approaches and noting its drawbacks. We then explore the ways and settings in which participants in conversational interactions use culture, illustrating the methodological advantages of conversational journals with examples from our texts. We end with a discussion of what we have learned about culture in action and the method’s potential in our setting as well as in other places and times