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

Interpretation, Explanation and Theories of Meaning

We use the work of Clifford Geertz to examine long-standing questions about the relationship between interpretation and explanation. We extract from Geertz’s work explanatory theories of what we are calling meaning and meaningfulness. We argue that making explicit interpretivists’ implicit theories about how these differing kinds of cultural experience work clarifies what interpretivists like Geertz are doing, but also allows us to examine the strengths and weaknesses of theories that underlie interpretive practice. We find that Geertz was more of a generalizing theorist of culture than he claimed to be and that the theories he worked with provide fruitful elements for an ongoing, theoretically-guided research program into how culture works

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