Paul Atkinson & Sara Delamont. Handbook of Sociology. Editor: Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan Turner. Sage Publications. 2005.
Introduction
The art historian Hal Foster (1996) has suggested that ‘the ethnographic’ has become the dominant methodological model of the contemporary academy (cf. Coles, 2000; Kwon, 2000). Foster’s discussion focuses on anthropology rather than sociology but the general point holds good. The visual arts, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology all share an ethnographic focus on local sites of social relations and cultural forms. They include: a close attention to the particularities of social life; an equally close attention to the forms of their representation; the reflexive attention to the productive work of the artist, writer and ethnographer; an awareness of the work of biographical and autobiographical construction. The ethnographic gaze captures and calls into question the tensions between the self and the other, between the near and the distant, between the familiar and the strange.
Ethnographic and other qualitative research has come to occupy a prominent position in recent sociology and related intellectual fields, such as the emergent traditions of cultural studies (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000; Atkinson et al, 2001). Sociology itself has witnessed a number of theoretical developments that have fuelled the volume of qualitative research—including the introduction of phenomenology, ethnomethodology, cultural sociology, the so-called linguistic turn, the influence of various strands of feminist scholarship, and the rediscovery of rhetoric in the social and cultural disciplines. These have conjoined with long traditions of research under the auspices of symbolic interactionism, urban ethnography, deviancy studies, and community studies to renew traditions of research that have spanned many decades. In a review essay such as this it is impossible to review comprehensively all of the research that has contributed to these movements and their consequences for empirical sociological inquiry. Furthermore, and partially divorced from the various theoretical and epistemological perspectives, qualitative research methods themselves have burgeoned and grown increasingly varied. They now include ethnographic fieldwork, life-history and narrative analyses, conversation and discourse analysis, documentary and semiotic analysis. Again, a review of all these developments would be impossible within the compass of a single chapter, and in any case would inevitably recapitulate many other treatments of these themes. Readers who wish to follow up the argument can find detailed citations to authoritative literature reviews and other relevant publications in the notes.
A historical chronicle of all these topics, and of the theoretical or epistemological issues that underpin them would be intractable. It would, moreover, fail to capture many of the most significant themes that have informed and emerged from these sociological tendencies. Consequently, we have decided to follow a different approach. We have identified a number of major themes that have informed qualitative research (in its widest sense) over the past century. Necessarily selective in coverage, this will enable us to convey many of the most significant continuities and influences in the development of sociological thought. This thematic treatment will give greater opportunity to explore simultaneously the substantive, theoretical and methodological preoccupations that have informed the sociological work. It is important to re-affirm some of the long-term continuities in sociological research. Recent commentaries on the development of qualitative research, especially those that focus primarily on methodological issues, have stressed discontinuities (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, 2000). Methodological innovation and development invite an emphasis on novelty and change. When linked to contemporary preoccupations with the claims of postmodernism, then it is all too easy to over-emphasize new departures and disjunctures (Denzin, 1997). While it is important to take full account of change and innovation, it is dangerous to over-emphasize them and so lose sight of deeper and longer intellectual commitments. In that sense, therefore, our remarks here are to be read in contrast to other accounts of qualitative research and its traditions that stress discontinuity.
This selective review, therefore, ranges across a wide variety of literature and across apparently different traditions. This is not an arbitrary selection. Rather, it consciously transcends some of the more conventional divisions—theoretical schools, national traditions and empirical specialisms. We pay attention to the following broad thematic topics: the modern metropolis and urban anonymity; the search for community; the production of selves and identities; the recounting of lives and voices; the aesthetics and politics of representation; and the philosophies and justifications of qualitative sociology. Hence we shall draw together recurrent empirical research preoccupations with recurrent motifs in modern sociological thought. Distinctive forms of sociological imagination have developed qualitative research methods and broad analytic categories to address these and similar phenomena. We are more interested in synthesizing than discriminating between different theoretical and epistemological positions. Fine-grained methodological or theoretical disputation too readily obscures significant shared interests. It is easier to try to establish the uniqueness or novelty of one’s own cherished position than it is to remember and acknowledge broader intellectual commitments. We are uninterested in accounts that repeatedly affirm the existence of incommensurable paradigms’—or their equivalent—within the field.
In affirming this approach to our subject matter we do not deny the importance of clarifying philosophical and methodological standpoints, and there is no lack of debate and commentary in that vein. There are more profound issues that are shared and that endure. We stress the recurrent rather than the transitory and the fashionable, the issues to which successive generations of sociologists and others have returned. Methodological discourse needs to be placed in the wider context of sociological and cultural analysis that informs it and is informed by it. Rather than starting with qualitative method’, therefore, we treat our themes from a different perspective. We discuss how general strategies of sociological understanding are grounded in recurrent themes. This treatment allows us to describe how methodological commitments have reflected and informed broader issues in the history of sociological thought.
Urban Exploration
The inspiration of much ethnographic work is to be found—historically and in contemporary sociology—in the moral ambiguities of the modern city. Ethnographers have repeatedly explored and reported the social and cultural domains of the metropolitan life of Europe and America. There they have juxtaposed estrangement with intimacy, the metropolitan with the local, fragmentation with organization. Urban ethnography has itself been placed between strangeness and familiarity, disengagement and intimacy. The impetus to explore the city has had diverse sources—theoretical, methodological, moral and aesthetic.
City of Strangers
The exploration of the metropolis gave a major impetus to the development of ethnographic work in the city: it is no accident that the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography was founded under the title of Urban Life and Culture. The observation of the urban milieu has various origins. It is to be found in nineteenth-century, fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century literary and social works.
Baudelaire’s commentary on modernity in Les Fleurs du mal provides a classic point of origin for the literary celebration of the flâneur (Tester, 1994). The female flâneuse has equally been a recurrent motif in women’s literary representations of the urban environment (Parsons, 2000; Wilson, 2001). This archetype inhabits a great deal of early writing on the city. The detached urban explorer, the cool gaze and the ironic tone are among the distinctive traits of this urban explorer. It was a theme taken up by Walter Benjamin in his series of metropolitan observations, most notably in the Moscow diaries and the incomplete Arcades project. In the study of the arcades of Paris, Naples and elsewhere, Benjamin developed a distinctive sociological gaze. In the arcades he undertook the archaeology of a modernity that was already being overcome by new forms of metropolitan construction and consumption. Like Baudelaire, Benjamin identified the flâneur as both the model of the social observer and an archetype of the urban dweller. The observer, the rag-picker and the prostitute were among the urban types that corresponded to the detached and nomadic intellectual (Benjamin, 1986, 2000; Buck-Morss, 1997; Coles, 1999). The intellectual style of urban observation in turn reflected the more general optic imagination of nineteenth-century intellectual and aesthetic life (Crary, 1990, 1999).
Such treatments of metropolitan culture were paralleled by the sociological treatment of modernity by Simmel and Kracauer (cf. Frisby, 1985). Cities like Berlin provided the opportunity to observe the characteristic cultural features of modernity. In particular, modern urban life was held to generate distinctive social types. The city was physically and socially fragmented. Urban life was described in terms of over-stimulation. The senses were bombarded by diverse stimuli at a rapid rate. The modern urbanite was therefore vulnerable to over-excitement. There was, in this treatment, an implicit parallel between the sociological view of modern city dwellers and late nineteenth-century medical anxieties. The medical image of modern social actors was one of neurasthenia and the neurasthenic was the victim of over-civilization (Rosenberg, 1978; Oppenheim, 1991).
The neurasthenic personality or social type was vividly present in Simmel’s treatment of the metropolis and its inhabitants. As Frisby (1992) makes clear, neurasthenic over-stimulation and depletion were explicitly recognized in Simmel’s work by his contemporaries. Indeed, the neurasthenic type of metropolitan dweller is to be found in the European images of modernity to be found in Baudelaire, Benjamin and Kracauer, among others. The modern metropolis was, therefore, clearly identified with varieties of degeneracy. Equally, it must be remembered, the connotations of neurasthenia were not unrelievedly negative. It reflected a heightened sensibility and sensitivity to external stimuli. Consequently, the urban observer, the aesthete and the social critic could all be thought to exemplify the positive benefits of the neurasthenic state. The European metropolis and the detached observer were described as ‘strangers’. The disengaged intellectual mirrored the anonymous and estranged individuals who were observed: the social observer was a stranger among strangers.
The European tradition of urban sensibility was paralleled in American sociology. It is a major strand in the earliest manifestations of Chicago sociology. Park provided a direct link with the European tradition, having been exposed directly to Simmel’s social thought in Germany. Park brought together his own experiences as a journalist and the sociological exploration of the city (Park and Burgess, 1925). Likewise, Louis Wirth and his Chicago-school contemporaries were at pains to describe the city as something more than and different from a merely physical location. They asserted that the modern metropolis created radically new forms and new social types. Wirth himself suggested that urbanism constituted a new way of life in its own right. The city was characterized not only in terms of its size, but also its complexity and the density of social life within it. Wirth’s portrait of modern urban living, therefore, has echoes of neurasthenic civilization. ‘Men and women coping with the pace and congestion of the city became irritable, unstable and insecure’ (Smith, 1988: 164). Moreover, the metropolis was a city of strangers. Urban dwellers were pictured as rootless and planetary. The metropolis is thus a setting for the anonymous crowd: primary social ties of kinship and mutual obligation were replaced by weaker, secondary links. In the works of early urban ethnography, therefore, the modern metropolis was a site of social dislocation (Riesman, 1950). The social forms and values of traditional societies in the old world (Europe) and the new (including the rural South) were smashed by the demands of the modern urban environment. Collective modes of social solidarity were being replaced by a new individualism and the values of self-interest.
Among the origins of a qualitative tradition in sociology, then, are to be found the observation and exploration of the urban scene, portrayed as a site of modernity, as a physical and social space within which strangers engage in fleeting encounters and transactions (e.g. Cressey, 1932). The city, moreover, is a site of appearances. The stranger-observer marks the appearance of things and of persons. This preoccupation with strangers and appearances is to be found in a later American manifestation of the ethnographic gaze. The work of Erving Goffman incorporates a series of engagements with those European and American preoccupations. His inspirations and sources are, of course, wider than that, but his core work develops the themes of estrangement in the modern world. He documents the fragility of the social actor in the presence of strangers and the protective work of appearances in the metropolitan setting. Goffman’s social actors are engaged in a never-ending series of tasks in order to preserve the possibility of selfhood and moral agency in response to the gaze of anonymous others (Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1963a,b, 1967). In a manner that recalls Sartre’s bleak anthropology, the self is always under threat: rendered an object of the other’s gaze and judgement. The presentation of self embodies the moral obligations imposed by the presence of strangers. Stigma is only the consequence of normal imperfection writ large and amplified through the judgement of uncomprehending others, when the everyday requirements of tact and face-work break down. The social world that Goffman creates, therefore, becomes a kaleidoscope of intensely magnified microcosms of the modern world—just like Benjamin’s shopping arcades. Everyday social life can be understood as a series of projects in which identities are produced and appearances are consumed.
Lyn Lofland’s urban ethnography has continued the project (Lofland, 1985, 1998). Her observations of urban estrangement and the work of moral agency are in direct line of descent from Simmel and Park, Wirth and Goffman. She deploys the sociological gaze to show how social actors conduct themselves in anonymous settings—in a city like San Francisco—in the interests of preserving the appearance of self-control and composure. An activity as mundane as waiting at the bus station becomes fraught with moral significance. There is no question of transforming anonymity into acquaintance; rather, the anonymity itself must be managed and controlled, its potential threats guarded against. Her focus on the micro-politics of self-management in part reflects the intellectual and aesthetic tradition of the woman flâneuse (Parsons, 2000).
The observation of modern society was given a particular flavour in the United Kingdom by the Mass-Observation project, founded by Hopkinson and Madge (see Stanley, 2001). It built on an image of the anthropological enterprise and a particular sense of documentary reportage. It drew on the observations of members of the general public rather than professional social scientists. From the 1930s onwards, correspondents kept records and diaries and collected ephemera about specified themes, or about particular social events. The results, although patchy and unpredictable, added up to a remarkable experiment in demotic social observation. Many of the materials remained unpublished. Key publications were also produced. They included the ethnographic observations of ‘Worktown’ (Bolton in Lancashire), and of working-class life in London and the provinces. At times the observers and the authors who collated and interpreted the records displayed an insouciant capacity to other’ the British working class. They provided vividly detailed accounts of phenomena such as the dance-craze ‘the Lambeth walk’, commercial (‘all-in’) wrestling, and day-trips to the seaside. By no means the same in inspiration as the disengaged observations of the European intellectual, Mass-Observation reflected a rather different mode of observation. Its gaze was an engaged one, in a vernacular genre. It had something in common with the various American New Deal projects of documentary reportage. The combination of text and photographic image contributed to a distinctive mode of attention to the everyday realities of working lives and popular leisure. It also owed something to a strand of surrealist aesthetics.
Contemporary preoccupations have given renewed impetus to the observation of urban spaces and the circulation of social actors within them. Indeed, recent work on culture and consumption have given a new urgency to that same optic impetus that informed Benjamin, Park and Simmel (e.g. Lash and Urry, 1994). Much of the scholarship is conducted under the rubric of late modernity or postmodernity, not least the exploration of urban spaces and consumer cultures. Informed by the theorization of Baudrillard and Lyotard, such contemporary scholarship in many ways returns to the early years of urban observation. It derives in part from the conviction that contemporary social life is increasingly mediated through the symbolic. Information-society and consumer-society are accomplished through the production, circulation and consumption of signs. The social commentator thus becomes a kind of semiotic flâneur amidst a proliferation of spectacles, representations and life-style goods. The identification of tourism as a key topic and as a trope for postmodern living is a telling one (MacCannell, 1976; Urry, 2000). The themes are reflected too in the research literature on the intersection of tourism, museum culture and the ethnographic gaze (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). The themes recall earlier sociological analyses of modernity once more: Veblen’s pioneering discussion of conspicuous consumption, for example, pre-figures some of the themes, if not the theoretical frames of reference (Veblen, 1899/1970; Diggins, 1978)
Within this renewed sociological gaze, the city itself is a semiotically marked space. It is itself a spectacle, and the sociological imagination is again rendered in terms of the optical. Cultural sociology has engaged anew with sociological classics such as Simmel in rediscovering the world of urban culture and consumption. Simmel’s sociology has been ‘postmodernized’ (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993). He, Benjamin and others have been rehabilitated as postmodernists avant la lettre, as contemporary social theorists have invested them with renewed vitality and urgency. Consumption of the city and consumption in the city together motivate the newer sociologies (Wilson, 1991, 2001; Urry, 1995).
Urban Intimacies
While the early European and American observers found an urban environment of strangers and fleeting anonymity, marked by the dislocations of modernization, they and their contemporaries also explored sites of intimacy and cultural coherence. There were domains of organization that resisted the entropy of urban fragmentation and estrangement, providing sites for personal identity and meaning. The slum, the urban ‘quarter’ and the workplace were thus reconstructed sociologically as local manifestations of order and intimacy. The exploration of such settings implied in turn the transformation of the sociologist from the detached observer to the marginal or conditional participant. The ‘strangeness’ of the social setting is something to be—partially-overcome. The ethnographic enterprise is portrayed as a process that transcends the gulf of anonymous social difference. The ethnographer of urban settings, while remaining a professional stranger’ (Agar, 1980), also seeks to gain access’ to the everyday culture and relationships of local social worlds. The methods of participant observation do not depend on participation in the purely behavioural sense of physical presence, but rest on the social engagement of co-presence in the social world. Gaining access to a social world is not, therefore, a mere methodological preliminary to field research. It is a guiding principle of the research process itself. It transforms the objects of the flâneur’s observations into the subjects of their own lives and circumstances.
Like the urban observations of the detached European intellectuals, the Chicago ethnographers also found an affinity with the marginalized and the demi-monde. Cressey’s taxi-dancers, or Anderson’s hobos were the equivalent of Benjamin’s prostitute or ragpicker. They represented the ‘stranger’ in the midst of the urban setting. Likewise, the ethnic quarter or the slum represented the sociologists’ terra incognita. The ethnographic interest in the American slum, the ‘little Italy’, or the street corner has been an enduring one. This perspective derived from the conviction of Park and his contemporaries that the modern city was an environment in which diverse ways of life could be sustained (cf. Vidich and Lyman, 1994). So-called ‘natural areas’ provided opportunities for participant observation, and furnished some of the early classics of urban ethnography (e.g. Anderson, 1923; Wirth, 1928; Zorbaugh, 1929). Not only did such urban domains provide the setting for documenting the ‘others’ within the fabric of the metropolis, they also allowed the sociologists to demonstrate local order. Even superficially pathological phenomena such as the gang could be shown to display coherence and to provide the social resources for organization and personal identity (Thrasher, 1927).
This spirit of urban ethnography was established by later classic studies of ‘urban villages’ and localities. Whyte’s study of the Italian community of Boston’s North End became not only a classic of urban sociology, but also a methodological exemplar. In recent years it has also become a key exemplar in the critique of classic fieldwork and its products (Whyte, 1943). It was paralleled by Gans (1962) and Suttles (1968). Through their ethnographic engagement with the urban neighbourhoods, they showed the local cultures, the forms of social organization and the modes of rationality. The intensive documentation of the local was brought to a high point by Liebow (1967) in his classic ethnography of unemployed street-corner men in Washington, DC, by Hannerz in his monograph on an urban neighbourhood (Hannerz, 1969), by Anderson (1978) and in Duneier’s subsequent study of urban African American men (1992). These ethnographies all exemplify the recurrent American themes: the identification of distinctive ethnic areas within the metropolis and the documentation of local subcultures. The urban worlds of the private eye are the fictional counterpart to some of the urban ethnographies. Rich topographical descriptions of gritty reality characterize this genre—from Chandler’s LA in the 1930s through Parker’s Boston to Burke’s New Orleans or Dawson’s Oakland (Willett, 1996).
The ethnographic eye in American sociology, therefore, has repeatedly traversed the ambiguous terrain of the city (Hannerz, 1980). It has sustained images of the city that encompass the overall fragmentation of the city to the intensity of the locality. The quarter, the block, the street corner, the diner—these are all transformed from the specific into the generic. They stand for a series of broader preoccupations. They capture the ironic contrast between the anonymity and disorganization of the ‘mainstream’ and the endurance of order at the social margin. They subvert the conventional moral order by affirming the rationality and morality of the local community.
More importantly, they have explored one of the most pervasive themes of sociological thought since the beginning of the twentieth century and before. That is, the search for collective social life in the face of individualism, the search for community in the face of anonymity, the search for intimacy in a world of strangers.
The Search for Community
The search for community has not been confined to American scholars, nor indeed to urban ethnographers. It would appear that social observers generically have been fretfully engaged with the theme of modern fragmentation and the loss of community. In the UK the classic theme was that of the spatial distribution of social classes in the urban scene rather than the ethnic dimensions of American social science. Young and Willmott (1957, 1973) were responsible for some of the most distinctive and influential of such studies. Their studies of neighbourhood and community in London’s Bethnal Green contrast it with the new suburban housing estate to which the East Enders were migrating. They echo the tone of nostalgia for community, for the urban village, for local intimacy. They epitomize a distinctive British sense of class and community: a palpable affection for the compact and intimate village, based on local craft industry and trade, embodying the physical and social warmth of the public house, the social intimacies of neighbouring and the dense networks of mutual obligation based on kinship and shared occupational cultures.
Bethnal Green represents the epitome of London’s East End in the immediate postwar period, when memories of the blitz were fresh, when modern re-housing projects were new, and when ‘tradition’ was confronted by the urgency of social and economic regeneration—embodied in the Festival of Britain just across the Thames on London’s South Bank. The coal mining community occupied an equivalent symbolic space. The dense physical inhabitation, its distinct position in the division of labour—mining as a particular kind of aristocracy of organized labour—granted the mining community a particular mythologized significance. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter (1956) made that concrete in their ethnography of a mining town. It captured the relations of intimacy and trust, the intensity of face-to-face social relations, that were among the abiding characteristics long associated with the sociological analysis of ‘community’. It satisfied deeply held, and not always explicitly articulated, feelings associated with a romantic celebration of working class heroism. The mining community stood some way between the modern and the premodern, the urban and the rural. It thus provided a historical link between several traditions of ethnographic research, linking the metropolitan with the rural. The mining ‘community’ has continued to occupy an iconic position in the canon of sociological topics. It has exerted an interest in the UK, for instance, that has clearly outlasted the mining industry itself. From a recurrent, nostalgic commitment to the occupational traditions and the life of the coalfield community studies have followed the miners into everyday life after mine closure (Dicks, 1996) to the re-creation of coal mining as part of the heritage industry (Dicks, 1997, 1999, 2000; Strangleman et al., 1999): arguably, community sociology itself was already a form of ‘heritage’ industry.
The fullest expression of community ethnography was to be found, in both the United Kingdom and in the United States, in the genre known as community studies, addressing the small-scale and the rural (Brunt, 2001). They described the persistence of the premodern. They also reflected long-term perspectives on the rural, as described for instance by Raymond Williams, inscribed in long traditions of literary and other representations (Williams, 1975). Images of small-town and rural social life pervade social and literary imaginations. There is a history of intellectual engagement with the rural community and its premodern characteristics that is as long as the equivalent fascination with the modern city. It is to be found influentially in the tradition of German-language sociology—most famously in Toennies and his ideal-type of Gemeinschaft (Toennies, 1957), and rather less well known in the work of Schmalenbach, who also theorized the nature of communitas in the Bund (Schmalenbach, 1977). It represents in part an intellectual reaction to the perceived pathologies of metropolitan life, a nostalgic return to the small-scale and the intimate, a rediscovery of mutual trust and obligation rather than impersonal contract in a cash nexus. Community studies were a hybrid genre between the ‘local’ studies of sociology and the ‘distant’ field research of social or cultural anthropologists. (In this context distance is not governed by mere geographical measurement: many of the ‘others’ studied by American anthropologists were the indigenous peoples of North America.) Community studies could satisfy an implicit desire for ethnographic fieldwork in self-contained settings, and a search for distance away from the urban milieu. In the UK they typically inhabited the geographical and social margins, most notably in the Celtic fringes and the borders. This is indeed a genre of the liminal. The villages in which community was to be found were poised between premodern and modern social life, between past and present, between the familiar and the strange. There the anthropologist-sociologists found the fine grain of mutual support and obligation, the ties of kinship and trust that sociology had typically found missing in the fragmentations of mass society. The multiplex ties of kinship and mutual obligation were encoded in the networks of reciprocity in the face-to-face community. The pre-contractual basis of trust was rediscovered. In the United States the rural community and the small town encapsulated traits of the American ethos, embodying values that contrasted with the metropolitan centres. Smalltown America has for a long time enjoyed a particular mythological status, and there was a close parallelism between literary and other artistic representations of the setting, and the sociological-cum-anthropological tradition of ‘community’ studies. The search for community and the nostalgia for past intimacies continues, in renewed manifestations. The popular reception of Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000) is but one contemporary manifestation of the general spirit.
Selves and Identities
Self and identity are repeatedly treated as problematic in the sociology of modern society, while postmodern perspectives have given renewed urgency to the treatment of identity. We have already suggested some of the ways in which the modern urban setting was regarded as a site of disrupted and fragmented identities. The tradition also asserts the essentially social character of the social self and of self-identities. Self-awareness is at the heart of interpretative social science, including George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist legacy, in which the dialectical relations between mind, self and society are established (Baldwin, 1986; Miller, 1973). Charles Horton Cooley also formulated the ‘looking-glass self’ in an attempt to capture the processes of mutual regard through which the self is constituted. The judgement of others constitutes a social mirror in which the actor sees himself or herself reflected in the perceptions and evaluations of others, and so experiences a sense of selfhood, accompanied by those feelings of pride or mortification that in turn reflect the degree to which that self matches or falls short of a desired ideal (Cooley, 1930).
Cooley’s others constitute a kind of audience, and in Goffman (1959) the sense of audience is rendered most vividly. His dramaturgical metaphor of everyday life portrays it as a kind of performance, and the self as a process of enactment. From the outset, the self of interactionist and Goffmanesque sociology is an embodied process (1963a). The body is at once cultural and physical. It provides the functional and expressive means through which everyday life is articulated. The presentation of self is always accomplished through physical work of some sort. The body is not merely a passive field but an active constituent of social enactments. Goffman develops Mead’s reflections on gesture to outline a grammar of performatives. Goffman provides a sociological counterpart to the philosophical consideration of speech acts, through a formulation of performances in which the self is achieved in its worldly presence with others (Goffman, 1963b, 1967). In that sense Goffman recapitulates Mauss’s pioneering work on the techniques of the body (Mauss, 1934). Mauss had extended Durkheim’s insistence on the pervasiveness of the social into the superficially intractable domain of the physical body, showing how the most mundane of activities inscribed culture in the corporeal.
Goffman’s self is also a ‘ritually delicate object’, in that it is created and sustained through the everyday rituals of social interaction. The social encounter is the fundamental unit of analysis, and in the face-to-face encounter social selves are produced and reproduced. The self is rendered delicate in that it is always a precarious achievement, open to threats and changes in definition. The mutable self thus reflects the plastic ‘definition of the situation’—an equally core concept in the interpretative tradition.
The long-term sociological project of work on self and identity has been given renewed urgency under the auspices of scholarship that is conducted under the auspices of late-modernity or postmodernity (Denzin, 1991, 1992,1995). There has been a new emphasis on the nature of the self under contemporary social conditions. It is argued that the social self is subject to unprecedented forces that lead to fragmented identities, in which analytic emphases are placed on instability and flux. Goffman’s contributions have been carried on—though the debt is sometimes unacknowledged—in various guises. The mutability of identity has been stressed. The absolute novelty of such insights has been exaggerated. Likewise, there has been a relatively new fashion for interest in the body. Significant while the new sociology of the body has been, it continues a strand in the interpretative tradition rather than initiating a completely new direction of scholarship. The interpretative tradition of qualitative research has for long recognized and explored such phenomena. But the ethnographic understanding of such things has sometimes been pursued in isolation from the main streams of theoretical fashion and orthodoxy. What is new in recent years is the congruence of ‘high’ theory with the abiding concerns with qualitative sociological traditions.
Lives and Voices
From the earliest years of the twentieth century the traditions of qualitative research have included the collection and analysis of documents of life. Indeed, ‘lives’ have been repeatedly documented and reconstructed, from letters, diaries, life-history interviews, oral testimony, biographical narratives and similar sources. In more recent years, lives have been supplemented by the reproduction of ‘voices’. Lives and voices inhabit a long development of humanistic, qualitative research (Plummer, 2000, 2001).
Life documents were among the earliest sources of data collected and analysed by the Chicago-school sociologists. Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918-1920) work with documents from Poles in Chicago and in Poland has long been regarded as a classic. It was one of the first major pieces of empirical sociological research to attain such classic status. It captured one of the main substantive themes of the first Chicago school—the transition from the Old World to the New. The work exemplified the social, cultural and personal consequences of the sudden translation into a modern urban environment. Perhaps, though, the methodological stance of The Polish Peasant was more significant than its substance. Certainly it is the research approach that has been an enduring inspiration and reference point.
In the mythologizing of past research methods, it is too easy to reconstruct the heroic golden age of the early Chicago School in terms of a fully fledged ethnographic approach. But participant observation—in today’s sense—was not regarded as the sole or even the main kind of data collection. The life and the life-history were promoted as the sociological approach par excellence, and documentary data were held up as exemplary sources for such sociological work. Thomas, for instance, not only worked on the life-documents of displaced Poles. He also used texts such as letters to problem pages among the sources for The Unadjusted Girl-a work famous for the inclusion of his famous dictum concerning ‘the definition of the situation’ (Thomas, 1923).
The life-history also gained classic status in Shaw’s extended biographical work with an adolescent deviant—the eponymous ‘jack-roller’ character who is the central character of the resulting monograph (Shaw, 1930). This work too has gained classic status in the canon of American empirical sociology. Again, this reflects primarily the fact that it was one of the first extended works of life-history reconstruction, based on repeated interviews with one informant. It retains its significance as a methodological exemplar rather than for the specific insights it might provide into deviant careers and identities.
At one time, then, life-histories, assembled from interviews or documentary sources, could be regarded as sociological materials par excellence. The ‘life’ encapsulated the personal and the public, social structure with personal subjectivity. In the face of survey methods, however, the life-history rather fell into obscurity. From the centre of sociological interest it was relegated to the margins. There continued to be outstanding life-history studies; Most notably they included Heyl’s study of a house-prostitution madam (Heyl, 1979) and Klockars’s (1974) study of a professional fence. These exemplified the strength of the life-history tradition.
In more recent years, varieties of the ‘life’ have been granted renewed currency in the social sciences. The biographical has been reintroduced. This has, in part, been promoted under the aegis of various poststructuralist and postmodernist tendencies in theory and method. In our view it is not necessary to invoke those particular meta-theoretical frames in order to justify a fresh interest in the documentation of lives; those tendencies have undoubtedly provided fresh justifications and have helped to encourage a commitment to such work.
The earlier genre of life-history owed something to other social and cultural forms. They had affinities with literary forms such as the Bildungsroman—the novel of personal development. The Chicago School style of work related directly to contemporary fiction. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy has an especially close affinity with that sociological tradition, not least from the setting of the fiction, and the fact that the author had himself studied sociology in the Chicago department. The fictional tradition and the sociological tradition alike traced the development of character in predominantly urban settings. They described what Goffman would later call the ‘moral career’ of characters (1961). In a manner reminiscent of the fiction of Zola, they explored the interaction of character and circumstance. Again, this is not entirely adventitious. We are told that the younger sociologists at Chicago were encouraged to read Zola as an exemplar of realist writing about social life.
Late twentieth-century interest in life-history took on a different array of connotations from earlier work and this continues into the new century. There has been a special emphasis on biographical and autobiographical narratives. Indeed, one can argue that the personal narrative has become one of the central modes of social and cultural inquiry of recent years. Biographical narrative has taken on a different kind of significance from the earlier representations of life-histories. As Atkinson and Silverman (1997) have suggested, this in part seems to reflect the growing cultural significance of the interview and the biographical confessional mode in contemporary society. The cultural work of the print media and television constantly reproduced the personal interview as the preferred way of capturing and disseminating information. There is a strong cultural preference for self-revelation through the interview. In contemporary society at large, the interview is a site for much more than the rehearsal of events. It is a genre for the expression of feelings. Events without emotional responses seem devoid of significance in this discourse. Rather, feelings have precedence over actions; emotions are granted greater significance than events.
The impetus for recent biographical work shares similar preoccupations. Atkinson and Silverman argue that the sociology reproduces the obsessions of the ‘interview society’. Sociological attention is paid to actors’ ‘experiences’ and ‘feelings’ with diminished attention to social organization and social action. The interview becomes a technology of self-construction and the reconstruction of lives. Interview sociology and the interview society become complicit in the celebration of lives. The interview has, they argue, become a contemporary technology of the self.
The interview society and interview sociology stress the identity of the social actor, and her or his biographical distinctiveness. It is, moreover, paralleled by a similar attention to the biographical work of the social scientist. The biographical and the autobiographical thus converge. This is a particular application of the principle of reflexivity. The autobiographical account of the research process has long been an aspect of field research, and it has been identified with a ‘confessional’ genre (Van Maanen, 1988). The confessional mode has become increasingly urgent in recent writing, however. Where once the confessional was confined to a methodological appendix or to a separate essay (often in anthologies of retrospective essays by experienced researchers) it has become central to the research itself (Coffey, 1999). In some cases the autobiographical self-absorption of the ethnographer can assume greater importance than the social actors or social setting that provide the ostensible subject matter. The sociological work echoes more vernacular reproductions of lives and voices, such as Terkel’s collections of vox populi interviews (e.g. Terkel, 1970, 1974).
The transformations in ‘lives’ and ‘voices’ mark the culmination in a major series of changes in the applications of qualitative research strategies. The celebration of biography in the so-called postmodern period marks the move from action to experience. The sociological gaze has moved decisively from observable actions to reported emotions and experiences. Everyday life is no longer conceived in terms of shared cultural resources and interaction; it is conceived primarily in terms of the personal and the private. The researcher no longer seeks ‘access’ to a shared social world, but ‘access’ to the private realm. It is a move from a distinctively social domain to a personal one. It ceases to be the exploration of a ‘strange’ exterior world and becomes the exploration of the interior world of feeling. This is no longer the detached gaze of the flâneur, nor even the conditional engagement of the professional stranger. It is more akin to a therapeutic relationship than a disengaged research-oriented undertaking (Atkinson, 1997). The analytic metaphor of qualitative research seems to have shifted from the visual observation of action to one of listening to the voices of others and to the interior monologue of personal reflection.
The celebration of voices accompanies ethical as well as methodological transformations. Under the auspices of postcolonial and other critical standpoints, scholars have increasingly sought to reinstate the voice of the ‘other’. It has been argued repeatedly that previous, conventional modes of ethnographic research privileged the voice of the ideal-typical observer (prototypically white, Western, male and privileged) while subsuming or muting the voices of the objects of the research gaze. In the process, however, the celebration of voices seems to have become privileged over the analysis of actions.
Aesthetics and Representations
We have alluded to a number of affinities between the social sciences and literary and other cultural forms already. It is important to note that there have been direct or indirect influences between the wider cultural and representational sphere and the conduct of the social sciences. Ethnographic and other qualitative research has not developed in a vacuum. While widespread and explicit literary experimentation may be a recent phenomenon among qualitative researchers, that does not mean that for most of the twentieth century there was no interplay between the literary, the artistic and the ethnographic. On the contrary, the affinities are an integral part of the intellectual history.
There were, for example, significant parallels between the development of the first Chicago School of urban ethnography and the literary imagination of realist fiction. Cappetti (1993) has documented such literary parallels in some detail. In a similar vein, it has been possible to trace intellectual and aesthetic convergences between Malinowski’s ethnography and Conrad’s literary preoccupations, and there are significant surrealist influences on anthropology (Clifford, 1981). More generally, of course, the modernist encounter with the primitive’ plastic art developed over a similar period of time that twentieth-century ethnographic fieldwork practices were established by British, European and North American scholars. It is wrong, therefore, to assume that an awareness of the literary and aesthetic possibilities of ethnography is an exclusively recent topic of interest. As early as 1935 Zora Neale Hurston was experimenting with literary forms for the expression of anthropological texts: hers was one of the first experiments in what has later been called ‘blurred genres’ forms of representation (Hernandez, 1995). Likewise, Bateson’s Naven must be recognized as an early essay in ‘alternative’ textual forms (Bateson, 1936).
Since the early to mid-1980s, however, sociologists and anthropologists have become increasingly aware of the textual conventions through which even the most orthodox of ethnographic texts has been constructed. The conventionality of ethnographic writing extends to the homology between functionalist anthropological work and the arrangement of ethnographic monographs, the use of textual practices like the ‘ethnographic present’, and the textual inscription of the ethnographer’s authority. As well as a heightened awareness of textual forms, an increasing number of ethnographers have experimented with ‘alternative’ literary forms for the reconstruction of social reality. These have included the construction of ‘ethno-drama’, of ‘ethno-fiction’, of poems and other self-consciously aesthetic experimentations (Angrosino, 1998; Banks and Banks, 1998; Handler, 1988; Jones, 1998; Mienczakowski, 2001; Wolf, 1992). These in part reflect the call for ‘messy texts’ that in turn reflect the complexity and indeterminacy of ethnographic understanding, and stand in opposition to texts that rest on realist conventions, and enshrine a monolithically authorial gaze.
Philosophies and Justifications
Ethnographic and cognate social research have not developed for over a century completely divorced from broader intellectual currents, as we have seen. Equally, they have not been entirely separated from theoretical and epistemological currents. It is not appropriate here to review all the possible theoretical claims that have been invoked for or against particular research strategies. We do, however, want to sketch out some general themes and in doing so correct some current misrepresentations. In general terms, one cannot point to definitive links between specific theories or philosophies of science and particular research approaches. It is sometimes convenient to do so for pedagogical purposes, but like most such pedagogical devices, at best it incorporates half-truths.
Qualitative research traditions clearly have a long-standing elective affinity with various strands of ‘interpretative’ social thought. In the United States there are strong family resemblances, personal and institutional links between the tradition of symbolic interactionism and qualitative research. The institutional links include the Chicago School of sociology. George Herbert Mead’s social philosophy and social psychology—most notably in his profoundly social characterization of ‘mind, self and society’—provide a significant point of reference (Baldwin, 1986; Miller, 1973). In the subsequent work of scholars like Herbert Blumer the strands of symbolic interactionism were to some extent codified into a coherent justification for a distinctive sociology. Blumer’s was a particular reading of symbolic interactionism that articulated a distinctive methodological vision (Hammersley, 1989). In the ‘Second Chicago School’ (Fine, 1995) there is a clear continuity between the interactionist and the ethnographic strands of work in the institutional ethnographies of Becker, Geer, Strauss and their contemporaries (e.g. Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss, 1961; Olesen and Whittaker, 1968). The transformations of the self through occupational and organizational socialization, for instance, provide a major programme of empirical research studies that portray the systemic relationships between institutions and persons (Becker, 1970; Hughes, 1971). The social psychology of interactionism also furnishes a major methodological warrant for ethnographic fieldwork. There is, as we have seen, a homology between the interactionist model of the social actor and that of the reflexive ethnographer (Rock, 1979).
Interactionism is not, however, the sole inspiration or justification for qualitative research. Versions of social phenomenology and existential sociology have also been of some influence. Indeed, it is noticeable that at various times in the development of qualitative or interpretative sociology, distinctions between those perspectives have not been especially clearly demarcated. At crucial periods in the dissemination of the relevant ideas, for instance, ‘symbolic interactionism’ has included work inspired by social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, existentialism and other philosophical or methodological tendencies.
The phenomenological tradition has been a major influence on the conceptualization of qualitative research. Alfred Schutz’s marriage of Weberian sociology and Husserlian phenomenology, together with his own migration to the United States, provides one significant link between European social philosophy and Anglo-American sociology (e.g. Schutz, 1967) Not an empirical social researcher himself, Schutz provides one philosophical justification for a distinctive approach to social research. This was given greater impetus by the work of Berger and Luckmann (1967) in their synthesis and exegesis of phenomenological sociology. The movement legitimated serious attention to social constructivism, including the social construction of expert knowledge, and the mechanisms of everyday practical reasoning. The affinities between social phenomenology and qualitative research lay in the former’s close attention to the practicalities of mundane action and common sense reasoning. Those included the use of typifications. Empirical research on the use of typifications—in professional reasoning, the everyday organization of work and organizations—was directly influenced by the phenomenological turn. The ethnographic study of practical reasoning and processes of categorization in situ became a major topic in the development of empirical qualitative research. In recent years, varieties of phenomenology have been given new leases of life in a number of substantive research domains. For instance, a number of practitioners of nursing research have claimed phenomenology as a distinctive foundation for qualitative inquiry into nursing knowledge and practice: the accuracy of those claims is beyond the scope of this chapter.
The phenomenological movement was also paralleled by various programmes of existential sociology and the sociology of the absurd (e.g. Douglas and Johnson, 1977; Lyman and Scott, 1970; Morris, 1977). Drawing inspiration not only from phenomenological philosophy, but also from other continental schools of thought, the existentialist and absurdist standpoints rested on the assertion of the arbitrariness of social life, the absence of intrinsic meaning, and the dissolution of assumptions of stable social order. There are affinities too between these radical sociological perspectives and theories of the spectacle and situationist radical perspectives in politics and aesthetics. The absurdist perspective also self-consciously draws on aesthetic movements: including, of course, the theatre of the absurd. In that sense, it also harks back to earlier affinities with surrealist aesthetics and theories. The emphasis on the essentially arbitrary nature of the social, and the radical view of the ‘definition of the situation’, were both central to the existential and absurdist positions.
It would be wrong, however, to focus unduly on the purely transitory phenomena of avant-garde epistemologies, or on the novelties of phenomenological or other ‘turns’ in qualitative sociology. Those movements and moments reflect a longer series of commitments in humanist interpretative sociology. Severyn Bruyn (1966) provides a major statement of humanist sociology that links phenomenological insights and the merits of participant observation. Earlier, Florian Znaniecki (1934, 1940, 1969) articulated a humanistic rationale for a sociology that also reflected his own qualitative’ research commitments.
We have mentioned from time to time already in this chapter that interests and commitments that have relatively long histories in sociology and other social sciences (notably anthropology) have been granted renewed attention, and endorsed with increasing enthusiasm in recent years. The theoretical enthusiasms that have led to the cultural turn in the social sciences have fuelled interest in qualitative research methods. They have also given renewed urgency to the exploration of representational modes. Likewise, the linguistic turn in the social and cultural sciences has renewed the array of qualitative research strategies. The traditions of conversation and discourse analysis are beyond the confines of this particular chapter. But their distinctive approaches to spoken action have provided an especially powerful way of understanding social interaction, understanding the performance of selves and identities, and the discursive accomplishment of everyday reality. Those interests converge with contemporary work on the biographical, through new programmes of work on narrative, biography and autobiography.
The ethical and epistemological commitments of feminist scholarship have led towards a broadly qualitative agenda. This has drawn on several kinds of justification. Stanley and Wise, for instance, base their methodological commitments to a feminist perspective on everyday life that owes much to the phenomenological spirit and something to the eth-nomethodological programme—in treating the everyday world as problematic from a feminist viewpoint (Stanley and Wise, 1983,1993). Likewise, Smith unites a feminist perspective with that of an interpretative tradition (1987, 1990,1999) to produce a distinctive synthesis of perspectives. More generally, qualitative research has been claimed as especially congruent. The newer emphasis on intimacy, biography and autobiography owes much to feminist commitments (see Coffey, 1999; Reed-Danahay, 1997; Stanley, 1992). These perspectives transcend vulgar appeals to feminism that uncritically equate quantitative with masculinist and positivist standpoints, while endowing qualitative methods with female and/or feminist qualities. Rather, they suggest that there is a convergence between a feminist commitment to treating everyday categories of thought as problematic, and the fundamental commitments of interpretative social science, including qualitative research methods.
Conclusion
A number of characterizations of qualitative research have stressed discontinuities in the development of the tradition(s). Those genealogies are often misleading. They have looked primarily at the explicit statements of methodologists—selectively at that—rather than looking more broadly at the major themes that have characterized the traditions. Other commentators have tried to insist on the existence of mutually exclusive and incommensurable methodological paradigms. Such an approach does violence to the intellectual history of interpretative sociology and qualitative methods. The mutual influences of theories, methods and practical research have been complex. There are no one-to-one relationships between theories and methods. There are no such things as ‘paradigms’ within these broad traditions. There have been changes of emphasis at various historical junctures, of that there is no doubt. Nevertheless, the identification of more and more historical periods, and more and more distinct paradigms, is equally absurd. Moreover, the authors of those reconstructions of the past frequently ignore significant contributions in order to produce spurious genealogies and developmental sequences.
There have been some remarkably durable and pervasive themes, some of which we have outlined here. Changes in emphasis need to be appreciated against this backcloth of recurrent preoccupations. For that reason, it is important to understand qualitative’ research traditions in terms of subject-matter, and not just in terms of specific methods of data collection and analysis. We have not made methods’ the focal topic of this chapter. The development of ethnography in Western urban settings, or in small-scale ‘communities’, or the use of the life-history interview, need to be understood in the context of generic sociological themes that have informed their use. Qualitative research in sociology has never been defined and practised entirely in terms of method alone. The qualitative research tradition is grounded in a more general set of intellectual commitments. It is not defined solely by the use of participant observation or interviewing. Even the more general commitment to ‘ethnographic’ perspectives does not equate with those foundational concerns. We have attempted to outline and illustrate just some of those major currents of social thought, of which methodological interests are but a part, however important.