ABSTRACT
Can we ever escape narrative? I doubt it. The more my career unfolds as a qualitative researcher the more convinced I am of the disjunction between the formal representation of what it is we as social scientists do and our owntales from the field. The formal representation is often couched in epistemologically loaded terms, such as “theories,” “concepts,” “data,” “methods,” “schools,” (e.g. ethnomethodologist, interactionist, interpretive sociologist, constructivist, etc.) and concomitant issues of veracity such as “the adequacy of the data,” the “representativeness of the sample,” the “match between theory and data,” the “novelty of the theoretical contribution,” and so on. The ethnographic field tale, however, is more likely to be couched in terms of authentically describing what the people we talked and interacted with said and did; how they experienced their world, what it was like to be there, do that, feel that, and so on.1 It is widely recognized that these latter sorts of experience, grounded in the contingency of everyday language and practice, can often be better narrated with the tools and skills of the journalist or the novelist. That is why a journalist writing about football hooliganism can produce an account which is as interesting, rings as true, and is as insightful as one couched in the formal language of the social sciences.2
