ABSTRACT
This chapter is strongly critical of some of the methodological comments and preconceptions which inform Goffman’s work. It involves invidious comparison of Goffman with the ethnomethodological tradition originating in the work of Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel. It is, therefore, important to stress that this does not reflect a comparably critical view of the work which was done under the auspices of, though perhaps in tension or even at odds with, those preconceptions. Goffman was a sociologist of the first rank, and in many respects his studies are simply unmatched. My critical comments refer to what is considered to be his weakest area: general methodology. They address that feature of Goffman’s work, which is (in the words of my colleague John Lee) that it has so many admirers but few actual followers. Though I think there was great potential for radicalizing sociological thought within Goffman’s studies, this was difficult to exploit because Goffman continued to place those studies within the setting of thoroughly conventional assumptions about how the analysis of social order was to be undertaken. Goffman was vastly more concerned with marking out a specialized domain of investigation within the established framework of sociological inquiry than he was with developing an alternative to that framework. On the other hand, it was plain that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology was engaged from the very beginning in a root and branch re-examination of the very concept of sociology. Despite Garfinkel’s critical comments on Goffman’s work (Garfinkel 1967:172–5), I do not think it would have been impossible to have extrapolated from Goffman’s writings a similar stance to that which eventually became ethnomethodology. But as I shall show, such an extrapolation would run against the grain of much, if not all of Goffman’s explicit reflections on matters methodological.
