ABSTRACT
Widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, Erving Goffman established face-to-face interaction as a worthy and sustained domain of inquiry. This chapter appreciates Goffman’s achievement, while critiquing his rule-based conception of interaction. Albeit in complex ways, Goffman treats rules as normative constraints for social actors and as explanatory resources for analysts. We review Goffman’s use of rules as an analytic construct across his entire corpus of work. To his perspective we counterpose a well-known other one, rooted in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which conceptualizes rules as resources for actors, who use them to produce recognizable social actions. Rules are “doings” in the sense of being participant-produced and accomplished in situ. The approach that we articulate is fully related to social theoretical explanation in showing how rules exist as accomplishments in the world, how they are relational and contextual, and how they are concretely rather than abstractly available for social explanation, according with the orientations of participants rather than those of the analysis.
