ABSTRACT
Lines of comparison between Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel frequently revolve around ‘Agnes’, Garfinkel’s study of an intersexed person in his book Studies in Ethnomethodology, as a submerged critique of Goffman’s notions of ‘impression management’ and ‘passing’ found in Presentation of Self and Everyday Life and Stigma. This chapter takes an original approach by looking instead at Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s contributions to the study of information and information concepts as central rather than peripheral to their more famous sociological programmes. That Goffman and Garfinkel considered information as a sociological topic distinguishes them within the canon of sociological thinkers; that they did so in the heated postwar environment even more so. Rather than reifying information, attempting to reduce their work to information as a root concept, this chapter looks at information as a topic in itself. This procedure highlights Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s distinctive takes on information. A lacuna within Goffman studies has been the lack of attention to Goffman’s work on information, regarding his book Strategic Interaction as his most proximate work on information. This chapter takes a broader view and highlights that information was a material topic throughout Goffman’s work. Likewise, Garfinkel’s writings show sophisticated treatments of information-in-use. Rather than trying to discern ethnomethodology throughout the historical record of Garfinkel’s corpus, it may be more productive to look at iterations of information concepts progressed within his work. Furthermore, this chapter looks at Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s writings on information as systematic, in that these were sustained and subject to change and development across and throughout their work.
