Search Results

What insights can the figure of the imposter provide into the social relations and cultural forms in the settings in which they emerge? How might ‘thinking with imposters’ be an important tool of analysis in the social sciences and humanities? This editorial essay sets the stage for working with these questions. It argues that the imposter is a figure that provides an important opportunity for thinking differently in social theory, much in the same way as other key conceptual figures like the parasite have done previously. Imposters tend to have been used in social theory primarily as a form of deviance which reveals an underlying order. The essay argues that thinking with imposters encourages us instead to emphasise uncertainty and to deepen our understanding of the dynamic relations in which appearance/reality puzzles are played out between imposters and their audiences.

The history of ethnomethodology is outlined, along with the context in which it arose. Responses to it from conventional sociologists are noted. The character of ethnomethodology is sketched, and the question of whether or not it constitutes a methodology is addressed. Summaries of later chapters in the book are provided.

The phenomenology of Alfred Schutz was a major influence on ethnomethodology, and on some other developments in sociology during the 1950s and 60s, notably the work of Cicourel and Berger and Luckmann. The character and reception of Schutz’s work is examined, and it is suggested that there are significant respects in which it has been misinterpreted. The context in which he began his studies is documented, and in particular his relationship to Austrian economics. Schutz’s aim was to resolve a problem that had been at the heart of this economic tradition: the grounding of its basic theoretical principles. And he identified much the same gap in the interpretive sociology of Max Weber. Schutz drew on the work of Bergson and Husserl in an attempt to clarify the nature of the lifeworld that underpins social and economic action. Two key questions are addressed here: whether his work served as a fundamental challenge to the positivism of the dominant sociological tradition in the 1960s; and whether Schutz regarded his work as part of social science or of philosophy, and therefore whether he was, in fact, aiming to build a phenomenological sociology, as seems to have been assumed by Garfinkel and many others.

This chapter compares the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman. Their work is often regarded as similar, being concerned with the study of mundane patterns of social interaction. However, ethnomethodologists usually insist that there are fundamental differences between them. Their orientations are examined via a comparison with the work of a third sociologist, Georg Simmel, who was an important influence upon Goffman. While Garfinkel does not seem to have drawn on Simmel’s work, there are interesting parallels: in particular, they share a concern with the constitutive role that social interaction plays in social life. It is argued that, despite similarities between the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman, the differences are more significant. For Goffman, the aim is to generate conceptual frameworks that illuminate everyday behavior, whereas ethnomethodologists resist the bringing in of new concepts, being concerned instead with explicating the processes by which social phenomena are produced in their own terms. Other differences relate to what is taken to be the context of social interaction, with Goffman treating the interaction order as mediating the effects of outside factors, whereas ethnomethodologists insist that the context of any process of social interaction can only be what is constituted as context within it.

This chapter presents an extensive discussion of how other social thinkers and theorists of social interaction regard solitary action, or better put, how they disregard it. The chapter examines a broad range of social thinkers and theorists from Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx to George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel. Readers will also find an analysis of an old literary friend, Robinson Crusoe, integrated into a pivotal discussion, as well as remarks on Bernice Martin’s social theory of housework as “magic,” which illustrates the capacity of solitary actions to provide comfort in times of trouble or distress.