Qualitative Sociology: A Method to the Madness

Contemporary Sociology 9(5) (September 1980):720—21. Let me put the matter very simply: Qualitative Sociology is a firstclass book, a tight package, a beautifully written thesis on the varieties of doing ethnography and what you do with it after you’ve got it. Its strength lies in the integration of theory and methods; it is a kind of manual for the analysis of social forms of experience. Starting with Leonard Schatzman and Anselm Strauss’ Field Research, through Robert Bogdan and Steven Taylor’s Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods, to John Lofland’s Doing Social Life, the literature on qualitative research has quickly blossomed in the past six years. The theory of choice, to date, has been symbolic interaction. The preferred method of data collection has been participant observation and/or informant interviewing. The theoretical task has been this: how to conceive the necessary relationships between patterns of collective action while providing first for the perspective of the participant, and, second, while retaining a concern for the production of “social order.” The work reviewed here deepens our appreciation of the first——capturing “the actor’s point of view”——through a discussion of participant observation, interviewing, personal accounts and life histories, and other strategies in symbolic interaction research. This enterprise dominates the first part of the book. The second part is the explication of the structure of everyday life. Here the book catches fire. Here we see the relationship between social organization and practical reasoning in everyday life. Here is the clearest discussion of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (called “conversational analysis”) that I have ever read. Writers Schwartz and Jacobs state up front that they set out to author a book of scope and substance. They have succeeded admirably. Qualitative Sociology is a major work, an extremely well-written and consistently high level treatment of all forms of qualitative sociology—— for example, ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, conversation analysis, cognitive sociology, interpretive understanding——not only symbolic interaction and research derived from fieldwork. The book is entirely too complex to summarizeinsuchareview.Icanonly evoke the book’s themes, not explicate them. Qualitative work characterizes human action as subjective, motivated, intentional, reflexive, intersubjective, and thus meaningful to actors in structuring their behavior. Whereas symbolic interaction derives, they argue, from Weber’s concern with the “content” and “meaning” of social reality, formalsociologystemsfromSimmel’s concern with the generic and transsituational features of sociation. The leading figures in Part 1 are Mead, Blumer, Glaser, and Strauss.