1
Martyn Hammersley
SOME REFLECTIONS ON PAUL ATKINSON’S FOR ETHNOGRAPHY1
As its title makes clear, one of the purposes of this book is to present a manifesto for
ethnography. Its other main aim is to offer guidance about ethnographic analysis: Atkinson
suggests that many of those starting out on ethnographic work do not know ‘what to look for,
how to organize their thoughts and reflections and how to structure their ethnographic work’
(p9). He is particularly keen to emphasise the distinctiveness of ethnography, and this derives
in part from his critical attitude towards much qualitative work today, specifically where
interviews or focus groups are relied on as the main or exclusive method, and where the
primary aim is to document people’s personal experiences or perspectives. He describes the
orientation behind this trend as Romantic, or sentimental, since it fails to recognise that
expressions of personal experience and viewpoint are always constituted in and through
interactional and discursive forms, rather than being reflections of ‘authentic’ individual
selves or transparent representations of the world. In large part, his objection to this kind of
work may be that it is unsociological. Much autoethnography comes in for criticism on the
same grounds. What Atkinson advocates is a more formalist approach to understanding the
social world, for which he sees ethnographic investigation – indeed ‘micro-ethnography’
(p121) – as essential.
There is much of value here. It is undoubtedly true that there is a great deal of
apparently unthinking reliance on interviews and focus groups, and frequently a misplaced
preoccupation with ‘giving voice’ to people, as well as a tendency to neglect the situated and
constructed character of all accounts. Atkinson also usefully emphasises the interactive
character of qualitative analysis, countering both those who seem to think that analytic ideas
emerge from data on their own, or can be generated by following some procedure, and those
who wish simply to ‘apply’ pre-existing theories. And he resists the current emphasis on
methodological innovation for its own sake, and the associated neglect of past work. In this
connection he writes: ‘We overlook our origins at our peril, and too many contemporary
commentators find novelty where there is none, revealing nothing new but a collective
ignorance of the past’ (p4). That there is considerable ignorance of this kind is manifest.
Furthermore, his discussion of the need to integrate analysis of different types of data (aural,
visual, and material), and to take account of the dimensions that structure social interaction,
especially time and space, provides very valuable guidance. In support of all this he presents
many illuminating examples, covering diverse types of context, both from his own work and
that of others.
At the same time, there are some important methodological and theoretical questions
raised by this book, not all of which are addressed directly by the author, and it seems fruitful
to focus on these here. One set relates to the particular version of ethnography that is put
forward and how it is presented. Closely associated with this is the way in which Atkinson’s
position seems to combine constructionism with a commitment to faithful representation of
‘the intrinsic, indigenous modes of social organisation’ (p74). His adherence to formalism
1
Paul Atkinson For Ethnography, London, Sage, 2015.
2
owes something to a variety of sources, from Simmel and Goffman to ethnomethodology, but
he does not address here the important differences among these, and between them and his
own approach. There are also a few more specific issues: relating to his reliance on the
pragmatist tradition, notably his appeal to the concept of abduction; his recommendation that
ethnographers attend to both micro and macro aspects of context; and his insistence that
ethnography is intrinsically ethical.
The status and character of ethnography
Atkinson treats ethnography as superior to other approaches, in effect as the gold standard.
For example, he writes that ‘‘Ethnographic fieldwork is not just a way to conduct social
research. It is a very special way. It is, if not the way, a distinctive way of knowing and being
as a social scientist [...]’ (p3). And, a little later on the same page, he describes it as the ‘most
rewarding and faithful way of understanding the social world’. These are bold and
contentious claims, but he offers very little direct argument in support of them.
While he locates ethnography in relation to some other approaches that he regards as
problematic – notably, as already mentioned, interview studies, the use of focus groups, and
autoethnography – he does not discuss its relationship to the broad range of competing
methodological stances that now exist in social science. Indeed, he displays a distinct lack of
interest in, or even opposition to, doing this. At one point he complains that ‘too often’
ethnography ‘is overlaid with all sorts of epistemological and theoretical “positions” and
disputes’ (p5).2 Although I sympathise – there is indeed a great deal of spurious
philosophising in the field of qualitative research – in my view he underplays the
fundamental differences in orientation now to be found in that field, a point I will illustrate.
Furthermore, given that we live at a time when, in powerful quarters, there is strong emphasis
on the value of ‘big data’, randomised controlled trials, and ‘mixed methods’, it is surely
necessary in any ‘manifesto’ to address the question of the distinctive value of ethnographic
accounts in comparison with the products of these other sorts of social research. Against this
background, the superiority of ethnography cannot be treated as a foregone conclusion.
This links to another issue that Atkinson does not address, but which is relevant to his
discussion: the relationship of ethnography to the demand, backed by enormous pressure
today, that social research must serve public policymaking, or at least have practical payoff in
other ways. Instead, he locates ethnography within a traditional academic conception of
research, treating what it produces as having intrinsic worth. For example, he claims that
‘well-crafted monographs’ have ‘enduring value’ (p195). I have no quarrel with this, even if
the nature of the value being assumed here needs clarification.3 However, such appeals to the
He adds that ‘To some degree, of course, academic debate and intellectual justifications are unavoidable, but
too much is made of them’.
3
Atkinson draws a parallel between the crafts he has studied and ethnography as a craft. However, while there is
much to be said for this – and the notion of social research as a craft is a longstanding one – the metaphor fails
to apply in some important respects. In particular, crafts generally produce objects that lay audiences value, and
indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, for which they are prepared to pay. But I do not believe that
ethnographic monographs have value in that sense on sufficient scale to finance the enterprise. Of course, appeal
could be made to some transcendent notion of value, in the way that art has often been justified, but that idea has
been subjected to considerable criticism, and it is unclear how it could apply to ethnography. While some
2
3
intrinsic value of knowledge are now widely regarded as insufficient, at best, so that this
position requires defence. Research posts and funds are increasingly tied to applied forms of
inquiry and to ‘public engagement’, and even academics’ use of research leave often now
requires them to make commitments to produce specific ‘outputs’ addressing current
‘priorities’ that will have specifiable ‘impact’ via ‘knowledge transfer’. One wonders how the
kind of ethnographic work that Atkinson favours – involving lengthy fieldwork that is
exploratory in nature, and not directed at practical payoffs – can survive in this environment.
Moreover, the challenge to this academic orientation comes from within the research
community as well as from outside. At one point Atkinson mentions the commitment of
many qualitative researchers today to pursuing social justice through their work (p186).
While not espousing this, he does not explicitly reject it either. Some clarification of his
stance here would have been welcome, since the use of social science to pursue any political
goal, however benign, also surely represents a threat to the sort of ethnographic work he is
advocating.
Turning to what Atkinson says about ethnography, it is important to recognise that
while he claims that ‘an old-fashioned approach to ethnographic fieldwork lies at the heart of’
his book (p4), there are features of what he recommends that are not characteristic of a
considerable amount of past work coming under this heading. For example, though he largely
rejects the use of interview data as a source of information about people’s lives and
perspectives, much work categorised as ethnography has used this as a key complement to
participant observation, and sometimes such data have been treated as central. Secondly, his
formalist interpretation of the goal of inquiry is rather different from the more substantive
foci common in a great deal of ethnographic work, where the aim for instance is to describe
and explain some problem in the lives of a group or type of people, the strategies they use to
deal with it, the consequences of these, etc. Third, he rejects the idea that ethnography is
concerned with discovering what people actually do as against what they say they do, or what
is really going on as against what is portrayed in official or other accounts (pp99-101). Yet
much work that would often be included under the heading of ethnography has been
committed to such concerns.4 While debating what sorts of work are ‘truly’ ethnographic
(p121) is fruitless, it is important to recognise that what is being presented here is a
distinctive version, indeed in many ways it is an explication of Atkinson’s own recent
ethnographic work: it does not represent the full range of ethnography, as conventionally
understood.5
knowledge can be of value irrespective of whether or not it is actually valued, not just any knowledge has this
status: it must have relevance to human concerns. Ethnography of the kind advocated by Atkinson seems to
claim this via the notion that it documents social forms, or more generally how social order is achieved. I will
examine this idea later.
4
To take just one example, picked more or less at random, my old PhD supervisor Isabel Emmett described her
aim in studying a North Wales village as ‘to observe, understand and record what people actually did, rather
than what they said they did’ (Emmett 1964:ix).
5
In one place Atkinson recognises this: he says he is calling for ‘a re-specification of the basic aims of social
research, and of course of ethnographic research in particular’. And he continues: ‘It is important to insist that
the main thrust of good ethnographic research is to understand how social action is accomplished, how orderly,
co-ordinated activity is undertaken, how knowledgeable and skilful techniques are employed, how material
goods and artefacts are made, used and circulated’ (p18). It is perhaps of significance that the term ‘re-
4
One way of describing the distinctive kind of ethnography being promoted here would
be to say that it is ethnography in the service of a ‘sociology of everyday life’. Atkinson
frequently refers to ‘everyday life’ or ‘mundane reality’ as the focus of inquiry, and it is
certainly accurate to describe much of the work of Simmel, Goffman, and
ethnomethodologists as concerned with this. For example, Garfinkel (1967:1) declares that
ethnomethodology involves ‘paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the
attention usually accorded extraordinary events, to learn about them as phenomena in their
own right’. Moreover, this was a focus that was given considerable emphasis in the late
1960s and early 70s, the formative period of Atkinson’s career (see Adler et al 1987).
Interestingly, it is a theme that has been returned to quite recently, albeit sometimes
approached from very different angles (Sztompka 2008; Pink 2012; Kalekin-Fishman 2013;
see also Human Studies, 3, 1, 1980 and Sociology 49, 5, 2015).6
Rather like the flowering of social history in the middle of the twentieth century, this
concern with everyday life amounts to a reaction against an exclusive focus on events,
actions, structures, etc. that are deemed to be of great social, political or economic
significance. Within sociology this focus on the mundane was perhaps, above all, a reaction
against a ‘social problems’ perspective, or to various forms of ‘grand theory’. In some
versions, and this is true of Atkinson’s book, the emphasis is on how particular kinds of
social order are established and sustained in and through everyday patterns of social
interaction.
There are at least three rather different arguments that could be put forward in support
of this focus. One is that everyday life is a worthwhile but neglected topic in its own right. In
these terms it complements other kinds of sociological and anthropological investigation.
Alternatively, it may be argued that it is not possible to understand the issues and problems
with which other sorts of social science are concerned without taking account of the mundane
social processes that these inevitably involve. From this point of view the study of these
processes provides a foundation for any sociological investigation. The third position is that
studying everyday social processes is the only rigorous or worthwhile form of social science.
Atkinson seems to adopt the second of these positions, though he does not offer much explicit
argument in support of it. This is an issue I will examine later.7
specification’ has frequently been used by ethnomethodologists to designate the radical shift in the focus of
social inquiry that their work exemplifies (Button 1991).The change that Atkinson is proposing may be less
radical, but it is still quite a significant departure from much ethnography, and from much social science more
generally. This is a point that is highlighted if we compare Atkinson’s account with another recent defence of
‘traditional’ ethnography, against some of the same trends: see Walford 2009.
6
There is also a French tradition – artistic and philosophical – concerned with everyday life: see Sheringham
2006.
7
A further sort of rationale would be via the idea that ‘the personal is political’. However, while there are many
aspects of everyday life that have social, economic, or political significance, not every aspect of it does. And
significance is, of course, a matter of degree and perspective. Aside from this, Atkinson would, one presumes,
reject this rationale because the term ‘personal’ relates to the experience of individuals, rather than to the social
forms that he sees as constituting everyday life.
5
The critique of interview studies
As already indicated, one of the central themes of Atkinson’s book is a critique of the
common tendency for many qualitative researchers today to rely primarily on interview data.
At one point he suggests that interviews are ‘essentially a lazy way of undertaking social
research’ (p8). However, his criticism of interview studies goes beyond the complaint that
there is too much unthinking use of this method. For example, he argues that interviews:
Provide little or no opportunity to investigate the multiple forms of social organisation
and action that are the stuff of everyday life. They yield information (of sorts) in a
vacuum, bereft of the sensory and material means of mundane reality. They furnish no
opportunity to study the techniques and skills that social actors deploy in the course of
their daily lives, or in accomplishing specialised tasks. (p92)
The argument here is a methodological one: that crucial data about behaviour in other settings
will not be available via interview accounts of it, so that direct observation is required if this
behaviour is to be understood. He writes:
We need participant observation if we are to develop a strong, practical sense of
encounters and performances. We need visual data in order to capture matters of
posture and embodiment. Likewise we need to be able to record matters of appearance
– clothing, hair, body-modification. We need, of course, permanent recordings of
spoken activity too. (p86)8
It should be noted that while this may be true for the kind of micro-ethnography of patterns of
social interaction that Atkinson focuses on in his book, it is not obviously true in some other
kinds of ethnographic work; for example, say, in research concerned with what sorts of
people use a particular type of drug, how they obtain supply of it, why they use it; or in
researching how children become involved in prostitution and the effects on their lives. In
these cases, it seems to me that a great deal of useful information could be obtained via
interviews, some of it relating to matters that may not be open to direct observation.
Atkinson’s argument is not, then, a basis for a blanket rejection of conventional uses of
interview data by ethnographers, in the way that – in places – he seems to suggest.
There is another argument that is often used to question the use of interview data as a
source of information both about other situations and about the beliefs and attitudes of
informants. This concerns reactivity: the suggestion is that these data are unreliable in
representational terms because they are co-constructed by interviewer (generally the
researcher) and interviewee, rather than simply being an expression of what the latter knows,
believes, feels, etc.9 However, it is important to recognise that what is involved here is a
claim about the degree of reactivity in interviews, as compared with observation of ‘naturally
Later he reduces the requirements slightly: ‘a minimum requirement is close in situ observation and careful
recording in the form of detailed fieldnotes, perhaps accompanied by sketches of embodied activities’ (p86).
9
For an example of the use of this argument about reactivity to question reliance on interview data, see Potter
and Hepburn 2005 (for a commentary see Hammersley 2013:ch4) – though they use other arguments as well,
including some that Atkinson also employs.
8
6
occurring’ behaviour. After all, observation will often involve reactive effects too: the
argument is presumably that these will be at a lower level. Furthermore, to some extent at
least, it is possible to allow for reactivity in the course of data analysis; indeed reactivity can
even be illuminating – for example showing how informants respond to types of people from
outside their normal range of contacts. Moreover, it is misleading to conceptualise reactivity
in terms of a dichotomy between naturalness and artificiality, as if interviews, and indeed the
ethnographer, were not part of the world being studied. While Atkinson questions that
dichotomy at one point (p99), in other places he seems to rely on it: for instance, he writes
that ‘research interviews are deliberately designed occasions on which such performances are
enacted, and to that extent there is no question: they do not constitute “naturally occurring”
sources of data’ (p95).
Rather than treating reactivity as a basis for rejecting conventional uses of interview
data, it could simply be argued that we must be cautious in how we handle all data,
recognising that they may have been shaped by the research process in ways that could lead
us astray. This requires us to take account of reactive effects, but only to the extent that they
are a potential source of error in our interpretations and conclusions. In the case of
interviews, much depends upon the conditions under which they were carried out, what was
said and what inferences are being drawn from this. In places, this seems to be Atkinson’s
position, as for example when he rightly complains that ‘we too often find informants’
accounts of events, or memories, or descriptions of social action, reproduced as if they were
transparent representations’ (p93). However, generally speaking, he seems to adopt the more
radical conclusion that interview data should not be used as a source of information about
what the informant has witnessed or about her or his beliefs and attitudes. In my view this is
not warranted, and it restricts the evidence available to ethnographers, thereby narrowing the
range of topics they can address.
Later, Atkinson employs a further argument, one which is the central theme in what
has been referred to as the ‘radical critique of interviews’ (Murphy et al 1998:120-3;
Dingwall 1997; Hammersley and Gomm 2008). This emphasises that interview accounts are
governed by discursive conventions, and are forms of action, rather than serving as windows
on the world or into the minds of informants. Following Silverman (1993), he writes that:
we cannot approach interview data simply from the point of view of ‘truth’ or
‘distortion’, and we cannot use such data with a view to remedying the
incompleteness of observations. By the same token, we cannot rely on our
observations in order to correct presumed inaccuracies in interview accounts. On the
contrary, interviews generate data that have intrinsic properties of their own. In
essence, we need to treat interviews as generating accounts and performances that
have their own properties, and ought to be analysed in accordance with such
characteristics. (p95-6).10
However, at one point he does recognise that interview accounts ‘may help to illuminate aspects of [...]
observed activities’ (p75).
10
7
Silverman’s position in the work cited is that interview data can tell us little more than what
goes on in interviews, and, for the most part, it seems that Atkinson agrees with this. He
writes that ‘a recognition of the performative action of interview talk removes the temptation
to deal with such data as if they gave us access to personal or private “experiences”’ (pp99100). He suggests that, instead of being concerned with whether informants’ accounts provide
reliable information, we should focus on credibility as a property of those accounts
themselves, addressing the question: ‘How does the informant construct a plausible account?’
(p101). And as illustration he cites his own treatment of reports of alien abduction.
Atkinson highlights the positive as well as the negative aspects of this argument,
insisting that:
The interview is itself a social encounter. Interview-derived narratives and accounts
are performances in their own right. They are, or contain embedded within them,
speech events. They contain stories that reflect common genres. They construct
biographies and identities. They deserve attention from those analytic perspectives.
They do not deserve merely to be chopped up and coded thematically without proper
regard for their forms and functions as narratives and accounts (p60).
Here the suggestion seems to be that interviews should be treated as sites in which social
interaction takes place, of particular kinds, and that attention should be given to the discursive
practices and interactional strategies displayed there. Moreover, this requires paying close
attention to how the interview unfolds, rather than coding segments of data in terms of their
relationship to various emergent themes that concern matters external to it: the social
situations in which informants participate and/or their feelings, beliefs, and attitudes.
It is worth noting an apparent contradiction in Atkinson’s position here. Some of the
arguments on which he relies in dismissing the standard uses of interviews – arguments
concerned with reactivity, informants’ reliance on discursive conventions, and the fact that
talk is action – apply to observational data as well. As already noted, the latter often involve
reactive effects: people may behave differently because they know they are being observed.
Furthermore, participant observation involves informal conversations that rely on discourse
conventions and consist of talk as action. And any fieldnotes that the researcher writes, and
transcriptions of recordings, also have these characteristics. Given this, why is the use of
observational data not ruled out as a means of documenting ‘the intrinsic indigenous modes
of social organisation’ (p73).The answer from Atkinson’s point of view is, I suspect, that if
we focus on investigating the forms of social interaction we can turn what are methodological
problems in studying substantive topics into theoretical resources. In other words, by refusing
to treat those forms simply as a resource in investigating substantive topics, our analysis
thereby becomes more rigorous: we are focusing on the constitutive processes that shape
social life, including research itself. This is a kind of argument sometimes used by
ethnomethodologists. However, both Atkinson’s critique of the use of interview data and the
formalist approach he puts forward appear to depend on a version of constructionism that is
open to serious question.
8
Constructionism
We can think of ‘constructionism’ (or sometimes ‘constructivism’ – the phrasing Atkinson
uses) as starting from a rejection of naive realism: the idea that the accounts people produce
(including those of researchers) are generated by the world impressing its character upon
their senses, this ‘impression’ then being ‘expressed’ in a manner that simply corresponds to
or captures that world. This, I suspect, is what Atkinson is opposing when he insists that
‘language-in-use is never a neutral medium of representation’ (p93). The implication is that
processes of perception and cognition necessarily shape what we experience, and what we
take to be true, that these are dependent upon the role of language, and that language must be
seen not as some fixed, internal, generative structure but rather as a diverse collection of
social practices. Thus, what is taken to be real or true is necessarily a socio-cultural product,
and will vary accordingly: in short, reality is socially constructed. From this it may be further
concluded that, since we do not have unmediated contact with reality, the validity of any
judgment about what is real, or true, is relative to the socio-cultural framework within which
it is formulated, or is conditional upon the discursive resources employed, and/or is
dependent upon whether the action in which it is embedded was successful in performative
terms.
However, while much of this argument is sound, the relativist or sceptical conclusion
drawn from it is fallacious. This is because it relies implicitly upon the empiricist
epistemology that has been rejected: in other words, it is assumed that for knowledge to be
possible (in other words, for there to be statements about the world whose truth status is
independent of any particular framework, set of resources, or successful form of action) we
must be able to register direct sense impressions and translate these into transparent
representations. And it is concluded that, since we are not able to do this, no knowledge (in
that sense of the word) is possible, that the meaning of this term, along with that of ‘truth’
and ‘reality’, must be redefined if they are to be used at all, so as to take account of their
relativity.11 Yet there is no reason to assume that in order to produce knowledge, in the usual
sense of the word, we must have unmediated contact with reality; or, indeed, that such
contact would produce knowledge. These conclusions would only be true if knowledge were
a copy of reality. Once we recognise that, instead, all knowledge consists of answers to
particular questions about the world, the assumptions on which any inquiry relies, and the
sociocultural resources it deploys, no longer need to be seen as necessarily distorting what is
produced; indeed, some assumptions and resources are essential to the production of
knowledge. While particular assumptions may lead us into error, others will take us towards
the truth.12
Atkinson appears to suggest that we can avoid the problem of treating data as
representing features of a world that exists beyond it by focusing on the forms through which
it is presented to us. Thus, we can use interview data to study the forms displayed in and by
it, and similarly when we are using observational data our focus should be on how the
11
12
It is striking that, like many other writers, Atkinson tends to put scare quote marks around ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
For some of the epistemological background to my argument here see, for example, Williams 2001.
9
performances observed are constructed – and, in particular, on the forms, methods, principles
of organisation, etc. by means of which this is achieved. However, my point is that this
remedy is unnecessary because the problem has been falsely diagnosed. While I agree that
our goal should be to document and explain facts – rather than to evaluate people’s actions or
the institutions in which they participate – this does not rule out assessing the likely validity
of people’s accounts as sources of information, in pursuit of factual knowledge. In other
words, if we reject the false sceptical conclusion drawn from constructionism, while we can
certainly decide to investigate social forms, this type of investigation is not privileged over
other more substantive foci, and we can use interview accounts as a means of gaining
information about the world along with observation.
Even aside from the fact that the sceptical constructionist argument is erroneous, we
should also note that it would work against Atkinson’s commitment to ethnography as
rigorous exploration of the social world. On the basis of epistemological scepticism or
relativism, ethnography itself can amount to no more than a performance to be assessed in
aesthetic, moral or political terms, rather than according to the likely validity of its findings.
It could only produce illuminating fictions, since the ‘knowledge’ it produces is socially
constructed just as much as the accounts of informants. By contrast, in places, Atkinson
appears to believe that we can have direct access through observation to social forms: that
these are simply there for us to see and to reproduce in our ethnographic accounts.13 He
writes, for example, that
we can examine the means and methods employed by parties to the encounter to
display mutual attention. The intersubjectivity of the encounter is not, therefore,
merely a vague (if productive) idea, but subject to empirical investigation and
analysis. Enactments of mutual attentiveness, for example, can be explored,
identifying mutual gaze, attentiveness, body posture and proxemics (Kendon 1990).
(p79)
Here his emphasis is on rigorous attention to and documentation of data concerned with the
enactment of social forms, and he treats these as immediately available to empirical
analysis.14
Along the same lines, Atkinson declares that the aim of ethnography is faithfully to
represent ‘the complexity of everyday life’ (p38), claiming that it ‘preserves’ this complexity
(p5), and even that it is ‘coterminous with’ ‘the social world under investigation’ (p173).15
Yet, while it is undoubtedly true that one of the contributions that ethnography, and other
kinds of research, can make is to expose relevant social complexities (as compared with
commonsense or theoretical understandings that gloss over these), recognising and revealing
13
This is an assumption that can also be found in ethnomethodology, and in phenomenology; though in the
latter case, at least in its Husserlian form, what is given and its mode of givenness are rather differently
conceived from what Atkinson has in mind.
14
By contrast, later, in outlining what is involved in ethnographic analysis he clearly recognises the need for
imagination and theory, rather than treating these as necessarily distorting the account produced.
15
Use of the word ‘coterminous’ reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s (2001:204) joke about the uselessness of a map
of scale one-to-one.
10
complexity is not a good in itself: it is of value only insofar as it facilitates understanding, in
the form of an answer to some question. Moreover, understanding requires at least some
simplification of the phenomena being studied (Hammersley 2008:ch2). Indeed, the idea of
capturing complexity is at odds with Atkinson’s commitment to formal analysis, since
studying social forms must surely involve reducing complex particularities to standard
patterns; looking for ‘generic social processes’ (p2) requires us to determine what is generic
and what is situationally variable. In this connection, Simmel (1950:16) refers to ‘the onesided abstraction that no science can get rid of’. The issue that must be addressed, therefore,
is: what is productive simplification and what is misleading simplification? Or, to put it the
other way round, which complexities must be preserved in an analysis and which can be
omitted, for the purposes of gaining the sort of understanding desired?
Of course, the term ‘complexity’ can have different meanings. In my discussion above
I have interpreted it as referring to the fact that, at best, social phenomena only approximate
to any given set of types, and that they are often subject to change over relatively short
periods, because they are produced by multiple causal factors. The contrast assumed here is
with physical phenomena, conceived as reducible to standard types among which there are
stable – perhaps even eternal – relationships.16 However, it seems that Atkinson is using the
word ‘complexity’ in a special sense, to refer to the fact that everyday social interaction is
generated by several ‘principles of orderliness’ (p19) rather than just one. He writes that since
‘‘Everyday performances are quintessentially complex and multi-modal enactments [...] they
need to be matched by ethnographies of equal complexity’ (p86). We should note that this
conception of complexity relies on a prior theory about the ‘principles’ (‘modalities’, ‘codes’,
or ‘forms’ are other words he uses) in terms of which social reality is organised or ordered.
And we might reasonably ask where this theory has come from, why we should assume that it
is valid, and why it should be treated as an essential framework for sociological analysis. The
first two questions could be answered by claiming that it has been developed out of previous
ethnographic work, assuming that this has displayed cumulative theoretical development – a
claim that is open to challenge. But the third question cannot be answered in this way, and I
will address it in the next section.
Formalism
Atkinson cites Simmel and Goffman in support of his commitment to a formalist approach.17
He criticises the failure to adopt such an approach in much qualitative research today: ‘We
have lost sight of the multiple ways in which social conduct is patterned through routine and
ritualized methods of conduct. We forget that cultural domains display codes of organization
and of signification’ (p13).
16
This may, of course, be an inaccurate picture of physical reality, as indicated by the development of
‘complexity theory’ (see Nicolis and Prigogine 1989). In Contours of Culture, Atkinson and his co-authors
(2008:207) suggest that their approach ‘complements the perspectives of complexity theory’.
17
Interestingly, what he has in mind here also seems to share something in common with Russian Formalism in
literary studies – in particular, a commitment to rigorous analysis of the structural organisation to be found
within ‘social texts’, rather than a concern with authorial intention and motive.
11
Simmel is, of course, renowned for his promotion of a formal sociology, and Goffman
follows in this tradition in many respects, even though he goes his own way. Involved in their
work is a contrast between form and content – between some structure or framework and
what fills, or is generated by, it – and perhaps also between the social, on the one hand, and
the personal, psychological, or individual, on the other. It should be said, though, that neither
Simmel nor Goffman are very clear about what is meant by ‘form’, and much the same is true
of Atkinson’s usage of the term.18
There seem to be several different meanings of ‘form’ that he has in mind. First, there
is the sense that is central to literary or textual analysis, where for example narrative is treated
as a language form that has specifiable constituents which must occur in some particular
order (as identified, for example, by Labov 2013: p102). What we have here is something like
the constitutive rules that define particular types of game, though of course the rules can
change over time, or develop differently in different contexts; and one game can morph into
another. A second, slightly different kind of ‘form’, consists of patterns of social action or
interaction that have the character of rituals, routines or skilful collective practices. One
example is the ‘interaction ritual’ studied by Goffman in the context of what he calls focused
gatherings or encounters. An example from Atkinson’s (2013) own research is the opera
‘master-class’ as a distinct type of pedagogical interaction. In these examples, much of the
emphasis is on regulative rules that guide behaviour, partly because of a commitment to
preserving ‘face’.19 A rather different example of the same type of form, despite overlap with
what is displayed in opera master-classes, would be certain sorts of occupational skill, such as
those deployed by the artists engaged in glass-blowing that Atkinson has also studied. In
investigating such social forms the concern seems to be with how they are established and
sustained, both as recognisable phenomena and as of value.20
Atkinson also identifies a more general type of social form: ‘modalities’, ‘orders’, or
‘codes’ that represent whole fields of social phenomena. Following Goffman, he refers to the
‘interaction order’, distinguishing this from the ‘political’ and ‘economic’ orders (p73). But
he also adds: the ‘semiotic order’, the ‘spatio-temporal order’, the ‘material order’, and the
‘aesthetic order’. One possible parallel here is with the different systems that operate within
the human body, such as the nervous system, the digestive system, and so on. However,
whereas these are relatively well-defined, despite the fact that they are interrelated, this is not
true in the case of Atkinson’s typology of orders. It is not entirely clear what each ‘order’
refers to and how this is separable from what the others denote, even in analytic terms. For
example, there are questions about how the ‘interaction order’ can be separated from those
practices that make up the ‘semiotic order’. And how are we to distinguish between the
semiotic and material orders when the latter is described as involved in ‘cultural codes’ and
as providing ‘semiotic resources’ (p21)? Furthermore, do not all of these necessarily operate
18
This was a criticism made of Simmel by Durkheim in an early commentary, see Durkheim 1965:47-8.
On the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules, see Searle 1995:27.
20
It is important to note that these forms are experienced by individuals as objective structures to be responded
to as facts, employed as tools, or adapted to in the course of interaction. They are not simply created by
individuals on the basis of personal preferences.
19
12
within spatio-temporal frameworks – indeed Atkinson emphasises that perceptions of time
and space are constituted interactionally and/or semiotically. And it is not clear whether he
sees these orders as overarching forms that contain, or frame, other more specific ones, or
whether they serve as a series of laminations (perhaps in line with the metaphor of ‘contours’
used in an earlier book: Atkinson et al 2008). There are also questions about the meaning he
is giving to the term ‘order’: this is presumably closer to the sense assigned to that word by
Garfinkel than that intended by Hobbes and Parsons; yet, as we shall see, Atkinson’s position
diverges in some significant respects from ethnomethodology.
Aside from this, though, it is clear that what Atkinson means by ‘order’, ‘code’, or
‘modality’ here is rather different from the more specific textual and interactional forms
mentioned earlier. In part, at least, these orders comprise what we might call constitutive
frameworks of interpretation. Atkinson states that ‘experience itself is constructed by and
through socially shared, culturally prescribed forms’ (p13). Simmel has provided the most
developed account of this kind of form. He starts from Kant’s notion of the categories of
understanding that structure our experience of the physical world, notably space, time and
causation.21 Kant famously argued that these are not present in the ‘things-in-themselves’,
only in ‘the-world-as-it-appears’. For Simmel, though, rather than being intrinsic to the
transcendental subjectivity through which we apprehend the world, they operate immanently
within that world, generated by the multifarious processes he refers to as Life. Furthermore,
he extends this approach beyond the frameworks of scientific understanding of the physical
world, of morality, and of aesthetics, the three fields on which Kant focused, to include
history and sociology as distinctive interpretive frameworks. Goffman pursues a similar
approach, albeit examining more mundane frameworks in Frame Analysis.22
There is, however, a significant difference between what Atkinson has in mind here
and the arguments of Simmel and Goffman, in that he stresses the need for ethnographers to
attend to all of the modalities he lists in examining any particular social situation.23 In
Contours of Culture, he and his co-authors write that we should not:
seek to render social life in terms of just one analytic strategy or one cultural form.
The forms of analysis should reflect the forms of social life: their diversity should
reflect the diversity of cultural forms; their significance should be in accordance with
the significance of their social and cultural functions. (Atkinson et al 2008:34)
Yet, from Simmel’s and perhaps Goffman’s point of view, forms as interpretive frameworks
involve discrepant ways of ordering reality and are therefore effectively incommensurable.
This implies that in any particular study the focus would need to be on one or other of them:
they cannot all be given the same weight. Thus, while the materials that make up other
21
Interestingly while, as we have seen, Atkinson treats the first two of these as important ordering principles
shaping social interaction, he rather ignores the third.
22
We should note that treating forms as immanent in the social world may seem to imply that human society is a
kind of collective mind. For Simmel’s account of the presuppositions of history, see his 1977 and 1980. For his
account of sociology as a distinctive perspective, see ‘The field of sociology’ in Wolff 1950.
23
It is possible that what he means is that ethnographers should give attention to the potential relevance of these
modalities in any particular case, but the problem I am outlining here persists.
13
‘orders’ may come within focus, they would only be taken into account selectively and would
be constituted in the terms of the order that is the main concern. Given this, there is an area
of uncertainty about the character of this third type of social form in Atkinson’s discussion.
On the basis of his formalist approach to the social world, Atkinson emphasises the
need to draw on multiple types of data: visual material and material artefacts as well as audiorecordings. This is integral to taking account of multiple orders or ordering principles. In his
analysis of opera master classes, for example, he emphasises the way in which the realisation
of this social form articulates space and time, and involves the deployment of speech, gesture,
and other non-verbal expressions, in a complex process of orchestration. And he is surely
right to resist both the temptation to focus entirely on audio data, as a result of the easy
availability of recordings, and the way in which a concern with visual data and with material
artefacts have come to be separated off from mainstream ethnographic work. Good research
must take account of any kinds of data that are relevant to the inquiry, and it is worth noting
that before the emergence of audio- and video-recording technology, ethnographers probably
tended to operate in a more multi-modal fashion than many have done subsequently.
What must also be resisted, however, is any tendency to subordinate ethnography to
the technologies now available for collecting data about human social life: these are no more
than means, and they can distort as well as enable – because it is possible to collect video
data, this may be judged to be essential, and because audio or video recordings allow finegrained, or frame-by-frame, analysis of action, it may be assumed that this is always
necessary. These are carts driving horses. Atkinson may agree with this, but there are places
in his discussion where he appears to make these forms of data and analysis a requirement.
This emphasis on detailed analysis amounts to micro-ethnography (p121). And I suggest that
this commitment stems from another important influence on his thinking: ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis.24
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as models
Built into ethnomethodology is the idea that if we are to understand the way in which social
life is organised we must approach it in a significantly different manner from that in which
natural scientists are generally seen as studying physical objects. Rather than treating social
phenomena as operating within a realm of causal processes that can be used to explain their
character and behaviour, we must focus instead on the methods by which people produce and
recognise instances of particular kinds of phenomena, in and through their actions. I suggest
that this is a fundamental difference in approach from much social science, and indeed from
much ethnography; I will characterise it as representing a constructionist rather than a
naturalistic stance.25
24
Of course, ethnomethodologists typically reject the micro-macro distinction, see for example Schegloff
1988:100. For Atkinson’s earlier ‘sympathetic but critical’ discussion of ethnomethodology, see Atkinson 1988.
25
I am aware that ethnomethodologists often deny any commitment to constructionism, and indeed criticise it –
see Button and Sharrock 1993. In fact, confusingly, they use the term ‘constructive sociology’ to refer to
mainstream forms of sociological work. However, the word ‘constructionism’ is used in a variety of ways, and
in the manner in which I have defined it here ethnomethodology would belong in this category.
14
One formulation of the task of ethnomethodologists is to explicate the, largely taken
for granted, cultural competence through which people act so as collectively and ongoingly to
construct the social world. The focus is on the how of actions and institutions rather than on
questions of why (i.e. of causality). This is analogous to the manner in which Husserlian
phenomenology sought to study the ways in which physical and other phenomena are
constituted in our experience of them. The argument, sometimes, is that social phenomena are
more various and variable than much social science assumes, and less standard in form than
is required for them to be studied scientifically, but that the methods through which they are
constituted are sufficiently stable and general to be studied rigorously. Conversation analysis
has been most successful in documenting these methods, for instance those involved in turntaking, in correcting oneself and others, in managing topical continuity and change, etc (see
Schegloff 2007). At the same time, questions have been raised about whether it adheres to the
ethnomethodological programme (see Lynch 1993).
In his book, Atkinson’s attitude towards ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
is generally positive (pp122-3). He rightly believes that they are important sources on which
ethnographers can draw. More than this, though, at one point he suggests that ‘the inspiration
of ethnomethodology could and should be pervasive’ (p121), in its concern with the
‘“methods” through which social actors accomplish their ordinary and their expert everyday
accomplishments’ (p121). Furthermore, there is an interesting parallel between his own
account of the value of studying how complex knowledge and skills are deployed by people
in situationally appropriate ways – for example in the context of producing an operatic
performance or generating artworks – and ethnomethodological studies of work; though he
does not emphasise the parallel.26 He also argues that ‘the distinctions between ethnography
and ethnomethodology are becoming harder to sustain’ (p123).
Another sign of the influence of ethnomethodology on Atkinson’s work, besides his
concern with detailed analysis of how social activities are performed, is his handling of the
concept of motive. He argues that motives must be treated as rhetorical products rather than
as causal factors operating on people’s behaviour. Here he is following Mills’ (1940) early
account of vocabularies of motive as well as later ethnomethodological arguments along
similar lines (pp97-8). Yet, it seems to me that Bruce and Wallis (1983) have conclusively
demonstrated that it is impossible to avoid the attribution of intentions and motives, even for
ethnomethodologists; and, indeed, that such attribution is central to most forms of
sociological analysis.27
Atkinson discussed these studies in his 1988 article. Also relevant, perhaps, is Collins’ (1981:373-4) argument
that sociologists of science need to be competent members of the research community they are studying.
27
See also Hammersley and Treseder 2007. For the debate on this see Sharrock and Watson 1984, Bruce and
Wallis 1985 and Sharrock and Watson 1986. See also Housley 2008. It is even more obvious in the case of Mills
that he does not avoid the attribution of motives, and apparently does not wish to: witness his claim that ‘The
differing reasons men give for their actions are not themselves without reasons’ (p904). That studying motive
ascription is worthwhile and important is not at issue, but sociologists also treat motives as mainsprings of
action and cannot avoid doing so, in one way or another, and in my view there is nothing wrong with that. In his
earlier discussion of ethnomethodology Atkinson (1988:449) complained that in ethnomethodology ‘motive is
not addressed in understanding social action. Language is not treated here as a medium for intentional,
26
15
At the same time, there are important respects in which Atkinson deviates from
ethnomethodology. One of these relates to the key ethnographic issue of context. For
conversation analysts, the only context the researcher can legitimately take into account is
that which is displayed as an oriented-to matter by participants within the processes of social
interaction being studied. According to this constructionist approach, all social phenomena –
whether in the background or the foreground – must be treated as constituted in and through
processes of social interaction (or discourse), rather than as existing prior to or outside of
those processes. However, while, as we have seen, Atkinson emphasises the need for detailed
study of social interaction, and thereby of how people context their behaviour, his prior
identification of different modalities or orders that structure interaction is at odds with the
constructionist conception of context on which Conversation Analysis relies. Furthermore, he
also suggests that the study of ‘the local production of social order’ needs to be ‘embedded in
more general accounts of social worlds’ (p76). Taking the example of Heath’s (2013)
ethnomethodological study of fine-art auctions, Atkinson insists that this should be
complemented by ‘a thoroughgoing ethnography of market-making in fine art and antiques’
encompassing ‘a variety of settings and encounters’ such as ‘valuations, expert evaluation of
art works and attributions of authorship, and evaluations of provenance’ (p123). Indeed, he
goes beyond this to require that an ethnographic study of any group or setting should take in
the broader society and its history. He writes: ‘Our ethnographic emphasis on real-time
observation and recording should not blind us to the broader cultural, social and historical
contexts in which ceremonial and discursive orders are created and sustained’ (p87).
This would be rejected by most ethnomethodologists, on the grounds that it involves a
spurious and arbitrary imposition of an external notion of context. Atkinson declares at one
point that ‘conversation analysts have sometimes been unwarrantably reluctant to engage
with broader ethnographic forms of inquiry’ (p80). But he does not tell us why he believes
that they have no warrant for this. While they have put forward arguments justifying their
stance (see, for example, Maynard 2006), he gives no attention to these. I agree with him that
their arguments are not convincing, but once this is recognised many of the reasons are
removed for believing that interview data cannot be used as a source of information about the
world, that social forms are the only legitimate topic for ethnography, that ethnographic
documentation must always be at the level of detailed analysis of interactional materials, and
that motives must be viewed solely as a matter of rhetoric.
Atkinson apparently sees no conflict between what I have referred to as naturalistic
and constructionist stances. He writes: ‘the social construction of reality does not mean, and
has never meant, that there is no material reality, or that phenomena are conjured up out of
thin air, by whimsical acts of will or imagination’ (p21). But, in fact, constructionists do
effectively deny the existence of a ‘material reality’ that shapes our behaviour, for example
discourse analysts of some stripes have denied that there is anything ‘outside the text’, and as
we have seen conversation analysts deny that there is anything beyond the context constituted
motivated social action’, and in the course of this he appeals to Bruce and Wallis’s arguments. His complaint on
that occasion seems to me to be well-grounded, but it looks as if he may have changed his mind about this.
16
in and through interactional processes. Moreover, it is hard to see how a consistent
constructionism could avoid this.
Atkinson seeks to support his argument here by appeal to the Thomases’ dictum: ‘if
men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas
1928:572).28 But he reformulates it as follows: ‘situations are real insofar as they are defined
as real and are real in their consequences’ (pp21). It is important to note that Thomas and
Thomas rely on a distinction between the objective character of a situation and people’s
subjective perceptions of it. Their point is that even if those perceptions are erroneous they
can have real consequences. By contrast, Atkinson’s formulation seems to imply that
situations are not real if they are not defined as real by participants. This points towards a
constructionist rather than a naturalistic conception of context. Yet, later, Atkinson uses the
same reformulation of the Thomases’ maxim but draws the conclusion that ‘situations, events
and encounters have a reality that is relatively independent of the individual participants’, and
he goes on to note that:
some constructivist approaches to sociological analysis have led to an undue emphasis
on the “definition” aspect of Thomas’s dictum, as if situations could be endlessly
defined and redefined indefinitely, with no regard to their conventional forms or
actual participants. We need, perhaps, to remind ourselves of the social reality of the
situation itself, which displays cultural regularities and social practices. (pp74-5)
There is an important ambiguity here, it seems to me, one that reflects the tension between
naturalistic and constructionist stances.29
Atkinson could perhaps argue that his position is a productive eclecticism, and that
what matters is the value of what is produced, rather than the internal consistency of the
position in philosophical terms.30 However, as I have already noted, he has not addressed the
issue of value in any sustained fashion, and assessing the value of what ethnography produces
immediately raises questions about the criteria to be relied on, with naturalism and
constructionism taking very different approaches. The former necessarily adopts some sort of
correspondence conception of truth, as Atkinson does when he claims that ethnography can
document ‘generic social processes’ or ‘indigenous forms of social organisation’. However,
most constructionists cannot adopt this notion of truth consistently, since they treat accounts
as constituting the reality documented, as Atkinson seems to do in his critique of interviews.
There is also the much more practical question of whether it is possible for
ethnographers to cover the extent of relevant context that Atkinson envisages. As already
noted, he emphasises the need for detailed analysis of talk along the lines of conversation
28
Goffman (1975:1) has commented that this dictum is true as stated but false as it is frequently interpreted.
There may be ways in which this ambiguity or uncertainty could be resolved, but Atkinson does not seem to
recognise that there is a problem here.
30
At one point he describes ethnography as a form of bricolage (p160), and this notion could be applied to his
use of methodological and theoretical ideas in this book. But, in my view, this is a problematic concept: see
Hammersley 1999. It is important to remember that Lévi-Strauss drew a sharp contrast between science and
bricolage, with art lying somewhere between the two.
29
17
analysis, accompanied by the study of non-verbal behaviour and immediate material context.
He writes that ‘technologies now mean that the ethnographer can [...] complement general
participant observation with participant recordings of encounters. [...] That is, we can
examine the means and methods employed by parties to the encounter to display mutual
attention. [...] Enactments of mutual attentiveness, for example, can be explored, identifying
mutual gaze, attentiveness, body posture and proxemics (cf. Kendon 1990). Likewise, the
relationship between speech and gesture is available for close analysis’. Doing this kind of
analysis is a very tall order in itself, but combining it with careful attention to the wider
societal and historical context in the way that he also recommends would be near impossible.
A counsel of perfection seems to be involved here.
A kind of foundationalism?
There is a further ambiguity in Atkinson’s work, this time derived from ethnomethodology
itself, rather than arising from combining it with ethnographic naturalism. This concerns
whether the kind of research he recommends is to be treated as a supplement to more
traditional sorts of social science, as a replacement for these, or as a foundation for them.
Sometimes, a commitment to ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ is expressed by
ethnomethodologists, whereby social research is treated simply as one among many other
members’ practices, and perhaps even analysed in these terms (see, for example,
Greiffenhagen et al 2011). However, ethnomethodologists have also criticised traditional
forms of sociology for adopting a false ideal, derived from taking natural science as a
methodological model, in terms of which the task is seen as causal analysis. Garfinkel’s
(2002) later argument that ethnomethodology is an ‘alternate’ to sociology encapsulates this
ambiguity rather than resolving it.
In parallel with this, it is not clear whether Atkinson regards the kind of ethnography
he practises, and recommends in this book, as the only legitimate form of social research or
as providing a more solid foundation on which traditional kinds of social science could rely,
in line with Schutz’s claims for his own more philosophical work on the phenomenology of
the social world (Schutz 1967) or Simmel’s (1950:9) argument that ‘the study of less
conspicuous forms of relationship and kinds of interaction’ is essential if we are to
understand ‘the major social formations – the traditional subject matter of social science’.31
What is certainly true is that Atkinson sees the kind of ethnography he is promoting in his
book as privileged over other kinds of social scientific work. But can this be justified?
31
Simmel seems to take the study of such behaviours as the distinctive focus of sociology, though he defines it
as a ‘method’, or a form, rather than as being tied to any particular content, perhaps on the grounds that
‘sociation’ makes up human social life in all of the areas covered by other social sciences. See Simmel 1950:1314. In these terms, sociology provides a foundation for these other sciences. Cicourel 1964 and 1968 also
appears to put forward a foundationalist position, in the form of the idea that research cannot be rigorous unless
it is based upon a full understanding of the means by which it is accomplished (on Cicourel’s position, see
Smith and Atkinson 2015). So, for example, if researchers are to use interviews as a source of data they must
gain a detailed understanding of the interview process that generated the data, and transparently document this
process for readers. It seems to me that this is an echo of an argument to be found both in Cartesian rationalism
and in positivism, and one that is false, since it would never be possible to produce a fully explicit account of
any knowledge production process, any more than a formal demonstration of the validity of the knowledge
concerned.
18
Sociolinguistic studies of discourse forms and Goffman’s documentation of
interactional forms clearly provide important resources that researchers can use in studying a
wide range of substantive topics, in particular facilitating methodological assessments of
likely threats to the validity of data and inferences from them, but it is less obvious that the
other types of form that Atkinson refers to could serve this purpose. Moreover, his work
offers not so much a foundation as a source of reminders and cautions. It certainly does not
establish that all social research, or even all ethnography, should study discursive or
interactional forms in detail, nor that social science requires such a foundation. At most,
research on the organisation of social interaction, semiotic processes, and so on, can serve to
complement and modify our experiential knowledge of social life, thereby improving the
assumptions on which other sorts of analysis rely. This is to give the study of social forms
rather less importance than Atkinson seems to assign it; on the grounds of a constructionist
formalism that, I have suggested, is not convincing.
Generating theory through abduction
Ethnomethodologists typically reject the idea that they are aiming to produce theories or
explanations (concerned with why), instead they insist that their aim is description of social
processes (in other words, a concern with how); more specifically, description of the methods
by which people constitute the social world.32 Atkinson also emphasises description but he
does not display the same aversion to theory. While he rejects the metaphor of theorybuilding (pp61-2), he argues that ‘we can and should move between different versions of
local reality, in order to move our analysis to the generic level, developing concepts – even
models – that capture recurrent features of social life across a range of social situations or
cultural domains’ (p14), and he claims that ethnography has generated cumulative knowledge
of this kind in some fields (pp36-7). So, he insists that, while ethnography requires ‘the
methodical exploration, analysis, and re-construction of a given social world’ (p6), it also
goes beyond this to produce ‘generic concepts and formal analyses that transcend the local
and the particular’ (p14). In this sense he claims that ‘ethnography is generalisable’ (p34),
this residing in our ‘capacity to generate reconstructions of social processes and social actors,
in such a way as to remain faithful to the complexities of the particular setting, while drawing
out the generic links and comparisons’ (p66).
Here Atkinson’s position is perhaps closer to that of Geertz than to
ethnomethodology. Neither he nor Geertz seems to see any conflict between the production
of idiographic description and of theoretical or explanatory understanding. Indeed, the latter
is to be achieved through the former. But how? Do these not involve incompatible
orientations (Gomm et al 2000; Hammersley 2008:ch3)?33 The problem involved here has
already been mentioned: identifying recurrent, generic features in particular cases surely
32
I will leave on one side the question of how sustainable the distinction they make here is and whether in
practice ethnomethodologists, for example conversation analysts, produce theoretical accounts. Much hinges on
what the term ‘theory’ is being taken to mean: for an outline of the senses in current use, see Hammersley 2012.
33
A similar problem arises with Simmel: see Tenbruck’s 1965 attempt to clarify what is involved in abstracting
forms from contents in his work.
19
requires abstraction from some of the detail of those cases, that which is deemed irrelevant to
the particular knowledge being pursued.
Atkinson’s proposed solution to this problem is abductive inference, a concept which
he draws from the pragmatist tradition, and specifically from the work of Charles Peirce
(Fann 1970). He writes that much of what passes for qualitative data analysis ‘is unhelpfully
flat, reducing the complexity of everyday life to a set of themes that remain otherwise underdeveloped’, and suggests that:
an implicit emphasis on inductive logic, rather than the abductive logic in the original
pragmatist tradition, can easily have a deadening effect on the conceptual complexity
of the analysis. An adequate and sensitive understanding of a given cultural system or
social setting may emerge from the ethnographer’s thorough knowledge of it, but it
will not emerge from peering at ‘the data’. So we really must free notions of analysis
from a close dependency on ‘data’. (p61)34
Later, he comments that: ‘we are in danger of losing sight of the role of imagination in the
ethnographic enterprise. In contrast, we need collectively to encourage the sort of
extrapolation and speculation that a thoroughly abductive logic implies’, suggesting that ‘our
analysis therefore resides in the skill with which we interrogate simultaneously the local and
the generic’ (pp66-7).
Atkinson’s conception of what abduction involves is similar in some respects to that
of Peirce, for whom it involves the development of a potential explanation for some puzzling
phenomenon not just through examining the phenomenon itself but also by drawing on
experience of other similar and different cases, as well as by deploying both existing
scientific knowledge and, as just noted, imagination.35 However, in many ways Peirce’s
model of scientific inquiry is very different from what Atkinson seems to have in mind.
Peirce treats abduction as aimed at developing a causal theory to explain some type of
phenomenon, whereas Atkinson interprets it as addressing the question: ‘what is this a case
of?’ (p65 and elsewhere) – a rather broader question, not specifically causal or explanatory in
character. And this raises a more general issue about the character of the ethnographic
product. I have already noted a tension between the declared goals of describing particular
social worlds and documenting ‘generic processes’. But, aside from this, Atkinson seems to
see the latter task as a form of description rather than of causal explanation. This contrasts
with Peirce’s concern with developing scientific theories that capture causal relations.
For this reason, Peirce saw abduction as one among several modes of reasoning
(including deduction and induction) that all play a crucial role in scientific inquiry, he did not
34
It seems to me that there is a puzzle here, given that Atkinson also places such great emphasis on collecting
very detailed data about the processes of social interaction being studied, not just talk but also non-verbal
behaviour, spatial arrangements, material artefacts, etc. The apparent contradiction may perhaps be explained in
terms of commitment to an iterative phase model: that ‘peering’ at the data is essential but that it must alternate
with periods when a more distanced approach is adopted that allows for creative imagination in developing or
refining concepts.
35
In fact, Peirce emphasises the role of intuition as much as creative imagination, regarding intuition as an
evolutionary product.
20
treat it as standing alone. For him, abduction led to theoretical ideas from which implications
must be deduced, and these hypotheses were then to be tested in order to assess the likely
validity of the theory, a process he sometimes referred to as retroduction. As with most other
qualitative researchers who have appealed to the concept of abduction (for example, Tavory
and Timmermans 2014), Atkinson neglects these complementary forms of reasoning, and
thereby apparently the need for testing the accounts generated through abduction. Perhaps he
regards it as simultaneously generating and testing the ethnographic account produced, but as
we have seen he emphasises the role of imagination in abduction and the need to gain
distance from the data, thereby minimising any empirical constraint on the accounts
produced.36
Atkinson writes: ‘the ideal-typical concepts and models feed directly into the analysis
of the local case, while the particularities of the local setting(s) contribute to an elaboration of
the general model’ (p70). At the same time, he declares that these ideal typical concepts are
metaphors which ‘have to be “found” through the imaginative work of abduction, whereby
general categories are drawn out from the particularities of local situations, and settings,
events and activities’ (p71). This illustrates the lack of emphasis on the need to test
interpretations, and the quote marks around ‘found’ underline this. Furthermore, as already
noted, it is not clear how a ‘general model’ is to be produced in the way described, given that
any such model always selects and simplifies, rather than simply reproducing complexity.37
So, while for Peirce abduction is concerned with developing a theory that identifies a
scientific law specifying the causal relationships operating among particular types of
phenomena under specifiable conditions, it is fairly clear that this is not what Atkinson
envisages, even when he refers to understanding generic social processes.38 Atkinson’s use of
the term ‘ideal type’ (pp36-7) perhaps signals this. Yet at the same time his usage does not
follow the model of Max Weber, for whom the focus of social science was on producing
singular causal explanations for value-relevant phenomena (ideal types being the means of
achieving this).39 Here, an examination of the differences between Simmel and Weber may
be fruitful. By contrast with Weber, Simmel is concerned with providing general
understanding of how particular social forms emerge via processes of social interaction, and
36
This neglect of the testing of hypotheses is perhaps encouraged or at least facilitated by the oscillation
between realism and constructionism.
37
Atkinson uses Oscar Lewis’s concept of the ‘culture of poverty’ as an example of a concept produced through
abduction. It is worth noting, though, that Lewis’s (1959, 1968, 1972) research practice was significantly
different from what is recommended by Atkinson, involving reportage of a single day in the life of five families,
and reliance on in-depth interviews with family members. Moreover, his research was concerned with the
substantive issue of poverty, rather than with social forms in the manner of Simmel or Goffman.
38
There are serious doubts about whether the kind of theory assumed by Peirce is achievable in social science.
My own view is that theorising in social science necessarily takes the form of the clarification and elaboration of
plausible ideas about motivation, unintended consequences, etc., these coming from experience and
commonsense as well as from research evidence, so as to produce rational models or other sorts of ideal type.
Interestingly, much of Goffman’s work can be interpreted in this way, as producing concepts that are focused on
people’s social identities and sense of personal worth, along with the effect of actions, personal characteristics,
and institutional arrangements on these, and how people work to preserve their sense of self in the face of
potential and actual challenges.
39
Atkinson is, perhaps, picking up on Goffman’s use of this concept in Asylums (Goffman 1968:17).
21
how they gain independent force so as to act back on those processes.40 /.However, he is
vague about the nature of this understanding and how it can be achieved. Nor does Goffman
provide much clarification of these matters as regards his own work. And Atkinson, like
Goffman, shows a decided reluctance to engage with such philosophical issues. Here a nonphilosophical pragmatism may be in operation, but this is very much at odds with the spirit of
Peirce, or even for that matter of James, Dewey, and Mead. Moreover, for the reasons I
outlined at the start, I believe that the need for epistemological justification is unavoidable,
albeit tailored to the context of social science and its publics rather than to the discipline of
philosophy.41
Research ethics
I will end by discussing a theme that is largely separate from those I have mentioned up to
now: Atkinson’s treatment of research ethics, to which he devotes his final chapter. While I
agree with much of what he says there, once again there are a few disagreements and doubts.
Some of these concern ethical regulation: while he is critical of this, I think he underplays
what is wrong with it. The problem is not simply that it is based on false, indeed
unsociological, assumptions about the nature of the social world, or that it frequently relies on
a defective understanding of social inquiry, but also that it is unethical in significant respects
and ineffective in its own terms. What is required is not its improvement but its abolition
(Hammersley 2009).
A second point is that Atkinson’s criticisms of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on
ethical grounds are excessive. While the notion of ethical equipoise is by no means
unproblematic, I am not convinced that ‘the very principle of the RCT is ethically flawed’
(p173). To his question ‘what could be less ethical than determining a person’s medical
treatment not on need but on the basis of a random-number generator?’, advocates of RCTs
would reply, with some justification: ‘administering medical treatments whose effectiveness
is unknown, that may have no value, or even be damaging’. Both sides of this argument have
force, and they encapsulate a very difficult dilemma.
By contrast, Atkinson argues that ethnography is intrinsically ethical. Presumably this
means that he believes that if it is done well it will be ethical, that it can only be unethical if
done badly. However, in my view, ethical concerns are never intrinsic to the process of
inquiry, even though they are an essential external constraint (Hammersley and Traianou
2012). Atkinson puts forward several rationales for his position. He writes that ethnography
is ‘a profoundly ethical form of enterprise, based as it is on a commitment to other people’s
everyday lives’ (p5). But this statement is misleading: ethnography is certainly committed to
Tenbruck (1965:84-9) emphasises the similarities between Simmel’s notion of ‘pure forms’ and Weber’s
concept of ‘ideal type’, but it seems to me that the differences between their approaches are greater than his
discussion suggests. For the background to my interpretation of Weber here, see Hammersley 2015.
41
We should also note that in producing his illuminating account of various social forms Simmel did not
employ the kind of intensive ethnography that Atkinson recommends. And much the same is true of Goffman’s
work as well, even the early books on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Asylums (1968) are
only partial exceptions. See Manning’s (1992:ch7) useful discussion of his methods. This perhaps raises the
question: is it necessary to do ethnography in order to document social forms? Atkinson seems to assume that it
is, but his appeal to the work of Simmel and Goffman is at odds with this.
40
22
understanding aspects of people’s lives, but that is different from being committed to those
lives, which would imply a concern with protecting, or even serving, people’s interests. And,
in fact, these two commitments will often diverge.
Another formulation that Atkinson uses is that by its very nature ethnography respects
the people being studied. This presumably arises from the fact that, from his point of view,
the ethnographer is concerned with explicating and documenting the knowledge and skills
involved in human activities. However, as I explained earlier, I regard this as an overly
restrictive conception of the task of ethnography, and one that does not match much that has
previously gone under this name, in both sociology and anthropology. Aside from this, a
great deal depends upon what is meant by ‘respect’. This word’s usual reference surely
extends beyond recognising that people deploy diverse and sophisticated cultural resources in
what they do. In the context of research ethics, it would usually mean taking account of their
right not to be subject to unwarranted harm, deception, or invasion of privacy. But there is
nothing intrinsic to good ethnography that will ensure this, it seems to me – unless these
considerations are being built into what counts as ‘good’, in which case the formulation is
circular. Indeed, there is a tension between the demands of effective research and those of
research ethics. For example, ethnographers often spend a great deal of effort on selfpresentation and building trust with people so as to gain access to the data they need. Also
involved here is a concern with minimising reactivity, which in effect means encouraging
people to forget that they are being researched. Both these aspects of ethnographic work
could be, and indeed have been, criticised as showing a lack of respect, or more broadly as
unethical.42 Finally, sometimes ‘respect’ can even mean thinking highly of people or
approving of them. But ethnographers will not always respect the people they study in these
terms, nor should they do so; and there would be little justification for restricting the focus to
people who can be respected in this sense.43
Atkinson offers a further justification for the intrinsically ethical character of
ethnography. He declares that ‘‘the highest ethical imperative is, from my own point of view,
fidelity to everyday life and its complex, detailed processes’. But while it is true that, like
other kinds of social research, ethnography is committed to epistemic values, above all truth,
these are not what is usually treated as central to research ethics. Moreover, I have already
raised questions about the notion of fidelity to everyday life as a characterisation of the task
of ethnography. While Atkinson is certainly right about the importance of commitment to
epistemic values, and that these are frequently neglected in discussions of research ethics, it
should be clear that researchers can pursue truth while being unethical in the manner in which
they do this. Many of the Nazi medical researchers put on trial at Nuremberg were not, as far
as one can tell, primarily concerned with inflicting pain on their victims but rather with
finding out, for example, what the human body could survive. They were committed to
42
See MacIntyre 1993, Homan 2001, and Hammersley 2014.
Perhaps Atkinson takes ‘respecting people’ to mean not criticising them? As I noted earlier, his position
appears to rule out questioning whether they are telling the truth, and in particular scrutinising whether they
actually do what they say they do. However, I suggested that there are no grounds for this, and indeed that these
concerns are central to much ethnographic work. There are also questions about whether refusing to evaluate the
truth of what people say constitutes showing respect.
43
23
epistemic values but their practices were grossly unethical. Much the same would have been
true of an ethnographic study of their work, however soundly carried out in methodological
terms.
Conclusion
In discussing Atkinson’s book, I have concentrated on problems and disagreements. These
reflect fundamental antinomies that underlie the field of social research methodology today.
They are important but also difficult to resolve, and they should not obscure the fact that this
is an extremely valuable book, especially for the guidance it provides about doing
ethnography, as regards generating fruitful analytic perspectives and taking seriously formal
aspects of social life. While in my view the book is much less successful in promoting
ethnography as an approach within social science, it nevertheless sets out a particular position
with clarity and force. More than this, it serves as an important and necessary challenge to
much current practice in qualitative research. Atkinson may not regard the issues I have
raised as needing resolution for sound ethnographic work to be done, but in my view they
must to be tackled if social inquiry, including ethnography, is to flourish, and perhaps even to
survive, in what is an extremely challenging present and likely future. While I certainly agree
that there is a great deal of misleading and often inept methodological philosophising about
qualitative research, there are nevertheless fundamental issues that require attention, as
Atkinson (1988) himself emphasised in his discussion of ethnomethodology some years ago.
They may not be resolvable in any straightforward sense, and total agreement about them is
unlikely, but they must be faced. By providing a distinctive account of the task and
requirements of ethnography, Atkinson’s book is an excellent stimulus to reflection about
them.
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