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The work of Alfred Schutz was an important early influence on Harold Garfinkel and therefore on the development of ethnomethodology. In this article, I try to clarify what Garfinkel drew from Schutz, as well as what he did not take from him, specifically as regards the task of social inquiry. This is done by focusing in detail on one of Schutz's key articles: 'Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences'. The aim is thereby to illuminate the relationship between Schutz's views on the character of social science and Garfinkel's radical proposal for a re-specified focus of investigation. This is further pursued by examining an important debate about the link between Schutz and ethnomethodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates what are frequently taken to be central commitments of Childhood Studies: the idea that children are worthy of study ‘in their own right’, that childhood is a ‘social construction’, that children are and must be treated as active agents, and that participatory methods are the gold standard. It is argued that while these ideas have been fruitful in some respects, they involve fundamental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Blumer was a key figure in what came to be identified as the Chicago School of Sociology. He invented the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ as a label for a theoretical approach that derived primarily from the work of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. But his most influential work was methodological in character, and he is generally viewed today as a prominent critic of positivism, and of the growing dominance of quantitative method within US sociology. While this picture is broadly accurate, it neglects an important strand in his methodological thinking. He was committed to the goal of a science of social life, while at the same time he was uncertain whether such a science is possible. In his Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, he identified a serious dilemma facing this project: the problem of how a scientific approach can be made compatible with the distinctive nature of human social life. In the first chapter of his most influential book, Symbolic Interactionism, he advocates a naturalistic approach to case study, and seems to treat this as avoiding the dilemma. However, there is evidence to suggest that, even towards the end of his life, he regarded the problem as still unresolved. In this article, I examine both sides of Blumer’s dilemma, and whether his attitude towards it changed. However, my interest here is not only historiographical. I evaluate Blumer’s arguments and show that his intellectual struggle with this issue remains relevant today, despite the shifts that have taken place in social science methodology and the philosophy of science since his death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both conversation analysis (inspired by ethnomethodology) and discourse analysis (of the kind proposed and practised by Potter and Wetherell) are usually treated as self-sufficient approaches to studying the social world, rather than as mere methods that can be combined with others. And there are two areas where their conflict with other approaches is clearest. First, they reject the attribution of substantive and distinctive psychosocial features to particular categories of actor as a means of explaining human behaviour. Second, they reject use of what the people they study say about the world as a source of information that can ever be relied on for analytic purposes. These two negative commitments mark conversation analysis and discourse analysis off from almost all other kinds of social scientific research. In this article, I consider how sound the justifications are for these commitments. I conclude that they are not convincing and that neither approach should be treated as a self-sufficient paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on sociologist Jonathan Potter's response to his article. Potter thinks the author is confused, but the author suggests that even if this is true, it arises at least in part from the character of approaches to research he was discussing and how they present themselves. Potter is right to baulk at the choice between paradigm and method which the author's title seems to offer. There are different ways of interpreting each of these options and this means that simple dichotomy is involved. So the author accepts all what Potter says about the diversity of discourse analysis and that it is not a paradigm in full Kuhnian sense. The focus of the author's article was more specific, it related to whether conversation analysis and discourse analysis can be justified as self-contained approaches to social research and whether claims about their methodological superiority can be sustained. Potter questions the author's attribution to constructionism of the idea that social phenomena do not have the kind of objective reality normally ascribed to them by social actors and most social scientists.

The article presents comments of the author to "Practical Scepticism," by sociologist Jonathan Potter. It seems to the author that this phrase carries with it the very equivocation that he claimed characterized Potter's work. In places, what Potter seems to be proposing is the bracketing of assumptions about whether or not the discourse being analysed accurately represents the world or indeed refers to anything beyond itself. Yet in other places Potter clearly wants to go further, in that the study of rhetoric is to replace or redefine philosophy and the social sciences. Phenomenological bracketing is not a form of scepticism, it is a methodological device which is designed to allow explication of the manner in which phenomena are constituted. The equivocation that the author was concerned with in his article is implicit in the concept of practical scepticism. If what is meant by that term is a methodological stance adopted for the pursuit of discourse analysis or discursive psychology, what is involved is not strictly speaking scepticism, it is temporary suspension of ordinary concerns for a particular purpose. Moreover, the usefulness of this stance cannot represent a challenge to philosophical or other social scientific work whose focus is different.