Bennett M. Berger

Structure and choice in the sociology of culture

In the methodological appendix to my counterculture book I referred to an incipient crisis in ethnography brought about by the doubts of ethnographers regarding whether they know what they claim to know, and whether those claims do any good or any harm to what people in what quantities; and who cared about the resolution of these doubts. I also talked briefly about efforts at solution represented at that time by grounded theory, ethnomethodology, leftist advocacy, and the kind of reflexive, interpretive ethnography represented (among other representations) by my book.1