John Lofland

ANALYTIC ETHNOGRAPHY Features, Failings, and Futures

The research strategy sometimes termed analytic ethnography has been a prominent—or even the dominant—form of qualitative inquiry for some decades. Lacking challenge by other qualitative approaches, however, there has been little need to articulate it as a distinctive strategy of qualitative research. The approach having now been challenged, it has become necessary clearly to adduce its defining features as a step in the larger task of undertaking accurate and systematic comparisons of diverse qualitative research strategies. I here attempt this first step by delineating seven features or tendencies that, in composite, constitute analytic ethnography. Following this articulation, I suggest some of analytic ethnographys successes and failures as a strategy of social research and I speculate about its future.

Becoming a World-Saver Revisited:

Loflands earlier work, widely assumed to have been done on the beginnings in this country of the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, resulted in development of the most widely cited conversion model in the literature of sociology. Here he updates and extends this previous work, based on a follow-up study of the same group studied earlier.

Early Goffman: Style, Structure, Substance, Soul

In the early nineteen sixties a happy chorus began to chant adulations around the work of Erving Goffman. The litany included such endearments as ‘remarkable’, ‘brilliant’, ‘insightful’, ‘meaningful’, ‘trenchant’, ‘landmarking’, ‘fascinating’, and ‘masterful’.1 I want in this chapter to ask: About what was there suddenly so much enthusiasm? My answer takes the form of delineating what appear to be the main features of Erving Goffman’s early sociological work, the work he published in the fifties and early sixties.2

Theory-bashing and answer-improving in the study of social movements

Over the 1970s and 1980s, a “theory-bashing” mindset gained popularity among sociologists of social movements and, for a period, overshadowed the alternative mindset of seeking to improve answers to questions about social movements. Now on the wane, theory-bashing nonetheless retains a significant presence. This mindset has a number of attractions and virtues and it is, broadly speaking, legitimate. But, it also has negative features and consequences that I want to point out. I begin by showing how the theory-bashing differs from the answer-improving mindset and I then explain ways in which the former hinders the analysis of social movements even though it can also be helpful. Finally, I offer a sociological account of why theory-bashing has been so popular in movement studies.

Erving Goffman's Sociological Legacies

Erving Goffman bequeaths us four main kinds of sociological legacies: the substantive study of the interaction order; a special intellectual perspective on sociology more generally; a reverent spirit, attitude, or mood with which to deal with scholarship; and a distinctive mode of being a scholar, colleague, and friend.

Bearing Bad News: Tactics of the Deputy U.S. Marshal

Occupations differ in the frequency with which their performers must communicate bad news to a serviced public. At one extreme, bad news must be communicated several times a day, day after day. One such occupation, the deputy U.S. Marshal, is analyzed in terms of tactics employed to manage the stressful moments of preparing to deliver bad news, delivering it, and shoring up recipients after delivery. Detailed tactics described include distancing, presaging, treating as routine, manipulating the message, and displaying certain supportive attitudes in interaction.

Open and Concealed Dramaturgic Strategies: The Case of the State Execution

SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS VARY in the degree to which their copings with basic aspects of life and death are dramaturgically open or concealed. A concealed dramaturgics of life and death events erects physical, social, and psychological barriers to perception, regulates the entrance and exit of participants and witnesses, controls publicity, and minimizes temporal duration, among other things. An open dramaturgics allows and even promotes the opposite. One way usefully to conceive that enormous transformation in the western world typically captioned, &dquo;the industrial revolution,&dquo; is as a shift from open to concealed dramaturgics in the management of many life and death matters. The primal scenes of fornicatilig, birthing, wedding, and dying (of humans afzd other animals) have shifted from relatively commonplace openness to delicate concealment. The historically open and ubiquitous acts of defecation and urination and their products have become shielded and contained. Disease, hunger, gross

Sociologists as an Interest Group: Prospect and Propriety

Over the last two decades, American society has changed in ways that significantly alter our relationship, as sociologists, to it. I want in these remarks, first, to depict these changes—the coming of something approaching “the interest-group society”—and, second, to point up the new measure of social value that accompanies it. Like it or not, sociologists must develop some sort of posture toward this new interest group context and its emerging measure of value. As my third task, therefore, I want to outline the three main postural possibilities: Continuation of the relatively passive status quo; rejection of politics altogether; and, a more assertive interest-group program. In the spirit of exploration rather than advocacy, I shall, fourth, detail some of the things a more assertive posture might mean and require. It is, however, one thing to list aspects of hypothetical programs; it is quite another to mobilize resources for them. Further exploring, I shall, fifth, consider some of the major facilitants and inhibitants of any important upgradings in our collective posture. Finally, I will offer some personal reflections on all this.

How to Make Out in Graduate School: One Observer's View

The establishment of new graduate sociology programs and the rapid expansion of such programs in general have created a deficit of peer socialization as to the latent, unwritten requirements of successfully attaining the Ph.D. The present paper seeks partially to correct this deficit through explicating a number of existing but unwritten requirements of success in graduate sociology. The explication focuses upon six informal aspects of the graduate experience that affect student success and it makes recommendations on how to manage each aspect: 1) being conscious that one should early decide his personal data style and substantive interests; 2) performing early a sizing up of the faculty in terms of their congruence with one and in terms of their national repute, as well as developing relations with congruent faculty; 3) knowing the factors professors employ in siting up students; 4) realising that accomplished papers are the key to graduate success, and knowing how to manage ones papers; 5) recognising the relative unimportance of formal examinations; and 6) knowing how to chose and manage ones doctoral thesis topic and committee

Deviance and Identity

Prologue to the Percheron Press Edition, Joel Best 1. Introduction: Ideological Matters 2. Introduction: Logical Matters I. The Deviant Act 3. The Defensive Deviant Act: Threat and Encapsulation 4. The Defensive Deviant Act: Closure 5. The Adventurous Deviant Act II. The Assumption of Deviant Identity 6. Social Identification as Pivotally Deviant 7. Escalation to Deviant Identity: Others and Places 8. Escalation to Deviant Identity: Hardware and Actor III. The Assumption of Normal Identity 9. Social Identification as Pivotally Normal 10. Escalation to Normal Identity: Others and Places 11. Escalation to Normal Identity: Hardware and Actor 12. Concluding Remarks Bibliographic Index