'It's the Same Old Story'

Abstract

The years from the mid-sixties to the early seventies were for me years of great sociological excitement and discovery. It was a period when the orthodox theoret‐ ical framework and the conventional methodology of social research were put under scrutiny and were found wanting. The objective was to put something in its place which was better and more geared to our subject matter. For me, a re‐ searcher and later lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester, this period was stimulated and sustained by the arrival of Wes Sharrock, who brought with him both his desire for rigour and his monumental reading in theory and its relevance to research practice. It was his pursuit of this goal, influenced by his reading and teaching of Schutz, which prompted him to bring to Manchester a series of very distinguished naturalistic sociologists, all of whom played an important role in teaching but also in confirming our view of the sociological field. Not the least important of these visitors was Egon Bittner, whose approach to the nature of sociological organisation matched our own findings and provided solutions to problems which we were experiencing in our research activity. In general terms the greatest of these problems was that we could not recog‐ nise how the conventional models of the subject might properly be related to or to be grounded in the activities of those which we wished to study. What we wit‐ nessed above all was interactants talking to each other and it was precisely in doing so that they performed their activities.1 If our subject matter was to be social organisation then it was surely necessary to see what part the talk played in that organisation and more pertinently in producing the social organisation that presents itself. It was for us a crucial feature of Bittner’s work that he saw social organisation as ongoingly achieved in the doings and sayings of what Garfinkel used to call its ‘members’. Nowhere was this better recorded than in his early paper ‘The Concept of Organization’ (Bittner 1965). To suggest the importance this paper had for my studies I wish to make reference to an early field study that I undertook into the organisation of a local political party – a Labour Party – in a northern industrial town.2 As a potential field of study it was brought to my attention by local newspapers and by some