Accounting for Action: Defending the Common Sense Heresy

Abstract

Contemporary sociology embodies a number of different resolutions to the problem of how actors' accounts of their actions are to be treated. Some structuralist and functionalist approaches, such as the Marxist, for example, discount actors' accounts as merely epiphenomenal, generated to make sense of actions people are led to perform on quite different grounds. Some variants of ethnomethodology, on the other hand, construe actors' accounts as all we can ever really know about the social world. We seek to show the weaknesses of these approaches and advance a set of arguments for the centrality of accounts in sociology, and for the validity of their use in our attempts to understand social action. The main thrust of our position is that accounts are hypothetical and susceptible to evaluation in ways which are at least as good as, even if they are as not radically superior to, those of commonsense. The issue of the status of actors' accounts has major ramifications for theory and method in sociology, and in the defence of our hereitcal common-sense approach, we seek to outline its major implications for the conduct of the sociological enterprise.