From Shotter, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford; Blackwell, p.4, and pp.181-184

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The Social Accountability of Human Action

The central shift of perspective exemplified in most of what follows in this book is the attention paid, not at all to the structure of behavior itself, but to the structure and function of the accounts of behavior that people give of themselves in their everyday social life. Accounts can be distinguished from theories in this sense: an account of an action or activity is concerned with talking about the action or activity as the activity it is; it works, if it works at all, to render the activity, to those who confront it or are involved in it, as something ‘visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., ‘accountable’, as organizations of commonplace everyday activities’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii). In other words, an account is an aid to perception, functioning to constitute an otherwise indeterminate flow of activity as a sequence of recognizable events, i.e. events of a kind already known about within a society’s ways of making sense of things.

              A theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with activities as they are; it is not simply an aid to those confronted with raw appearances, in making sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which people may reshape and reproduce events which already make one kind of sense to them, and talk about them as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be. Unlike an account, which is addressed to the second persons involved in a situation with first persons, a theory is of use to third-person outsiders, to those unconcerned with the personal situation of first and second persons; rather than context-dependent and personal, a theory may thus (to an extent) be context-free and impersonal. However, a theory must always be accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how it should be understood and used -unless, that is, it can be formulated as a set of specifications for a certain pattern of result-producing activities (Stapp, 1972). Then, the distinction between theories and accounts [end 3] collapses, and theories degenerate, so to speak, into accounts. In what follows, the distinction between theories and accounts will be crucial, for my main critique of psychological research will revolve around, not so much its failings as an ‘experimental’ science, but its attempt to be, as McGuire (1973) puts it, a ‘theory relevant’ enterprise. [end 4]

[begin 181]

Accounting

Our accounting practices are deeply embedded in our everyday activities. But people do not just happen, passively, to act in an accountable manner and to perceive events in accountable terms; their procedures of talking and listening are methodical. They act so as to make their behavior accountable; it is, says Garfinkel (1967, p. 1), ‘an endless, ongoing, contingent accomplishment’; and it is achieved by the use of certain methods and procedures which, says Garfinkel (p. 10), are experienced as ‘unproblematic ...and are known only in the doing which is done skillfully, reliably, uniformly, with enormous standardization and as an unaccountable matter’. We attend from the methods and procedures to the results they achieve, as Polanyi (1967) would put it in his ‘structure of tacit knowing’; we become aware of the particulars of the procedures only to the extent that they work to specify an outcome.

              People’s normal behavior is routinely ‘accountable’ in the sense that it is intelligible and legitimate without question. An ‘account’ as such is only required of someone if, for some reason, their behavior is untoward. Then it must be excused or justified (Scott and Lyman, 1968), and the [end 181] untoward action given a fitting place in the social order as a result. In other words, an account of an activity or state of affairs is itself a special kind of social activity which works, if it works at all, as an aid to perception, to render an otherwise indeterminate flow of activity recognizable as a sequence of commonplace events - the account may, be retrospective, prospective or simultaneous (Harre and Secord, 1972). Whichever, to work in this way, as an aid to perception, the talk must have a certain function: it must instruct them in the method or procedure of doing it; and accounts which fail to do this will, literally, be ‘pointless’, and their content will be vacuous. As C. W. Mills (1940) put it, some years before Wittgenstein noted the same point: ‘Rather than expressing something which is prior and in the person, language is taken by other persons as an indicator of future actions’ (p. 162). And in particular, motive accounts, said Mills (p.163), ‘do not denote any elements ‘in’ individuals. They stand for anticipated situational consequences of questioned conduct.’ Language is used to achieve concerted social action. And utterances indicate metonymically, as part to whole, what a person is trying to do in the activity they were observed as doing; they (the utterances) work to specify the larger whole (the ‘world’) in which such an activity can play its proper part. Accounting, then, in this account of it, is the activity in which people, methodically, by the use of established ‘but as yet unaccounted for’ accounting practices embedded in their everyday activities, actively make themselves accountable to one another. And it is a research activity, of course, to discover what these ‘as yet unaccounted for’ practices are - as Garfinkel points out.

Theories, Models and Accounts

Such accounting practices are constitutive of everyday life and of everything which goes on within it. As such, they are fundamental to the conduct of science itself. It will thus be instructive to contrast everyday accounting procedures with explanatory procedures in science.

              Science, it is claimed, is concerned with achieving true knowledge of natural phenomena. It is generally taken as proceeding in terms of the formulation and empirical testing of theories or models, where a theory or model is taken as representing a true state of affairs to the extent that, by its use, one can predict or control an expected outcome. Knowledge arrived at in this way is often taken as a basic indubitable truth about the world in which we live, one upon which we should base our actions and our policy making. This view - as to the power of scientific modes of investi[end 182]gation - is clearly partial and limited, however. For the conduct of science rests upon the prior possession by all of us of a much more basic form of knowledge - let me call it simply ‘practical common sense’ knowledge - in terms of which scientific activities are conducted, and in terms of which they must make sense. Theories do not reach down and anchor themselves in a fundamentally neutral, physical reality (Stapp, 1972) - indeed, whenever we speak of atoms and molecules, and the laws of nature, we are speaking of what we mean, by the expressions ‘atoms’, ‘molecules’ and ‘laws of nature’ (Winch, 1958); they are all expressions associated with a particular way of ‘seeing’ the world and of manipulating it by the means it provides. Theories are grounded, as Kuhn (1962) makes clear, in the activities which give research practices their reproducibility: namely, their accountability amongst those conducting them.

              But notice how this accountability is achieved. Participants begin by appreciating how, given the practical phenomena confronting them, theoretical categories can be used to constitute them as events of a recognizable kind -the research practice provides an account as to how a theory should be used and applied (Stapp, 1972). Such categories are used as an unquestioned (and unquestionable) resource in organizing one’s perception of events within the research paradigm (Hanson, 1958). And it is in this sense that one is entrapped: for by conducting all one’s further activities in terms of a set of categories - grasped by, as Stolzenberg (1978) puts it, ‘initial acts of acceptance as such in the domain of ordinary language use’, and then suspended from all further doubt- necessitates one having to assimilate all further activities to a pre-established set of categories. There is no possibility of a hermeneutical development of new categories; the transformation of one’s perceptual categories in the course of dialogue is denied. Consider, by comparison, the process of listening to an account: if the facts so far are unsatisfactory, incomplete or even bewildering, one waits for later facts and uses them in an attempt to decide the sense of the earlier ones; what sense there is to be found is not decided beforehand, but is discovered in the course of the exchange within which the account is offered.

              In fact, to give a proper account of what something is; of what it is to be a person, say, neither a theory nor a model of persons will do: if we are to talk about persons as persons (which indeed is a part of what it is for human beings to be treated as persons), then we must not talk about them as really being something else, as really being entities requiring an unusual description in special theoretical terms; nor can we talk about persons as being to an extent like something else (information-processing devices, say) which, in other respects, are not actually like persons at all. For both these ways provide only partial views, ways of ‘seeing’ from within [end 183] instrumental forms of activity, and our task is to talk about persons as persons. We must collect together in an orderly and systematic manner what people must already know as competent, autonomous members of their society - and to do this, they do not need to collect evidence as scientists, as competent persons, they should be a source of such evidence (Cavell, 1969). Drawing upon the knowledge we already possess, what we need is an account of personhood and selfhood in the ordinary sense of the term ‘account’: as simply a narration of a circumstance or a state of affairs. Something which in its telling ‘moves’ us this way and that through the current ‘terrain’ of personhood, so to speak, sufficiently for us to gain a conceptual grasp of the whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it - it is a view ‘from the inside’, much as we get to know the street-plan of a city, by living within it, rather than from seeing it all at once from an external standpoint. It is a grasp which allows us to ‘see’ all the different aspects of a person as if arrayed within a ‘landscape’, all in relation to one another, from all the standpoints within it.

              This illustrates another way in which our approach to our own self-understanding by use of theories is deficient: they lead to fragmentation, not integration. For at the moment there is a near chaos of different theories about ourselves all clamoring for survival. Could an all-embracing theory be developed to encompass them all? No, for it is in the very nature of what theories are that even if they were all ‘good’ theories (in the sense of producing when applied the results they predict) they still could not all be combined into one good theory. Because as Marie Jahoda (1980, p.185) has pointed out, ‘each contains an extra theoretical element: the choice of the basic question the theory is meant to illuminate.’ That is a non-rational matter: there being no single, basic question – such as ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything?’ – from which all other questions can be logically derived. In other words, as mentioned before, all properly scientific questions are rooted in a particular research tradition or ‘paradigm’ to use Kuhn’s (1962) term, where the number of such paradigms is indeterminate, and where there is no possibility of a ‘neutral’ or ‘superordinate’ style of activity which includes in some simply logical sense all the rest. Living continually necessitates the making of value choices; it is here that the difference between theories and accounts becomes acute: accounts may depict value choices; theories suppress them. [end 184]

Some additional comments on theories versus accounts:

Indeed, let me just add this about theories: strictly, an explanatory theory is produced by people working within a professional discipline or paradigm; it is not immediately intelligible to those outside the paradigm; they have, so to speak, to be talked into it. That is, in learning the discipline, students have to learn to 'see' a set of events that already make one kind of sense, and to talk about them as being quite other than what they ordinarily seem to be. Furthermore, besides having to learn to 'see' these events... the have to learn to see them, not from a position of involvement in the action, as second-person participants, but as uninvolved, third-person, objective observers... It is no wonder that the 'theoretical talk of experts' is unaccessible to ordinary folk.

              If we are involved in an activity with others, and an event occurs that is puzzling to us - which we want to know for the event it is - then it is not a theory we need, but an account. Where an account is an utterance in ordinary language from within an ongoing flow of activity, that works to render aspects of that same activity, as Harold Garfinkel (1967) put it, "visibly rational and reportable for all practical purposes.." (p.vii). In other words, it is an kind of talk that works, not cognitively, to give us a picture of what something 'is' in itself, but perceptually, to draw our attention to links and relations between the particular event in question and aspects in its surrounding circumstances, that might have escaped our notice. For instance, I account for, or explain, my reaction of 'wonder' that we are all gathered here to talk about talk, by saying: "Oh... so you think that there is something extraordinary about ordinary talk too!"... And my comment works to 'place' or 'position' what we're talking about - not only in relation to other topics in our talk, as we talk about it... but also to the rest of our lives together.