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Notes

[Note 1]

I am grateful to Sonia Floriani, of the Universities of Calabria and York, for her comments on an earlier draft.

[Note 2]

There is a personal story behind this conviction. Andrle (2001) started its existence in a draft that strove to shine as an example of Gubrium and Holstein's "middle ground", trying to balance a realist discussion of a historically irrepressible upper class with narrativist observations on the construction of an exemplar life story. The draft got kind reception when presented to the Biographical Perspectives workshop at the ESA Conference in 1999, but it had been returned by a reputable British journal six months after submission, with the explanation that the editors had unfortunately not been able to find referees. I redrafted the article to make its realist theme more clearly the primary one before submitting it to Sociology, and then redrafted it further in this vein in response to referees' comments. Andrle (2000) enjoyed much quicker and easier passage from first draft to publication, I believe because I had abandoned quixotic attempts at "middle ground" virtue and, right from the start, deliberately wrote this to be a narrativist and ethnomethodologically oriented piece.

[Note 3]

It is possible that in their other works the two (sets of) authors clearly part ways on this point, in that Gubrium is distinctively ethnomethodological in his other works (Gubrium and Holstein 1995; Holstein and Gubrium 1997; 2000) while Jones and Rupp, I guess, may well have sympathies with elements of psychoanalytic theorising. In the particular work cited here, however, Jones and Rupp present their hermeneutic analysis without adding any further theorising to it.

[Note 4]

A sociologist can be expected to claim sociological relevance for a piece of subjectivist analysis by referring to an established sociological theory, concept, or a stereotype that it arguably puts under challenge. That should not obscure the point that the prime contribution of the analysis consists of presenting a subject's perspective or stance, in its own terms, for empathetic understanding.

[Note 5]

The BIM way of distinguishing narratives proper (as in Labov and Waletzky 1967) from descriptive reports and arguments is similar to distinctions identified, I believe without prior knowledge of Schütze's or Rosenthal's work, by other researchers of life stories – e.g. Polanyi (1985) and Linde (1993).

[Note 6]

For a stinging criticism of this kind of approach, see, for example, Holstein and Gubrium (1997). For an example of the productiveness of a much more conversational approach in a research area shared with Gabriele Rosenthal (German narratives of wartime memory), see Welzer (2001).

[Note 7]

Miller (2000, 135 and 154) acknowledges in a footnote that the claim that past events can be recovered in their real time perspectives from present-time narrative must be open to doubt. In 1962, Daniel Offer (2000) carried out interviews with fourteen-year-old boys about their experience with family and growing up. In 1996, he managed to track down 67 of the respondents, and interviewed them on the same topic again. While factual answers about homelife circumstances remained consistent across the 30-year divide, those concerning emotions and relationships differed widely. The boys complained primarily about physical discomfort while the middle-aged men recalled emotional discomfort; middle-aged men recalled themselves to be the favourite child in their family, contrary to what they had reported as boys; etc.

[Note 8]

Chamberlayne et al. (2000) and Wengraf (2001) emanate from the same large European research project, which apparently adopted BIM as its corporate policy, complete with a bought-in training package. Both volumes are remiss in giving a clear explanation of why BIM in particular became the project's ruling orthodoxy, and neither of them says enough about the project or its results to enable the reader to see how BIM provided just the right means for its goal. Interestingly, the compilation by Chamberlayne at al. includes contributions that break with the project's commitment to BIM. Annette King (pp. 305-20) duly tried to apply BIM to her task of comparing two Bremen districts for their patterns of home caring, until she rebelled and adopted another method instead. Middleton and Hewitt (pp. 261-75) present a piece of research on the practical usage of life stories in a professional care setting, which is ethnomethodological in its approach and has no connection with any BIM-like hermeneutics; this contribution contradicts the editors not just in their commitment to BIM, but also in their quick and sweeping dismissal, in the second paragraph of their introduction, of concerns with "the discursive constitution of the social" (p. 1). By showing these breaches in the corporate line, Chamberlayne at al. at least inadvertently allow a glimpse of the matching between research goals and methods that has to take place in any research worth its salt. Wengraf's methodological textbook, however, presents BINM as the method of qualitative research interviewing, to be supplemented perhaps by two or three other types of analysis, such as the Propp-Greimas type of search for "deep structure". In including the latter, Wengraf aligns himself with key texts of general qualitative methodology, which tend to present the Propp-Greimas method as the academically respectable one for dealing with narratives (e.g. Silverman 2001).

[Note 9]

Freud showed awareness of this process in his theory of transference and counter-transference. He couched it, however, in terms of depth psychology rather than in terms of a social setting and process.

[Note 10]

The chapter on the holistic analysis of narrative form is almost as weak in my opinion as the chapter on the categorical-form analysis discussed here. Both chapters on content analysis are much better. Yet, ironically, the authors declare the analysis of narrative form to be especially productive of insight into the deeper structures of the narrator's personality.

[Note 11]

See Frank (2000) for a reply.

[Note 12[

Zussman (2000) considers even relationships of the personal realm (marriage, sexual partnership, friendship) to be institutions. They certainly are an important site of autobiographical occasions. In advocating empirical investigations of autobiographical occasions, however, I have in mind institutional settings of the more public realm.

[Note 13]

See Holstein and Gubrium (2000) for an extended critique and reply.