Accounts

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Although talk is the fundamental material of human relations, the sociology of talk remains undeveloped. This article presents an analysis of one kind of talk, the employment of accounts-statements made to explain untoward behavior and bridge the gap between actions and expectations. Accounts may be classified by content as excuses and justifications, each with its own subtypes. Excuses and justifications are socially approved vocabularies which neutralize an act or its consequences when one or both are called into question. The honoring of an account represents the restoration of equilibrium. There are also strategies for avoiding accounts. More broadly, accounts are manifestations of the underlying negotiation of identities within speech communities. FROM time to time sociologists might well pause from their ongoing pursuits to inquire whether their research interests contribute in any way to the fundamental question of sociology, namely, the Hobbesian question: How is society possible? Attempts to answer this question could serve to unite a discipline that may not yet have forgotten its founders, but may still have forgotten why it was founded.Our purpose here is not to review the various answers to the Hobbesian question,' but rather to suggest that an answer to this macro-sociological problem might be fruitfully explored in the analysis of the slightest of interpersonal rituals and the very stuff of which most of those rituals are composedtalk.Talk, we hold, is the fundamental material of human relations. And though sociologists have not entirely neglected the subject,2 the sociology of talk has scarcely been developed. Our concern here is with one feature of talk: Its ability to shore up the timbers of fractured sociation, its ability to throw bridges between the promised and the performed, its ability to repair the broken and restore the estranged. This feature of talk involves the giving and receiving of what we shall call accounts.An account is a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry.3 Such devices are a crucial element in the social order since they prevent conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation. Moreover, accounts are "situated" according to the statuses of the interactants, and are standardized within cultures so that certain accounts are terminologically stabilized and routinely expected when activity falls outside the domain of expectations.By an account, then, we mean a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior-w...

Stumbling into Sexual Crime: The Passive Perpetrator in Accounts by Male Internet Sex Offenders

“…Such findings are compatible with the techniques delineated by Mills (1940), and related work by subsequent authors (Scott & Lyman, 1968;Scully & Marolla, 1984), in which the authors describe how we 'reinterpret' our improper/illegal actions to make them more palatable to others (and potentially to ourselves). In this paper, we focus more closely on offenders' (causal) explanations and attributions for the commencement of internet activity and the progression to more illicit online materials, specifically sexual images of children.…”

Behind the Blue Line: Investigating Police Officers’ Attitudes Toward Rape

“…Burt (1980) was among the first to empirically study "rape myths," which refer to the stereotypical and empirically incorrect beliefs that an individual holds concerning rape, rapists and the victims of rape. Rape myths may provide a justification (e.g., she seemed to like it) or an excuse (e.g., that was bad, but I"m not [wholly] responsible) for the (male) rapist"s behavior (Scott and Lyman 1968). That is, responsibility is either displaced from perpetrators on the idea that they surpassed the level of "controllable" sexual stimulation and could no longer be held accountable for their actions (Bart 1979) or female victims and potential victims are cast as the responsible party.…”

Intra-cultural variation: Explanations in service calls to two Montevidean service providers.

“…Some scholars (Scott and Lyman 1968;Schönbach 1980) appear to regard apologies as types of accounts, broadly understood as statements made by a social actor to explain his/her own unanticipated or untoward behaviour or that of others (Scott and Lyman 1968: 112); however, accounts can also be deployed to explain intended offensive behaviour as well as other forms of prevention and repair within Goffman's "corrective cycle" (Antaki 1994). Explanations are thus seen here as a choice from the inventory of sub-strategies available to the speaker to apologize.…”

“…The inclusion of these expressions upgrades the force of the explanations. Using the distinction drawn by Scott and Lyman (1968) between justifications and excuses in accounts, RSC explanations would be considered to be justifications in that recognition of fault is implicit and what is needed to remedy the situation is in progress. In CSC explanations, fault was also implicitly admitted but personal and/or institutional responsibility for it was denied.…”