The Efficacy of Performance Science: Comment on McCall and Becker

Who but a spoiler would write critical commentary about McCall and Becker's' engaging script? Whatever the content, a response paper in conventional prose seems to draw an audience right back into the same academic underworld that the authors are attempting to liberate us from. Therein lies my initial reluctance to accept this assignment: a comment on "Performance Science" has to miss the point of the play going in. I could not of course have known such reluctance had I not, in some sense or at some level, received and appreciated the point of the play. Part of that point-that academic sociologists might loosen up a bit, take themselves less seriously, understand their own participation in what they produce as knowledge, take a less pretentious attitude toward those they study, and through all of this improve the accuracy of their discipline-comes so close to my sentiments as to exacerbate my initial reluctance: why pick on fun? This script is fun, no doubt, and it should elevate the mood of the journal readership. I especially like its playful commentary about itself as an example of the medium it recommends, including its use of this medium to discuss other cases of using it for the same reasons the authors use it here. I am delighted and grateful that there are sociologists of this caliber willing to engage in these kinds of projects. Nevertheless, there are some serious issues embedded in this script that should be addressed. An initial irony is that these issues may not be as apparent in a performance of the play as they are in the script as a written document, now a published document. I have not seen a performance, but friends who have suggest that I really need to see it to gather its full impact. This is probably so, and were I to gather its full impact, the issues that emerge as central in its written form might not seem central at all. I say this is ironic because the authors argue on behalf of performance and may even confound their very recommendation by submitting the script to a journal. They do not argue, in the script, that a published script has advantages over a published article; in fact it follows from what the authors say that the impact of their work will be lost in the commitment to paper. This script is not, in other words, the medium the authors recommend. Hence despite what the authors say concerning why performance is preferred over papers (including oral presentation), I am obliged by format to recast this script as a "paper anyway," albeit a highly innovative one. It is this "paper anyway" to which I direct my comments. And so at risk of returning to academic pretensions (but no citations, I promise), I see the script encompassing two domains: some theoretical assertions and some methodological recommendations. There is also the substantive domain of the theater research, but this is covered more in other plays which this script refers to and borrows from here and there. I want then to focus mainly on the theory and methodology of this piece. First, the theory. Since ethnographers invariably interpret and transform their data, we are told that an improved science would simply present the richness and detail of social life from the points-of-view of real life actors, making their life-worlds supreme, minimizing the