Coherence and Credibility: The Aesthetics of Evaluation

Consider two different images of the drinking driver. One may imagine the ordinary social drinker who happens to overindulge, and who, missing a stop sign, is detained by the police, thereby getting into trouble. Or, imagine a driver who is habitually drunk, a reeling, stumbling, insensate hazard to everyone on the road, including himself. The image that one constructs of the driver who drinks has much to do with the recommendations for action that one may embrace as a means of curtailing drinking drivers. Until the past decade, the drinking driver had been perceived as the social drinker, a civil problem susceptible to correction by legal actions such as imposed penalties and fines. Over the past 10 years or so, however, a series of studies has been influential in changing the dominant image of the drinking driver so that he is now perceived as more of a habitual, pathological drunk. The resulting recommendations for remediation are medical and are directed at a small subset of offenders rather than at all drivers who drink. The sociologist Gusfield (1976) analyzed the rhetoric of these studies-how the data were presented to persuade the reader of the conclusions. What he found is provoc-