Analysing Practical and Professional Texts

"Analysing Practical and Professional Texts makes extensive use of a wide range of empirical examples to analyse the work done by people using texts in everyday life and the work done by professional social scientists using texts. Focusing on texts as constituents of human usage, this book shows how written documents and other texts are integrated to a wide range of social arrangements, thus revealing such arrangements to be not only textually mediated in nature but also textually constituted. Showing how texts - professional, technical or otherwise - as well as various social-scientific methodologies employ the resources of ordinary language, it outlines and recommends a particular, naturalistic approach to study of texts, one broadly located in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and various strands of philosophy." As such, the book indicates the implications for professional social science as derived from 'textual incarnation' and its ordinary language moorings. Theoretically sophisticated and illustrated with empirical examples, this book will be of interest not only to those with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, but also to social scientists and anthropologists concerned with text analysis, textual sense and the 'linguistic turn' in the methods of their own disciplines.