Ethnomethodological analyses of texts

I spent part of this weekend reading some articles about ethnomethodology. These were given to me by Gillian who is an academic staff member at cqu and PhD student (supervised by Susan Danby at QUT).

I particularly enjoyed reading "The equivocal text and the objective world: An ethnomethodological analysis of a news report" by Lena Jayyusi. I haven't done this kind of analysis myself, nor read many accounts of how to do it. Here is a long section that i thought interesting. It comes from the introduction (p. 168):

"One will also be engaged, clearly, in asking how 'reality' is constructed within the text. Specifically, for a news or documentary text, one would investigate how it is that the text provides for its 'objective' character by which it is encountered as an 'objective account of actual reality' rather than as just some subjective version of reality. How is that reality constructed within this text and with what practical import.

The constitution of an objective reality lies at the heart of mundane social praxis - both as premise and outcome. From within the natural attitude, news reports (and various other documentary texts) are taken to stand in a particular relation of correspondence to an external reality that is independent of them: they either reflect it, report on it, relay it correctly, or they misrepresent it. In that respect, and from within the natural attitude, the 'objective world' as premise is marked and attended to routinely, and can provide an array of possible empirical and moral problematics for the ordinary person: the mundane actor/reasoner. It is the objective world as 'outcome' of these and other practices that is the focus of the social constructionist turn in contemporary inquiry, and of the analytic scrutiny that arises from it. For the ethnomethodological analyst, the news report is interesting for the ways that the premise (and premised properties) of an objective world is reflexively tied to its intersubjective constitution. In other words, the ethnomethodologist, seeking the explication of mundane social order, preserves within view the properties of the objective world as they are and in the way that they are encountered by the mundane actor/reasoner. The ethnomethodologist locates these as features of practices through which the 'objective world' is constituted so that the news report, or media text, is the nexus of both objectivity-as-premise and objectivity-as-outcome of social praxis."

Now I'm going to have a long hard think about all of that!