ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an attempt to locate some of the problems and lacunae in The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (Morley 1980) and is offered as an expansion (at points perhaps, merely a reiteration) of the uncertainties expressed in the ‘Afterword’ to that publication. Although the chapter is centrally concerned to reformulate the framework within which the audience research was conducted, I shall, in the first section, be spending as much time on problems of textual analysis as I later shall on audiences. Evidently, any form of audience research is necessarily engaged in making propositions or assumptions about the nature of the text whose ‘effects’ or ‘uses’ or ‘decodings’ are being investigated. For that reason it seems as well to attempt to clarify the problems with the conception of the text which is proposed or assumed by the Nationwide audience work.
