ABSTRACT
This chapter argues an interpretive perspective that focuses on what a text does within local networks of activity, and on what it says. It is concerned with the rhetorical dynamics of social science disciplines as they carry out their various activities of knowledge creation, application, and transmission and of institutional maintenance. The chapter looks at how the text reaches out beyond the page, what connections it makes with the reader, the ambient natural world, the ambient social world. It also looks at how a text defines or reorders relationships and implies activities, how it places itself within its multiple heterogeneous contexts and creates a temporary stable place within which the text exists and within which the reader may confront the text and construct a meaning. Such an approach obviously treats the regularized literate practices of disciplinary discourse as more than arbitrary conventions or habits.
