ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses problems arising out of a research project in the social organization of knowledge. The project was concerned with the social and technical processes interposing between actual happenings and factual accounts of those happenings vested in texts. It was a study of the social organization of news in a newspaper. The research approach was ethnographic. The research was modest in scope. I was assisted in it by Nancy Jackson who was largely responsible for the observational work.2 We shared the interviewing. In the course of our inquiry, the problematic of our research also became a problem for our research. If the facticity, content, and structure of news was to be seen as an organizational accomplishment and as standing in a far from simple relation to events it claimed to represent, did not this same problem apply to our own work? What was the status of our description? This chapter investigates that problem, beginning with the dilemma posed for description by ethnomethodology. An alternative strategy is extrapolated from Marx whose method presupposes a determinate relation between the language of political economy and the language of everyday life. This notion is developed here as a relation between different ‘language-games’ (Wittgenstein 1953). The problem of sociological description is elucidated by examining the relation between different types of language-games as these are embedded in social relations. It will be argued that our problem in part arises out of a confounding of the practices of one language-game with those of another, and that as we understand how they are related, so too we can begin to see, first how we have attributed to the actuality intended by the description properties of the relation in which the description arises, and second, how we might proceed with an alternative descriptive strategy making use of the language of everyday life as its point d’appui.
