Using Documents in Social Research

Lindsay Prior

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761957478, 9780761957461
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using Documents in Social Research offers a comprehensive, yet concise, introduction to the use of documents as tools within social science research. The books argues that documents stand in a dual-relation to human activity, and therefore by transmitting ideas and influencing the course and nature of human activity they are integral to the research process.

Key features of the book include:

· Alerts students to the diversity of social scientific research documents.

· Outlines the various strategies and debates that need to be considered in order to integrate the study of documents into a research project.

· Offers a number of examples where documents have been used within a variety of research contexts.

The book is written in an easy and engaging style which makes it accessible to undergraduates and postgraduate students. It will be essential reading for students and researchers across a range of social science disciplines.

1

Basic Themes: Use, Production and Content

What is a document?

Diversity in documentation

Documents: production and function

Writers and readers – a dynamic relationship

Documents and their content

Conclusions and key points

Notes

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What is a document?

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) adorned a common urinal bowl with the signature of ‘R. Mutt’, placed it on a pedestal, and presented it as a work of art to an exhibition arranged by the New York Society of Independent Artists. The selection committee rejected it as being ‘by no definition a work of art’ (de Duve, 1993) and consequently Duchamp resigned from the Society. The ‘Fountain’, as the artist had entitled the urinal, was just one of many ‘ready-mades’ that he presented to the world in the form of objets d’art. The latter included bank notes – signed by Duchamp himself – and a copy of the Mona Lisa defaced with a goatee beard and a moustache (a caricature much imitated in later years). The reasoning behind such apparently ridiculous acts and presentations was to challenge the very notion of an independent and singular work of art. For where, Duchamp asked, was the boundary between art and non-art? Indeed, was it possible for anyone to produce works that were not works of art?

Although such questions may seem rather distant from the ones that concern us, they, in fact, go right to the heart of our problem. For it is no easier to specify what a document is than it is to specify, in abstraction, what is and what is not a work of art. Nevertheless, by dwelling on Duchamp’s questions we can gain insight into some of the essentially social processes that are involved in acts of definition. Consider the following.

In 1995, the Royal Academy (London) presented an exhibition of works under the title ‘Africa: The Art of a Continent’. Among other things, the display included a collection of gold weights from West African societies. Such gold weights took the form of animals and humans in various poses, and as anyone may see from the exhibition catalogue (Phillips, 1995), they are objects of considerable beauty. Yet, when the objects were originally made they were fashioned with rather immediate practical purposes in mind – the weighing of gold. This is not to exclude the possibility that they were also designed with a view to being aesthetically pleasing, but they were certainly not made by ‘artists’, nor were they made by people who would have considered themselves in any way as ‘Africans’. Nevertheless, they were presented to us, in the late twentieth century, as examples of art made in somewhere called Africa during earlier centuries. So what is it that has turned gold weights into African art?

Any answer to such a question must surely lie in the web of activities that surround the objects rather than the things in themselves. That is to say, with the actions of museum curators, critics, and cataloguers who regard the objects as fit for display in an ‘art gallery’, and the viewers and visitors who are willing to pay to see such tools as very fine vehicles for the expression of human aesthetic sensibilities. This, not to mention the existence of the art gallery itself, which offers a platform or ‘frame’ for the exhibition of such works. The objects as such cannot contain the answer for they are here defined as weights and there defined as art. Nor would appeal to the original intentions of the creators of such objects settle the matter, for their involvement with things was (necessarily) ephemeral. Indeed, whichever way you look at it, the ‘artness’ of the art ain’t in the things.

In attempting to define the nature of a document one is, of course, presented with very similar problems to those posed by the attempt to define art. Thus, paintings, tapesteries, monuments, diaries, shopping lists, stage plays, adverts, rail tickets, film, photographs, videos, engineering drawings, the content of human tissue archives and World Wide Web (WWW) pages can all stand as documents in one frame or another. Yet, as with the gold weights, their status as documents depends not so much on features intrinsic to their existence, nor on the intentions of their makers, but on factors and processes that lay beyond their boundaries. Indeed, we shall note throughout this book that if we are to get to grips with the nature of documents then we have to move away from a consideration of them as stable, static and pre-defined artefacts. Instead we must consider them in terms of fields, frames and networks of action. In fact, the status of things as ‘documents’ depends precisely on the ways in which such objects are integrated into fields of action, and documents can only be defined in terms of such fields.

Fields or networks of action, of course, engage and involve creators (agents, writers, publishers, publicists and so on), users (readers, or receivers) and settings. All three realms are implicated in the emergence of documentation. As for the producers and users, they invariably operate on the documents in terms of specific projects and systems of relevance (Schutz, 1962) – say, the study of fine art, or the study of archaeology, or the study of African history. Indeed, borrowing Schutzian terms, we might say that the social world is made up of the ‘multiple realities’ of its creators. And the objects that interest us are inevitably ‘situated’ in terms of such systems of reality. That is partly (but only partly) why one and the same physical artefact (gold weights) can appear in different guises (as African art here and as functional implements there).

For Schutz and other humanistic social scientists (such as, say, G.H. Mead, 1934) the most obvious point to enter into the study of fields of action is, of course, through the world of human agents. In fact, for most of anthropology and sociology ‘the field’ is commonly defined so as to focus specifically on the array of activities that human actors engage in – making gold weights, art, promises, families or whatever. Yet we should remain alert to the fact that there is far more in heaven and earth than human agency. Indeed, human agents only ever appear as one component of a field, for it is quite clear that human beings necessarily live and act and work in a field of things as well as of people. And there is forever a dynamic to ‘the field’ in such a way that things, such as documents and the information that they contain, can influence and structure human agents every bit as effectively as the agents influence the things. In that respect, there is always a ghost of the sorcerer’s apprentice present in the existence of documents and other artefacts.¹ In this book, that dynamic will be central, and in many of the examples provided herein we shall be looking at and analysing the different ways in which documents function in action.

The emphasis that social scientists commonly place on human actors manifests itself most clearly in the attention that they give to what such actors say and think and believe and opine. And should we wish to study human actors in a rigorous social scientific manner there are many manuals available to instruct us as to how we should proceed with our research. Most of these texts focus on ways to capture and analyse speech and thought and behaviour. However, few social science research manuals concentrate on the written word and, more specifically, on documents that contain words. Indeed, when documents are put forward for consideration they are usually approached in terms of their content rather than their status as ‘things’. That is, the focus is usually on the language contained in the document as a medium of thought and action. Yet it is quite clear that each and every document stands in a dual relation to fields of action. First, it enters the field as a receptacle (of instructions, commands, wishes, reports, etc.). Secondly, it enters the field as an agent in its own right. And as an agent a document is open to manipulation by others: as an ally, as a resource for further action, as an enemy to be destroyed, or suppressed. (We should not forget that people burn and ban texts as well as read them.) It is the examination of this dual role that forms the intellectual backbone of the current volume.

As I have just stated, in so far as documents have been dealt with as a resource for the social scientific researcher they have hitherto been considered almost exclusively as containers of content. Now, as we shall see, document content is important. We should not, however, let the presence of content bedazzle us to the exclusion of other qualities. For, above all, a document is a product. It is a work – often an expression of a technology. And, in the ordinary way of things, products are produced – they are produced by humankind in socially organized circumstances. Consequently, one set of questions that may quite justifiably be asked by the social scientific researcher concern the processes and circumstances in terms of which document ‘X’ has been manufactured. It is a theme that recurs throughout the book, and one that is specifically addressed in Chapter 2.

Naturally, documents are not just manufactured, they are consumed. Further, as with all tools, they are manipulated in organized settings for many different ends, and they also function in different ways – irrespective of human manipulations. In short, documents have effects. So a further route of analysis for the researcher is to ask questions about how documents function in specific circumstances. Questions of functioning will be dealt with mainly in Chapters 3–5. Naturally, the way in which a document functions is often affected by its content, but content is not always determinant. (Indeed, at the risk of jumping the starting gun, I should point out that the content of a document is never fixed and static, not least because documents have always to be read, and reading implies that the content of a document will be situated rather than fixed.) In any event, the analysis of content (dealt with in Chapters 6–8), production and use form three of the corner points around which this book is built.

Our focus, then, will be on the study of documents in their social setting – more specifically on how documents are manufactured and how they function rather than simply on what they contain.² Of the three dimensions, however, the most fundamental is undoubtedly that which relates to matters of function or use. For, by asking how things function we can move away from a strategy that views documents solely as resources to be scoured for evidence and data, and into the high plains of social scientific research.³ In most social scientific work, of course, documents are placed at the margins of consideration. They are viewed as mere props for the real (human) action that takes place in and through talk and behaviour. Once one has read Derrida (1976), of course, one sees that such a position is entirely consistent with a long and inbred tradition within western philosophical thought. That tradition, according to Derrida, has persistently valued speech over writing and relegated the latter to a marginal and subsidiary role.⁴ Writing thereby appears as an alienating force in the world. Yet, we are aware that the modern world is made through writing and documentation, a point that was emphasized, above all, in Max Weber’s perceptive analysis of ‘bureaucracy’.⁵ It is somewhat telling that the lesson has seemingly been forgotten. Indeed, given the role and significance that written documentation plays in most human societies it is strange to note just how little attention has been paid to it by social researchers. In this book, of course, we can hopefully move documents ‘up front’, and seek to mark them out as a legitimate field of social scientific enquiry in their own right. How that is to be done will be evident in the remainder of the text. For now we shall merely concentrate on a few preliminaries: first, to consider how documents as a category of ‘things’ can encompass a wide variety of media; secondly, to assess the significance of text in documentation.⁶ Both of these tasks can be achieved by consideration of a few early examples.

Diversity in documentation

We normally think of documents in somewhat uni-dimensional forms – as fixed and static texts. And it is certainly the case that in this book, text will figure prominently. Yet, documents are not coterminous with text. Indeed, it is clear that contemporary documents often express their contents – ideas, arguments, narratives or whatever – in multi-modal forms. That is to say documents frequently contain pictures, diagrams, emblems and the like, as well as words. What is more, an electronic document can also add sound to the multiple dimensions in terms of which it may ordinarily be composed. In some ways, therefore, it is quite artificial to restrict analysis of documents to text (see, for example, Bauer and Gaskell, 2000). Nevertheless, for ease of analysis, it often makes sense to focus on documents in which written words serve as the mastercode (Kress, et al., 1997), and that is what we shall do. One implication of this book, then, is that the analysis of the scribbled word can serve as a paradigm for the analysis of documents in their entirety. In order to emphasize the significance of non-textual features of documents, and to illustrate something of their potential complexity, however, it will prove useful to consider just a few examples of things that do not necessarily involve text, but which may, nevertheless, be used as documents. We will begin with a consideration of sculpture and paintings. I shall offer here an example of how such objects can function as documents in fields of activity, and suggest some ways in which they may be approached as a field for social scientific enquiry.

At the risk of seeming overly gloomy at such an early stage of the book, I would like to consider something about the representation of human attitudes towards death in the western world during the last couple of centuries – in particular with respect to sculpture. I am not so much thinking of the grand and rather eloquent sculptures that may be found in palaces, abbeys and cathedrals – though the tombs of the grand and powerful have much to tell. Instead I am thinking of everyday, routine, funerary sculpture as might be found in almost any of the older cemeteries in the English-speaking world. Such sculpture may, of course, vary from work that is nothing more than rough shaped stone, to rather elaborate representations of angels, cherubs and the like. Outside of the aforementioned cathedrals and abbeys, however, it is unlikely that one could find any form of ‘modern’ funerary sculpture dating before the mid point of the seventeenth century. It is an absence that can be used to reveal a great deal about western attitudes to death.

One might be tempted to think that the absence of personal gravestones dating from before the latter half of the seventeenth century is something to do with the ravages of time. Perhaps all of the older graveyards have been destroyed, lost or overgrown. It is not so. Very simply (and as far as the western world is concerned) it is only in the seventeenth century that resting places of ordinary men, women and children were individualized and marked. That is to say, before this period the lot of the common person at death was to be dispatched to the common funeral pit, whereas after the seventeenth century and in the world of Protestant Christianity at least, it came to be regarded as more appropriate for ‘decent’ people to rest in their own private (family) plot. The cemetery nearest to my own home, for example, has its earliest stones and slates dated to the 1720s, even though the area has been inhabited for some 4,000 years or more. (I should add that it is an area that fell beyond the borders of the western Roman Empire – an empire in which personal funerary monuments were extensively used.) In that respect, we have to suspect that the very presence of a cemetery with personalized graves ‘documents’ a long-term change in social sensibility and social behaviour in relation to death. I leave aside, of course, the fact that large numbers of poor and institutionalized people, as well as stillborn infants, were buried in common plots right into the twentieth century, not to mention the fact that by the first half of that century cremation, as well as burial, came to be regarded as a legitimate form of disposal.

Further, were we to look in more detail at our traditional cemetery we would undoubtedly note other changes. Thus, the sentiments and images on the gravestones would, for example, appear to have altered from one century to another. Skulls, crossbones and hourglasses would probably be present on the earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stones, whilst urns, truncated pillars and angels on a human scale would appear on some of the later, nineteenth-century, graves. Equally, we might note that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inscriptions gave a quite heavy emphasis to the body, as in the frequent use of the inscription ‘here lies the body of XYZ’. This would stand in contrast to nineteenth- and twentieth-century sentiments that are more likely to ignore, and therefore to elide, the body/soul distinction that earlier peoples took to be central. Again, as we move through the twentieth-century cemetery we would probably see a far greater uniformity of expression on gravestones – often noting standardized heights, spacing and sizes of the stones, fewer elaborate figures, and a marked secularization of expressed feeling and sentiment. In such ways we might consider the shape and size of cemeteries, their internal arrangements, the sentiments expressed on the stones, and the very stones themselves as documenting changes in both western attitudes towards death and features of common social relations, the growing individualization of the dead being, perhaps, the most powerful example of the latter. In fact, by examining the spatial organization of the cemetery we can see how the document acts back on its creators. It achieves this in part by emphasizing the significance of individuals and intimate (as opposed to, say, organizational) relationships, and by emphasizing the significance of a durable personal marker in the face of a transient life (Bauman, 1992). Indeed, it provides one means by which we modern humans attempt to colonize the future.

The use of a cemetery as a document to changing human sensibilities was most powerfully exercised by the French social historian of death, Phillipe Ariès, in his broad review of the Western tradition – The Hour of Our Death (1981). More limited and restricted overviews of the cemetery as a social document have been produced by others, such as for example Prior (1989) and Stannard (1977). Archaeologists, of course, use ancient cemeteries as documents in a routine manner and their work, more than any, gives credence to the observation that the arrangement of things ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Basic Themes: Use, Production and Content
• 2 Producing Facts
• 3 Documents in Action I. Documents In Organizational Settings
• 4 Documents in Action II. Making things visible
• 5 Texts, Authors, Identities
• 6 Content, Meaning and Reference
• 7 Doing Things with Words
• 8 Documents as Evidence. Researching the Inert Text
• 9 Production, Consumption and Exchange
• Bibliography
• Index