No abstract

The authors use some photographs of hospital signs to illustrate basic issues in the analysis of signs. They discuss the issues of quantity of data, of pragmatics, of the unity of'disparate' data, of location, juxtaposition, and of sequence, showing the many ways in which sign reading is an embedded activity. The latter part of the paper discusses the possibility of generalising their analysis to other signs.Why should two sociologists be interested in some hospital signs, more precisely in five photographs of a dozen or so such signs?It is a truism, but worth repeating, that it is impossible to study signs: one can only study read ings of signs or behaviour subsequent to reading a sign or the production of signs, not the sign itself. Put loosely, studying signs is really the study of what people do with signs even if the person be oneself. It is a commonplace observation, but one worth making, that lots of people use the same sign in the same way insofar at least that they go off in similar directions after reading it. Other groups of people use the sign differently and go off in other directions. Thus when we say that people use signs in the same way we are not making a rule nor inferring identical information process ing operations but simply noting that signs work in a regular patterned socially orderly way. Their in terpretation and use is not simply idiosyncratic.When we think of people using signs it becomes obvious that the use they make of them is practical. They are not interested in the meaning of the sign but are interested in using the sign for some pur pose. They are not interested in what signs in gen eral mean but in the use they can make of this sign here and now. Their reasoning is not theoretical and general but practical, particularised and in con text. Thus to study signs is to study sign use and to study actual as opposed to ideal sign use is to study use in context. It is as instances of the soci ally orderly achievements of practical activities that we see signs as properly sociological data. This does not of course mean that only sociologists should be allowed to study signs: it does mean that studying signs without a concern for their practical and socially orderliness will, whether the student be a graphics expert or a visitor to the hospital, get that student well and truly lost.However, to argue that some sociological and pragmatic considerations are necessary for a study of signs that is to be relevant to how signs actually get used, is not to argue that any sociological con siderations are potentially useful in the analysis of signs. Sociologists have a penchant for making the simple complex and they also have a mania for changing the subject. Like crude Freudians there are crude sociologists who, when given any topic will rapidly assure the donor that the subject is not what the donor thought but is really something different. It is not very useful for the student of hospital or railway signs to be told that these are really about unconscious sexual drives or the crisis in capitali...

Given that written texts are characterized by indexicality and incompleteness; how is it that they are read and followed then judged adequate? In particular how are social scientific arguments read as plausible under such conditions? It is suggested that the very natural language that renders such arguments in principle problematic, provides a resource in its textual particulars for the repair of indexicality. The article analyzes some local textual features with methods borrowed from conversational analysis to demonstrate three reader/writer strategies 'age orientation', the categorization of a population as more than incidentally juvenile; establishing 'author authority' ; and 'investing' (apparently senseless actors with 'purpose'.

The first part of the article is a general critique of radical media/cultural studies; the second is an illustration of these criticisms detailed through analysis of one media student's treatment of a newspaper. In general, the authors find media studies do not establish that their reading of materials is the reading made by media consumers; that the bias they allege in the media is not significant; that they set up a false and irrelevant model of what the media producers are trying/claiming to do; that they displace the technical-professional interests of media producers with their own ideological interests and that their analysis of texts is crude. In particular, they show how trivial identifications are turned into significant ones; how items are transformed in their transfer from media page to media criticism page; and how readings of a media text are argumentatively and constrastively organized. In summary it is argued that such plausibility as the media critics' arguments possess derives not from the accuracy but from the presentational organization of their analysis.