Sociology Plus
Documentary Analysis Definition
Documentary analysis is the study of documents in sociological research — not merely as sources of information, but as objects worth investigating in their own right. To Max Weber, the written order was an essential building block of bureaucracy, the quintessential form of modern organizational life, and many later sociologists have noted how documents structure and facilitate human interaction. Despite this, documents tend to be taken for granted in sociological studies — used far more often as a resource for research than as a topic in themselves, and typically subsumed, within research methods, under the broad category of “unobtrusive” techniques. This stands in sharp contrast to the study of talk and speech, which enjoys tailor-made styles of analysis such as conversation analysis.
The Neglect of Writing
There is no obvious explanation for the contrasting fortunes of speech and writing in social science, and few scholars have remarked on the difference. The anthropologist Jack Goody repeatedly illustrated how writing is a rich yet neglected field for research, and Walter Ong underlined how the influence of writing — as against “orality” — has been underestimated in Western scholarship. The subordination of writing to speech is far from deserved. Nor are text and documentation coterminous: architectural drawings, photographs, tapestries, scientific images, X-rays, body scans, and various physical artifacts can all function as documents in the sociological sense, though the written trace serves as the useful paradigm.
Documents as Receptacles and Agents
When documents appear in research they are usually approached in terms of what they contain — as instruments or conduits of communication between writer and reader. They do contain information, but every document enters human activity in a dual relation. First, it enters the social field as a receptacle — of instructions, obligations, contracts, wishes, reports. Second, it enters as an agent in its own right: documents have effects long after their creators are dead and buried (wills and testaments are the obvious example), and as agents they are always open to manipulation by others — as allies, as resources for further action, or as opponents to be destroyed or suppressed. People burn and ban documents as well as read them.
Techniques: Content and Discourse Analysis
The text, pictures, plans, and drawings within a document can be analyzed by techniques ranging from simple content analysis to more complex discourse analysis. Content analysis — word and phrase counts and other numerical measures of textual expression — can yield fundamental insights into what people consider significant and insignificant, revealing how “disease,” “crime,” or “self” and “other” are represented in a given context. More sophisticated strategies derived from the analysis of speech transcripts, such as second-order coding schemes, can also be applied to writing. The most promising lines of inquiry, however, build on discourse analysis. Discourse is a complicated concept — even texts devoted to explaining discourse analysis are not always clear about what it is — but the best starting point for sociologists is Michel Foucault, who examined how sets of ideas in science, medicine, and social science cohere into determinate ways of seeing the world. These “discursive formations” are crucially linked to specific forms of social practice: what is written and said is inextricably locked into what is done. Documents, their contents, practical action, and sites of action all express aspects of a discursive formation, and with this in mind three moments of documentation can be distinguished: production, consumption (or use), and circulation.
Production
The production of documents — statistical and other reports on crime, health, poverty, the environment — has been studied across sociology. The standard stance treats such reports as a resource, a source of data. Following the ethnomethodologists, however, documents can equally be studied as “topic”: how are reports and accounts of the world actually assembled by social actors? What conceptual and technical operations, and what assumptions, go into producing a “report”? In the sociology of health, studies have examined how death certificates and mortality reports for towns, cities, regions, and nations are produced; in the sociology of science, how findings and papers come into being. Studies of scientific controversy show that demonstrating “facts” about the world depends heavily on documentation — especially the manufacture of visible traces (graphs, photographs, tables) of invisible entities.
Consumption and Use
Questions of consumption turn on use and function: how people deploy written (and non-written) traces to manage social organization, from fleeting episodes of interaction to the running of a hospital, business, or school. In his renowned study of case folders in a suicide prevention clinic, Harold Garfinkel showed that users often put folders to purposes at odds with their original design. Routine data that should have been present were frequently missing — patient age and occupation often absent, reasons for non-acceptance missing in 20 percent of folders, the names of staff in charge of intake conferences missing in just over half. Why were such incomplete records nevertheless assiduously kept? Partly through “normal, natural troubles” like forgetting to enter data; more fundamentally, Garfinkel argued, staff kept records with an eye to the possibility that their contents might one day be needed to demonstrate that patients had received the treatment they deserved. The folders were constructed within a medico-legal framework, able to show that the “right” things were done to the “right” person at the “right” time — a contractual reading that explains why basic data could be missing while marginal notes, corrections, and additions accumulated. There were, in short, good organizational reasons for keeping bad records. Similar reasoning has been applied to school, surgical, police, and welfare records, and medical sociology has shown how patient identities and diagnoses are shored up through written traces in charts and files.
Documents and Identity
The creation of identity through documentation has figured prominently in sociology’s history. Researchers in the Chicago tradition gave voice to “delinquents,” criminals, and other outsiders through constructed “life stories,” while anthropologists sought the autobiographies of tribal chiefs and other traditional figures. Today the work of identity creation and life “storying” concerns nearly everyone in the advanced world — assembling a curriculum vitae, narrating personal troubles to a counselor, or establishing at a security check who one “is” and what one is doing, an assertion of identity almost wholly dependent on documentation. Such autobiographical strategies are elements of what Foucault called “technologies of the self,” a cornerstone of modern everyday life.
Circulation
In the circulation and exchange of documents — greeting cards, Christmas cards, memos, files — one can trace the development of social networks and the emergence of identifiable groupings. Citation studies have mapped styles of interaction among scientists, and web crawlers have identified emergent medico-scientific networks in genomics; studies of email and text-messaging contacts could similarly show how exchanging text defines and cements social groups. Advocates of actor-network theory (ANT) stress that documents do not merely circulate but act back upon and structure their creators and users — documents are invariably involved in the performance of social organization.
Conclusion
Documents, especially written ones, thus constitute a field of research in their own right. Studying the production and consumption of written materials is often key to understanding how the social world is constructed. In the hurly-burly of everyday activity, production and consumption become entwined and are not always easy to distinguish, and content must not be overlooked; it is the ways in which production, consumption, and content relate to one another that should form the basis of sociological investigation.