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In matters of social research sociologists and other social scientists have tended to view documents primarily as sources of evidence and as receptacles of inert content.The key strategies for data exploration have consequently been associated with various styles of content or thematic analysis. Even when discourse analysis has been recommended, there has been a marked tendency to deal with records, files, and the like, primarily as containers — things to be read, understood, and categorized. In this article, however, the author seeks to demonstrate that by focussing on the functioning of documents instead of content, sociology can embrace a much wider range of approaches to both data collection and analysis. Indeed, the adoption of such a programme encourages researchers to see documents as active agents in the world, and to view documentation as a key component of dynamic networks rather than as a set of static and immutable `things'.

This article is concerned with the ways in which people who work in and use a cancer genetics clinic in the UK talk about the `gene for cancer'. By conceptualizing such a gene as a boundary object, and using empirical data derived from clinic consultations, observations in a genetics laboratory and interviews with patients, the author seeks to illustrate how the various parties involved adopt different discursive strategies to appropriate, describe and understand what is apparently the `same' thing.The consequent focus on the ways in which the rhetorical and syntactical features of lay and professional talk interlink and diverge illustrates not merely how our contemporary knowledge of genes and genetics is structured, but also how different publics position themselves with respect to the biochemistry of life.

This paper is concerned with the socio-medical organisation of psychiatric disorder. The main line of analysis demonstrates how different psychiatric ideologies produce different objects of professional focus and, consequently, radically different forms of therapy and therapeutic environment. By way of empirical evidence, the paper examines in some detail three contrasting contexts in which psychiatric disorder has been described and organised. The first is represented in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, the second in the case books of a turn of the century asylum, and the third in the activities and practices of a modern psychiatric ward. By drawing on these sources of data, it is argued that an understanding of large scale changes in the organisation of psychiatric health care (such as is evident, for example, in modern trends from hospital to community care), firmly depends upon a study of the inner structure of psychiatric ideologies. Furthermore, and as a corollary of this it is claimed that appeals to extra-psychiatric (economic) interests and/or scientific (pharmacological) advances as key factors for explaining processes or organisational change (especially the process of deinstitutionalisation), are essentially misleading.

This paper focuses upon the nature of the mortuary as a socio-medical institution and the discourse of pathology which operates within it. More specifically, by examining the manner in which pathology is operationalised in Belfast it demonstrates: (i) how medical interests are frequently fused with those of the wider politico-technological system within which they are ensconced; (ii) how the assumptions and investigative principles of pathology are grounded in social rather than specifically clinical concerns, and (iii) how the subject population on which pathology concentrates is selected in accordance with social as well as clinical characteristics.