Family Discourse, Organizational Embeddedness

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Treating family as an everyday, working vocabulary or discourse for assigning meaning to social relations, the analysis considers the social processes and descriptive conditions through which meaning is established, managed, and transcended. Highlighting both the descriptive utilities and the limits of organizationally embedded discourses, the article presents etlutographic material to show how family, although discursively and interactionally constituted, is a local enactment of practical reasoning substantively bounded by local culture yet offering grounds for resistance. The article suggests analytic orientations and strategies for examining family discourse and meaning in organizational context.

Family Discourse, Organizational Embeddedness, and Local Enactment JABER F. GUBRIUM University of Florida JAMES A. HOLSTEIN Marquette University

A new perspective in family studies has coalesced around core assumptions of phenomenology and ethnomethodology to launch empirical research in what has been variously labeled "family ideology" (Bemardes, 1985), "family rhetoric" (Gubrium & Lynotl, 1985; G. Miller, 1987, 1991; L. Miller, 1990), and "family discourse" (Gubrium, 1988a, 1988b; Gubrium & Holstein, 1987, 1990; Holstein, 1988). As Bernardes (1987) aptly emphasizes, the perspective, broadly conceived, deals with what those concerned with domestic affairs-family members, social scientists, service providers, policymakers, and significant othcrs-s-t'do with words" to produce and manage the meaning of family living. The central principle of the family discourse perspective is that the social world and its forms are made concrete and meaningful through everyday talk and interaction, by way of descriptive practice (Gubrium & Holstein. 1990). Conversation, testimony, and case histories-discourse of all kinds-are not as much spoken or transcribed descriptions of reality, as they are tacitly constitutive of objects and events. In this regard, family as a social object may be construed as both a production and a by-product of family discourse. Accordingly, Garfinkel (1967) would refer to the JOURNAL OF FAMILY ISSUES. Vol. 14 No. I, March 1993 66-81 C 1993 Sage Publications, Inc.

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"seen but unnoticed" practical reasoning that provides meaning, shape, and visibility to domestic life. Yet, although practical reasoning is "artful" (Garfinkel, 1967}-that is, it entails the skilled and inventive management of social forms-practice is not substantively arbitrary. Practice is conditioned, but not determined, by existing categories for assigning meaning to experience. Emphasizing the local enactment of culturally available meanings suggests an uneasy analytic alliance between what categorically exists and what categorically could be. This article shows how family is both discursively constituted and resisted in organizational context, making visible the substance and margins of family's "organizational embeddedness" (Gubrium, 1987a; Gubrium & Holstein, 1990). Analytic orientations and strategies are offered for examining family in terms of organizationally embedded descriptive practice.

ORGANIZATIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS Family life is meaningfully embedded in organizations because organizational agents of all kinds, especially human service professionals, literally make it their business to understand and define the domestic order of the home so as to interpret and eventually treat the personal troubles that beset family members. There is no dearth of personal troubles in contemporary society, with experts and specialists ready to diagnose, correct, or sequester the related behaviors, thoughts, and sentiments of putative troublemakers and the troubled (Mills, 1959, 1963). The emotionally disturbed child initially might be the troublemaking "kid" who persists in stirring up classmates in his elementary school. His referral to a multidisciplinary team of behavior consultants produces a documented case of disturbance and a recommendation of individual therapy or a referral to a treatment center (Buekholdt & Gubrium, 1979). A young man whose so-called bizarre, uncontrolled actions causes fright in the neighborhood is brought to the attention of the police. Figuring that the man has not broken the law, the police contact mental health professionals whose job it is to sort troublemakers from the psychiatrically troubled (Holstein, 1984, 1988). The housewife who drinks excessively and ignores her usual domestic duties is perceived by her wotried husband to be io need of help. Distressed, he seeks the counsel of a therapist for what eventually is diagnosed as the housewife's depression (Gubrium, 1992; Warren, 1987). An aging father with Alzheimer's disease burdens his adult daughter with

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what are called "36-hour days" of home care. The daughter turns to a support group for comfort (Gubrium, 1988b). The entire life course brings the troubled, troublesome persons, and a related spectrum of conduct into contact with a community of professional, organizationally based "troubleshooters" (Emerson & Messinger, 1977). In attempting to interpret what is happening in clients' lives, troubleshooters routinely consider the social order of clients' domestic environs. The emotionally disturbed child's problem may be traced to the lack of appropriate role-modeling of an ineffective father (see Kadushin, 1967; Polsky, Claster, & Goldberg, 1970; Whittaker, 1978). A young man's delinquency may be assessed in relation to the "broken home" in which he was reared, where domestic disorder was the norm and now is presumed to have significantly contributed to the youth's instability (Emerson, 1969). The interactional minutiae of family life may be the telling background of personal troubles, as Laing and Esterson (1964) vividly describe in linking schizophrenia with the "hidden" rituals of the household. The family, which Skolnick (1983, p. 55), among others, suggests is "perhaps the most secret institution in American society," is a pervasive public concern (Gubrium & Holstein, 1987). Family life as a social object is increasingly embedded in organizational activity. Organizational embeddedness refers to the circumstances in which domestic order is constituted, not the actual integration offamily members into the working life of organizations. The sense of domestic order that makes troubles and social relations recognizable and meaningful as familial objects may thus emerge from interactions far removed from the household, in such diverse settings as welfare agencies (G. Miller, 199\), nursing homes (Gubrium, 1987a), and courtrooms (Holstein, 1988). Consider the local meanings of family and divorce presented in a discussion of marital dissolution drawn from a field study of family therapy (Gubrium, 1992). A brief exchange of professional opinion about the domestic meaning of divorce illustrates how events can be contrastingly represented when diverse versions of domestic order arc taken into account. The exchange follows a lengthy discussion between family counselors and a consultant about what divorce can do to a home. Note how what is understood to be happening in the home is embedded in local organizational interpretations of domestic living. (Names are fictionalized throughout the article.) Tom:

[To Sharon, another counselor] Didn't you say that divorce causes

havoc in most families? Isn't that what you said?

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Sharon: I think that's generally true. It changes everything. Youknow ... like they've been going along and are used to each other and all of a sudden, things are different and they don't know what to do. They're lost. They fan apart. [elaborates] Tom: I don't know,Sharon. I think that depends 00 the kind offamily you're dealing with. I think, actually, the Lincolns ... they're doing better after Amy [the wife] divorced Chuck [the husband]. That guy was real trouble for her and the kids. Talk about weak! He couldn't hold down ajoh if you nailed it to him. He was always whining and bothering the kids. He was abusive. [elaborates]Now that he's gone, it's like night and day. She [Amy] got her act together. She's on top of things at horne. The kids know where they stand. She's gotten them in line. She put up with a lot of shit because that's what they'd gotten used to. It was a habit and habits are hard to break. They make you dopey. Consultant: Sounds to me like the kind of family that doesn't know how to react to the little annoyances, but they come around when there's a big problem. [elaborates 1 The divorce woke them up and showed their hidden strength. Sharon: That's different. You're talking about a divorce when you've got one of those moms who can make it no matter what Most of the families I've seen are not like that. Divorce is hell in those families. Maggy: Sharon's got a point, Tom. How often do you see that kind of family? Tom: No, I think the point is that we can't just say that divorce is bad, point blank. It depends on the kind of familyyou're talking about ... like Sharon said. Right? Although the counselors and the consultant do not ultimately resolve the issue of the meaning of divorce in the family, meaning is loeally linked to particular senses of domestic order.In the context of this organization, as in others, although there may he extended praetical reasoning about the meaning of divorce, the range of linkages with domestic order is conditioned by available understandings and interpretive resources. Analysis of the discourse shows Sharon arguing that divorce is generally destructive, especially for the kind of family that counselors see in treatment. Tom, with the consultant's support, maintains that divorce may work to awaken family strength, which, until there is a separation, can be hidden by a swirl of numbing routine. Depending on the evident or "hidden" domestic order assigned to the home, the matter of divorce is construed negatively or positively. The point is not who is right or wrong, but that, through talk and interaction, local understandings of the relation between domestic order and divorce serve to construct the meaning of divorce in particular ways, quite apart from other definitions and from what ostensibly may be actually happening in the home. In the exchange, domestic relations are construed through two competing senses of the meaning of

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divorce for home life; other settings and organizations provide other options, connecting and constituting the facts of cases differently. In the following sections, two analytic strategies are presented for examining the different features of family's organizational embeddedness. The first strategy emphasizes the categories or understandings that organizational agents bring to the interpretation of home life, that is, local cultures of domesticity. The second strategy features the locally sensitive, practical reasoning that provides grounds for confirming, resisting, or transcending local culture.

LOCAL CULTURES OF DOMESTICITY: ANALYTIC STRATEGY 1 Organizations that treat or service families vary in their understandings of domestic order, providing diverse interpretive resources or local cultures for assigning meaning to home life (Geertz, 1983). Some organizations have official treatment philosophies. For example, a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children, studied in the 1970s, offered a behaviorally oriented program (Buckholdt & Gubrium, 1979). The center employed a token economy whereby children were systematically rewarded for appropriate behavior through the accumulation of points exchangeable for small gifts or recreational privileges, Officially, there was a local preference for casting the whys and wherefores of behavior in the vocabulary of rewards, punishments, and related terms of control. Descriptions of households and family life were similarly shaped by the local interpretive culture. Domesticity was viewed as a system of home management. Parents who had trouble with their children were taught to design and mount behavioral assessments and encouraged to be clear and consistent in the delegation of responsibility. Parents were expected to establish rational grounds for appropriate conduct and instructed not to respond to their children arbitrarily. Parent effectiveness classes taught parents how to manage on a domestic scale what the facility had established as a therapeutic identity. Yet the local culture of domesticity was not limited to this clear-cut therapeutic philosophy. Some staff members were at professional odds with behavioral principles. A consulting child psychiatrist was an assiduous Freudian who attended to the deep and developmental meaning of conduct, assuring that early childhood experiences in the family were


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taken into account. This psychiatrist regularly "got into the heads" of children and parents, an area where his behaviorist counterpart, a professional psychologist, hesitated to go in his consultations. A third consultant, with an admittedly eclectic attitude, claimed to be impartial, using whatever ideas or reasoning he felt shed light on a case. Staff social workers and special education teachers were similarly diverse. Nonetheless, staff members and consultants sustained the overall system of behavioral management. In practice, differences in treatment philosophy were not so much resented as they were understood at a certain level to be equal sources of insight into what ailed emotionally disturbed children and their families. For example, when the differences between the Freudian psychiatrist and the behavioral psychologist were pointed out, they were taken as perspectives on the overall puzzle of disturbance,

not as being conceptually inconsistent. Still, the differences were real enough to require the formulation of

consistent behavioral descriptions for official purposes. The semiannual reports sent to a child's county welfare department could not contain deep readings of family life that contradicted behavioral accounts. A psychiatric consultation suggesting that the source of a disturbed child's conduct lay in his early relationship with his father would seem to contradict the behavioral assessment that the source was a currently unstructured, fatherless home.

Discussions of the differences between practice and the center's official treatment philosophy offered continual opportunity to collect empirical evidence of the local culture of domesticity embedded in the organization. The method of analysis was to examine talk and interaction for

discursive clues to local culture. One set of clues was found in persistent references by staff members to the question of "how to put" all that was said and done about a case into institutionally appropriate terms for the record. This especially affected the social workers, whose responsibility

was to compile semiannual reports and other written case materials. The question centered on the fact that there were different, locally discernible ways of interpreting children's conduct and their family lives. The question was how to bring all that was said into line with official claims. One could literally hear local culture in references to the way ''we,'' meaning the official staff as a whole, see things in this particular facility as opposed to remarks about the different ways individual staff members spoke about and framed emotional disturbance. Another set of clues came in the form of family members' responses to institutional categories for interpreting home life. Although the moth-

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ers, fathers, stepparents, and other kindred who attended parent effectiveness classes concentrated on methods for dealing with their children, class participants occasionally compared their own and other outsiders' separate interpretations with staff members' views. For example, when a mother stated that every time she came to class, she saw things at home in a completely new light, or in a way that was substantially different from understandings presented in another facility, one heard references to alternate local cultures for interpreting domesticity. Although this organization had its internal conceptual differences, its staff oriented to the facts and happenings of home life in terms of treatment and cure. Other organizations bring entirely different understandings to bear on troubled families, providing additional frameworks for interpreting what goes on in the home and what to do about it. Take the orientational complexity offered by contrasting therapeutic and custodial framings presented in the involuntary mental hospitalization hearings observed in a large Western city (Holstein, 1984, 1988). Consider, in particular, the case of Tyrone Biggs, who had been a client of a psychiatrist, Dr. Conrad, at a community mental health center for several months. While under treatment, Biggs was apprehended by the police for causing a public disturbance on a bus. A large man in his 30s, Biggs was temporarily hospitalized in the county psychiatric facility for evaluation, then involuntarily committed for treatment in the state hospital. Biggs was entitled to a formal commitment hearing at which time Dr. Conrad and the presiding judge exchanged views on Biggs's psychiatric troubles and the residential arrangement Biggs proposed for himself if he were released. Familial responsibility became an issue as the psychiatrist and judge offered their respective, contrasting concern for Biggs's therapeutic welfare and the havoc he might cause in the community. Dr. Conrad recommended that Biggs be released to live with his "family"-his girlfriend, her two children, and the girlfriend's aunt-because, according to Conrad, "being close to his family is extremely important for Tyrone's [treatment] program:' Conrad offered his recommendation in terms of the affective, supportive aspects of Biggs's relationship with the groups Biggs called his family. This family allegedly would provide Biggs the sense of security and well-being necessary to make psychotherapeutic progress. The judge disagreed with Conrad, articulating custodial and community concerns in the process. Whereas the psychiatrist had portrayed a willing and accepting famiiy, the judge countered, "I really don't see much of a family here." In assessing the situation, the judge was chiefly concerned with who would keep Biggs ''under control," make him take his


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medications, and generally be responsible for his whereabouts. The judge emphasized custody and broader community control over psychotherapeutic progress. Reflecting on these concerns, he concluded, "I just don't see any family there to look out for him." The hearing raised the issue of the tenability of Biggs's proposed living situation if he were released from the hospital. Interpreting the familial status of the girlfriend, her aunt, and the children was central to establishing the viability of the living arrangement. Interpretations of tenability were mediated by distinct organizational actors with contrasting professional agendas. From a therapeutic standpoint, with its emphasis on remediation and affective security, Dr. Conrad spoke of Biggs's family in terms of love and care. The judge's desire for secure custodial arrangements for a potentially disruptive mental patieot led him to reject that criterion for conferring family status. From the judge's point of view, family meant persons who could "really be responsible for this man," which in the judge's opinion this particular set of candidates failed to provide.

PRACTICAL ANALYTIC

REASONING: STRATEGY 2

Local cultures of domesticity offer conceptual resources for practical reasoning about the social order of the home. Practical reasoning is a process whereby the generalities of local culture are linked discursively with the circumstantial particulars of everyday life, thereby constituting meaningful objects of attention or concern. A mother who participates in parent effectiveness classes encounters general understandings of what families are like, how they work, what makes them break up, and how to effectively intervene to help them-that is, local culture. Yet it is never precisely indicated how these understandings apply to particular parenting experiences, hers included. We can analyze how this is clarified by orienting to the mother's and others' practical reasoning, which, like local culture, reveals itself in family discourse. Consider how the meaning of family responsibility developed in a comparative observational study of support groups for family caregivers of Alzheimer's disease victims (Gubrium, 1986a, 1986b, 1988b). An enduring question in all groups was, "What kind of family are we [family members] to each other [at home]?" The question may never have been

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raised in the household proper. For many participants, it was now being addressed for the first time. One group, facilitated by two experienced caregivers, had a welldeveloped conception of the normal course of familial responsibility. It was conveyed against the burdens of the 36-hourday thatcaregiving proverbially entailed and a multiphase chronology reminiscent of KublerRoss' (1969) stage model of dying (Gubrium, 1987b). According to the chronology, in the Alzheimer's disease experience, family members initially orient completely to the victim's cure and recovery; the caregiver's own needs are ignored and caregivers devote 36-hour days to tbe care receiver. Although caregivers eventually acknowledge the general inevitability of the victim's decline, they refuse to believe it applies to their afflicted family member and thus enter a stage of denial. Caregivers may feel guilty that they are not doing enough for the victim or they become acutely guilt ridden when they occasionally inadvertently place their own welfare ahead of the victim's. As domestic life goes from bad to worse, with no hope for recovery for the victim and no relief in sight from the burdens of care, caregivers are said to enter a stage of depression. Soon, it is hoped, they move into yet another stage when it is realized that there is more at stake than the victim. At this stage, the inevitably of full dementia is accepted, with caregivers taking stock of the impact of the disease on their own and other family members' lives. At this point, the question of family responsibility centers on institutionalization or nursing home placement, it is said for the sake of all concerned, both the victim and the family as a whole. Caregivers who participated in this support group sorted and organized their thoughts and feelings in relation to the stage model. But this was not a wholesale process of enculturation, where participants straightforwardly internalized the model, using it to identify who they were as family members, what they had become, and, especially, what they owed to each other, among other questions of domestic order. Rather, talk and interaction showed that the process of practical reasoning could assemble in different ways what participants were said to commonly encounter in their caregiving experience. A brief conversation between two facilitators (Ann and Ruth), a caregiver (Dee), and two other participants (Belle and Dora), suggests that the link between the local culture of family responsibility and the interpretation of domestic particulars was not automatic. We enter the proceeding following an extended discussion between Ann, Ruth, and Belle about how similar the course of the home care experience has been for them.


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Dee: I don't know Belle. Sure, I can see what happened ... why you decided to start looking for a place [nursing home) for Harold [Belle's demented husband]. I guess ifl was in your shoes, I wouldn't fight it anymore either. You do have to start thinking about how you feel inside and what's happening to your family. God know, the kids would have heen ignored. Dora: [To Dee) Well then dear, what's yourprohlem? We're all in this thing together. You're no different. You just think. you are. I was like you once. [elaborates) I did everything. I had no time to think. It was get this, do that. and take carcofBen (herhushand) 24 hours a day. Well, I1eamed the hard way and nearly put myself in the hospital. Ben's on a waiting list [for nursing home placement] at Pine Crest. God help me, it won't come too soon. Belle: I don't think I'm ready for that yet, hut I know I'll have to pretty soon. Iknow it's coming. It's only a matter of time. Dee: Idon't think it's that simple, Belle. Anne: Oh, come on, Dee. That's what it is in a nutshell. You have to start thinking about yourself. [elaborates] Look at you. You're all worn down and I'll bet you're feeling lonely and depressed. Dee: No, that's what I was trying to explain last time. I'm realIy not lonely. I'm ... Rum: You're denying. We aU try to deny it. At this point, there is an extended

discussion

of denial,

its workings, re-

and how it applies to several caregivers, after which Dee continues, sisting the local characterization of the caregiver.

Dee: I don't think so. Seriously, if! was in the same situation as most people, maybe I'd be denying, but basically I'm here to learn how to cope with his [her husband] ... you know, how to dress him and what's going to happen to him in the months ahead. [elaborates] Anne: Dee, you're forgetting that we know all about this. Dee: I know. I know that's the way it works. I understand that. But you're forgetting one thing, too: he's all I have. He's a friend, a companion, even if he forgets who I am sometimes. It doesn't matter that much anyway because I know he knows in his heart that it's me. [elaborates] If we had had kids, mayhe it'd he different. I'd probahly he going through all the phases of this thing. [elaborates] But I don't have kids and his family's not around and I don't know who mine are. We've pretty much been on our own and with each other all our lives. If! give him up, it'd be, well, giving up on life. It's not like I'm going to get back to my life after he's gone. What life are we talking about? Life with Gordon is all I've ever really had. Gordon's my family. Although Dee acknowledges the stage model's general validity, she considers herself to be an exception to its developmental rule, not on grounds of denial, but applicability. Adherents of the model assume that

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there is a family life separate and distinct from the caregiver's relation with the care receiver-a life jeopardized by caregiving and, it is hoped, taken into account "before it is too late." According to this model, in the normal course of caregiving, one eventually breaks the clutches of denial. The group's two facilitators note that one of their tasks is to help others do just that. Dee, however, insists that her husband Gordon is her family, indeed her life. Her responsibility to her family and to life itself is equated to her responsibility to Gordon. By disentangling her care for Gordon from the prevailing model of caregiver adjustment and, instead, tying care to the life she and Gordon have built together without competing familial obligations, Dee establishes rational and practical grouuds for resisting local culture (Connell, 1987,1989; Paules, 1991; Scott, 1985, 1990). She not only is an exception to the general rules conceming responsibility and the borders of the familial but simultaneously depathologizes her responses and provides a separate and unique space for her well-being. All the same, her exceptional status proves the rule guiding other participants, allowing Dee's difference to stand rationally side by side with the commonly accepted "normal' course of the caregiver's experience. Another support group had little or no prevailing understanding of a normal course for responding to caregiving. By and large, proceedings were made up of shared thoughts and feeliugs from the previous weeks' home happenings. Members had established a diverse participatory history of shared examples against which to assess and interpret individual caregiving experiences. Still, like the other groups studied (including Dee's group), they were at pains to understand what was happening to their separate family lives and to interpret their respective responsibilities. Answers to questions of domestic order and responsibility were matters of constant interpersonal comparison. This presented contrasting practical reasoning, highlighted in caregiver Sally's extended remarks. Responding to participants' comments about how it felt when the care receiver failed to recognize the caregiver as a family member, Sally describes her own experience. Note how, at one point, she even serves as a kind of model for herself, as she reasons about the meaning of the relationship under consideration. I can't say that it's been the same for me as Violet [another participant]. Of course, you do think about what all this means sometimes. Like this last week, AI (her husband] turned around ... just like that ... and asked me, "Who are you? What are doing in here?" It was like I was a stranger in the house or somelhing. God, did that set me back. They say it wakes you up

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and makes you realize what it's all about I got scared. I remember how Cora [a participant] reacted when hermotheryelled at her about not wanting a stranger running around in the bedroom. I felt like that How could AI think Iwas someone else! It was real hard to take. Iremembered what Cora said and it snapped me back a bit They [Alzheimer's patients] get confused sometimes. They don't know how to express things and so it comes out all twisted around,like they don't know who they are, even. It's not their fault I remembered that and that calmed me down a bit ... and I thanked Cora for having shared that. [pause] I think what a person has to do is keep in mind what you've heard from everyone here tonight. Down the road, well, I know if! stand back and think back to myself and what happened, I'll say to myself, "Hold on there, Sal. Remember what happened last week or last month and how it made you fecI and tell yourself how you should feel right now." You learn from experience ... all the experiences ... and that helps to answer things that keep coming up in your mind ... like what's happening to your marriage or if you even have one to speak of ... you know, what you owe to each other after all those years. Sally's practical reasoning reveals an agent of everyday life attuned to local descriptive resources (Sally's and Cora's pasts as interpretive "models") as well as to how the resources were to apply to Sally's current domestic experience. As others did, Sally gave voice to experience through shared understandings. Yet the manner in which she voiced her understanding was competently attuned to the enduringly contingent particulars of descriptive practice.

ORIENTING TO FAMILY DISCOURSE Building on the concepts of local culture and practical reasoning, an approach for studying family discourse as organizationally embedded interpretive practice can be set forth in brief, We offer four analytic orientations. The first two emphasize family as a discursive process. The third and fourth highlight organizational embeddedness. The orientations coalesce into the concept of local enactment. which provides the basis for both the situated reproduction and redefinition of the familial. ORIENTING

TO FAMILY AS A TOPIC

Garfinkel (1967) distinguished between two treatments of sociological concepts: as resources and as topics or phenomena in their own right. As a sociological resource, a concept is used to understand conduct. Commonly, family is treated as a resource by social researchers. Variable fea-

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tures of family life, such as family size and marital stability, act as explanations for members' or outsiders' behaviors, such as the likelihood of delinquency or marital dissatisfaction. In this treatment, questions rarely are raised about the everyday reality of family, what it is as a meaningful entity in its own right or how it is constituted as an object of experience (Gubrium & Holstein, 1990). In contrast, to treat a concept topically is to study its everyday reality as an object of concern, that is, how the concept is constituted and used as a category. Rather than taking for granted the reality of family facts and happenings, our approach orients to how facts and happenings are discursively organized so as to bring about a sense of a whole, the thing called family. We take Weber's (1947, p. 88) definition of action seriously, considering how meaning is attached to objects and events, emphasizing the available categories and practical reasoning hy which the familial is derived. ORIENTING TO ALL PERSONS CONCERNED WITH DOMESTICITY

The approach also orients to the myriad contexts in which the attachment or interpretive process takes place. There are, of course, diverse situations and occasions in which family is assigned meaning. Questions such as "What is family?"; "Who is family?"; and "Where is family?" are not the sole concern of family members. Consequently, the approach attends to whoever engages in the interpretive practices that assign order to domestic life, including family members, significant others, and service professionals. No one is assumed to have a priori privileged knowledge in this regard (Gubrium & Holstein, 1987). DISCERNING LOCAL CULTURES

The family discourse approach further speci fies context in terms of the local cultures discernible in the interactions of participants in particular settings. For example. in the residential treatment center discussed earlier, the official culture of domesticity availed participants of behavioral categories for assigning meaning to the home, even while there were diverse informal senses of order. Yet both official and unofficial patterns had practical boundaries, delimiting local culture. Just as Dee's reformulation of the bounds of the familial made visible the interpretive margins of local culture, on week-

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ends at the residential trealment center, for example, the language of diagnosis, pathology, and cure was challenged by another vocabulary and its representations. The language of containment and interpersonal persuasion loomed in significance. Children who remained at the center for the weekend used the idea of the weekend as a "time-out" from the accountabilities of the point system and its behavioral targets, arguing that, because "it's the weekend," other priorities applied (Gubrium, 1989). To use Silverman's (1989) term, a predominant component of the local culture of pathology and behavioraltrealment discursively "escaped" on the weekend, contained by a competing way of understanding and communicating daily life. "It's the weekend" became for the children part of a rhetoric of resistance of clinical categories. LINKING WITH PRACTICAL REASONING

This brings us to a final orientation to the practical reasoning thatserves both to constitute and transcend culture. Members of established groups and organizations attach meaning to domestic life through circumstantially sensitive, yet working, discourse. In practice, we literally hear the articulation of versions of domestic orderas speakers propose locally relevant models, schemes, folk theories, and other designs for family living and deliberate their applicability to their own and others' lives and expericnces. As members speak with each other about the familial and therein exchange ideas, suppositions, categories, and explanations, they virtually construct and reconstruct domestic order, yet they also present competing conceptions that challenge the taken for granted. Taken tngether, the four orientations make family's organizational embeddedness a problematic oflocal enactment. The orientations are not politically preferential, providing analytic space for making visible both conservative and transforming forces of everyday life, both the public reproductions of family as a discursive formation (Foucault, 1972) and resistance to reproduction. It has been argued that the family, like other social forms, is increasingly subject to the rationalization of contemporary life. It hardly qualifies any longer as a "haven in a heartless world" (Lasch, 1979). The ideas of organizational embeddedness and local enactment, however, offer both theoretical and methodological grounds for conceiving of rationalization as manifold and sited, certainly less "total" than Weber's (1947) iron cage metaphor suggests.

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