For this current section I introduce interpretation from two perspectives, both of which rely on
the deployment of MR. Both views chime with my understanding of Latour’s (2005) ideas about
the ‘local’ site, the standpoints of participant and researcher as they create the networks for their
local sites, here through textual production and interpretation, drawing on temporally and
spatially distant resources to stabilise and calibrate their resulting views of the world.
The first perspective, then, is my interpretation as researcher/analyst of what my participants say
and write. My own interpretation emerges from my identification of categories, values and
attitudes through my act of describing discourse. From the other perspective, the texts which my
participants produce result from their interpretation of previous texts which may be what has
been said immediately before them in an interview, or may be produced in anticipation of what
greater spatial and temporal distance from the moment when the participants produce their texts
– as per my example of the ‘presence’ of policy (see above under ‘MR and Policy’).
Participants’ interpretation is carried out with a view to action seen as the production of further
text. From my perspective as analyst the purpose of my interpretation of the texts is to produce
this text. From my participants’ perspectives, interpretation was carried out in order to produce a
written text as an assignment or ‘action plan’. Or the participants were members of focus groups
and interviews where the production of text was perhaps more ‘spontaneous’ and of the
moment.
Fairclough (2001:117-118 ) maintains that both the researcher/analyst and the participants are
both interpreters of texts. Whilst the participants interpret text for the immediate purposes of
the interview, focus group or task in hand, the researcher/analyst’s task is to look beyond and
behind the immediacy of the participant-produced texts to uncover the background and common-
sense assumptions and presuppositions (also part of MR) which are included in participants’ texts,
or indeed, the assumptions and presuppositions which could have been drawn on but were not
favoured by the participant.
Fairclough’s (2001) approach therefore includes the idea of a dialectical interplay between
participants in the particular situation where the dialectic involves the choice of some MR as
opposed to or at the expense of others. At the stage of interpretation therefore I will be engaged
in examining what common ground my participants share. From my list of data sources (see
below under ‘About the texts: the sources of my data’) it is evident that the situations which
prompt the emergence of discourse have different purposes and are achieved at points where
participants bring them together in different sites. Through the very variety of these sources and
presuppositions, time/place, actions, events, common-sense notions and ideology etc.) and the
(lack of) conformity to situations which participants demonstrate.
The consequences of the different types of construction of language (Potter and Wetherell,
1987:55) begin to feature in the interpretation of my participants’ texts and echo Fairclough’s
(2001) approach to MR as outlined above. Here I use their ideas on the purposive construction of
language as contingent, reserving their approach to widening out my discussion until the stage of
explanation.
The stage of interpretation therefore comprises an examination of how the participants use
mental representations such as actions, topic and relations (schemata, frames and scripts;
Fairclough, 2001:131) to give purpose and meaning to what they say and write. Fairclough
(2001:132) stresses the inter-relationships between the three:
Notice . . . that there are interdependencies between the three, in the sense that
a particular schema will predict particular topics and subject matters, and
particular subject positions and relationships, and therefore particular frames and
scripts. Nevertheless, the three do vary independently, and it therefore does
make sense to distinguish them in analysis.
Moreover, he (2001:133) suggests that the analysis of actions, topic and relations leads to the
uncovering of the ‘the ideological imprint of socially dominant power-holders that are likely to be
a naturalised resource for all’ and thereby opens up the way for the stage of explanation. On the
other hand, Fairclough (2001:134) also acknowledges that there may be diversity among and
between participants within the same context and across different contexts with different
participants. This resonates with Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) discussion of the importance of
From my reading of these authors I am advancing a view of my act of interpretation as examining
how participants use language to make things happen or to show how things have happened in
their texts, through using their MR and looking for commonality and variability between the
accounts. In addition to this, and important for the stage of explanation, interpretation enables
the researcher/analyst to explore how discourse is dependent of the ‘common-sense assumptions
of MR’ (Fairclough, 2001:135) and whether these assumptions vary between participants and over
time.