Locating Ideology and Ideological Codes within Ruling Relations

. They are not inert, but rather they operate to mediate everyday life in numerous ways: filling in forms to attend conferences; writing cheques or filling in direct debit forms; using public transport, including bus or rail passes, and the numbers on the front of buses which coordinate with timetables. Some texts, such as academic texts, operate predominantly within the realm of intertextuality and appear to speak to each other independently. Other forms of texts, such as memos, policy documents, spread sheets etc., are directed at specific areas or specific people and are predominant in the coordination of organisations. What is key is understanding how texts are always active in one sense or another and at varying levels, and that texts carry language which is expressed through discursive means.

The next section considers how concepts, categories and ideological methods of reasoning can work in practice, and Smith’s analytical term ‘ideological code’ is also introduced.

Sociologists, and indeed lay-people, all work with concepts and categories. Take, for example, what is at first glance the relatively simple concept of ‘family’. ‘Family’ is both a concept and a working category that has sprung from actual social relations and refers to specific ‘units’ of people. The ethnocentric, Western understanding of ‘family’ consists of an organisational ‘unit’: two heterosexual parents, usually married, residing together in one place, with their children, if they have them. Often, the notion of ‘extended family’ is included within the concept. In actuality, the lived social relations of any given ‘unit’ or group of people is dependent on culture, the mode of production that dictates the economy, the contemporary and gendered

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patterns of the division of labour, sexuality, race, class, religion and so on. To widen this analysis further, these aforementioned factors are also related to temporal attitudes and acceptability, or the norms and values of society, thus the concept of ‘family’ must always be historically located. Under closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that the concept of ‘family’ contains within it other concepts, the ‘economy’, ‘heterosexuality’, ‘homosexuality’, ‘two parents’, ‘the division of labour’, and so on.

Clearly, the concept of ‘family’ becomes far more complex under interrogation. Each of the component concepts contained within the concept of ‘family’ can be deconstructed and analysed, and no doubt each of the component concepts will contain other component concepts and categories, for example, men as ‘breadwinners’, women as ‘mothers’. This compares closely to what Smith calls an ‘ideological code’:

… an ‘ideological’ code’ coordinates multiple sites within the intersecting relations of public text-mediated discourses and large-scale organization. (1999:157)

Thus, concepts and categories originate in actual social relations, and are built up into ideological methods of reasoning that merely reflect back the lived experiences they were grounded in, but which are elevated in significance and work to organise social relations. Compounding this phenomenon further is the ability for ideological concepts to shift and accommodate new ways of thinking, or emerging discourses. For example, single and same sex ‘families’ have become more common, and within a Western context have worked to reconfigure the concept of ‘family’. That is not to say, however, that the traditional, heterosexual, two parent concept of ‘family’ does not operate simultaneously, bringing with it its own problems regarding new policy and/or regulations and laws. Indeed, it is this simultaneous operation of an ideological code that organises social relations, and that is often invisible to people unless or until they experience a disjuncture.

Smith (1999) uses the tool of ideological codes to investigate the social organisation of Standard North American Families (SNAF). Smith, and her colleague Alison Griffiths, had previously studied the work single mothers do in relation to their children’s schooling. Their research stemmed from their own

experiences as single mothers and their problems of being categorised as ‘defective families’ as opposed to the professional ideology of ‘intact families’ by which US school systems operated. Smith identified SNAF as a version of ‘the family’ that masked people’s actualities and implicitly judged and evaluated those supportive emotional relationships that did not conform to, or accord with SNAF. Moreover, after a reflexive treatment of her experience of doing research, she found that her own interviewing questions were also caught up in the ideological organising of SNAF. Smith’s interview questions to mothers with small children regarding paid work was introduced as “work outside the home” (ibid:164). Although the interview questions were designed to redefine work outside the home as normal, there remained an implicit reference to SNAF codes that view employment for mothers with small children as a deviation from the SNAF norm. Smith found that SNAF, therefore, was an organising schema of ‘family’ that infected governmental text, policy, statistics, as well as sociologists’ interview questions.

Smith’s analytical tool of ideological codes is highly significant in this research and is explored throughout Chapters six, seven and eight. The next section, however, takes a selection of what might be termed more ‘orthodox’ IE studies.