The Importance of Talk (Continued)
The analytic schemes of conventional sociology and ethnomethodology assign quite different roles to talk, according to Wieder:
Traditionally sociology has been concerned with talk only as a source of data for analysis. What is said as such, how it is said, and the interactional and other contexts for what is said is [sic]generally disregarded in favor of exclusively examining what was meant by some utterance or collection of utterances as that meaning is relevant to some sociological theory or frame of reference...the remarks that an ethnographer receives to his questions (or simply overhears) are of interest in the ways that they can be understood as substantive reports about such matters as norms, values, customs, and the like. The meanings of a societal member's talk, as understood in terms of the social scientist's theory or frame of reference, is [sic] often analytically related by him to the meaning of some other remark. In this way talk is both of overwhelming interest to social science and of little concern.