Since Max Weber social theory has been faced with a paradox -- the "problem of rationality" -- that seems to challenge the very foundations of critical and humanist visions of modern society. According to Weber, as industrial societies develop they increasingly are dominated by rational procedures for the production of goods, the organization of human resources, and the management of information. The paradox consists in the fact that while modern society is, in this instrumental sense, becoming more rationalized, the prospects for developing political and cultural institutions which are linked to a progressive vision of rational discourse and democratic-will formation are diminished.

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How is history produced? How do individuals write-or rewrite-their parts while engaged in the production of history? Michael Lynch and David Bogen take the example of the Iran-contra hearings to explore these questions. These hearings, held in 1987 by the Joint House-Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaragua Opposition, provided the nation with a media spectacle and a rare chance to see a struggle over the writing of history. There was Oliver North, prime suspect and designated scapegoat, turning into a hero of the American Right before the very eyes of the nation. How this transformation occurred, with the complicity of the press and the public, becomes disturbingly clear in The Spectacle of History. Lynch and Bogen detail the practices through which the historical agents at the center of the hearings composed, confirmed, used, erased, and denied the historical record. They show how partisan skirmishes over the disclosure of records and testimony led to a divided and irresolute outcome, an outcome further facilitated by the "applied deconstruction" deployed by North and his allies. The Spectacle of History immerses the reader in a crowded field of texts, utterances, visual displays, and media commentaries, but, more than a case study, it develops unique insight into problems at the heart of society and social theory-lying and credibility, the production of civic spectacle, the relationship between testimony and history, the uses of memory, and the interplay between speech and writing. Drawing on themes from sociology, literary theory, and ethnomethodology and challenging prevailing concepts held by contemporary communication and cultural studies, Lynch and Bogen extract valuable theoretical lessons from this specific and troubling historical episode.

Media Studies presents the first collection of studies of mass media texts of various genres from an ethnomethodological point of view. This distinct point of view derives from the analytical attention to the way in which sense may be made of cultural products, focusing on the logic of textual production that enables its practitioners to avoid the stipulative classifications of traditional content analysis, the sterility of hermeneutical debates, and the ethical quagmires of the critique of ideologies. This collection offers an advancement of the analytical ambitions that require close attention be paid to the details of human conduct in real time and to the articulation of descriptive vocabularies which accurately characterize the concepts, reasoning, knowledge, and upon which such conduct depends and exhibits. It furthers both media studies and ethnomethodology, providing the intellectual rigor sought after by practitioners of ethnomethodology and an extension of this kind of inquiry into the heart of media research.