How Ideologies Work: A Critical Interactionist Perspective to Ideologies-as-Texts

How Ideologies Work

A Critical Interactionist Approach to Ideologies-as-Texts

Originally published in 2012. I have revised this essay while preserving its original argument and intellectual history. My thinking about Critical Interactionism, organizational records, documentary processes, and the reproduction of domination has developed considerably since it was written. Rather than rewriting the essay from the standpoint of that later work, I have retained it as an account of how one strand of my Critical Interactionist project emerged. The revisions clarify several arguments that, in retrospect, were more consequential than I understood at the time.

What is an ideology? How do ideologies work? What types of empirical sociological research might be able to get at these questions?

In what follows I trace the evolution of my thinking about ideology. I begin with my research in ethnomethodology and my fascination with how organizational records are situationally produced. I then turn to three central sociological thinkers who influenced my approach to ideology-as-text—Harvey Molotch, Dorothy E. Smith, and Stuart Hall—each of whom pioneered distinctive ways of examining how ideologies work.

I then describe a series of empirical projects through which my interpretive approach to ideology-as-text developed. This Critical Interactionist approach brings microsociological and interpretive methods for examining cultural discourse together with critical theoretical concerns about domination and ideological hegemony.

The argument running through these otherwise diverse studies can now be stated more clearly than I stated it in 2012: ideology is not merely something people believe. Ideological reality has to be socially accomplished.

What Is an Ideology?

Sociologists often take their understanding of “ideology” from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's famous proposition that the ruling ideas of an era tend to be the ideas of its ruling groups.

This points us toward what is more precisely called dominant ideology. Working people, socialist movements, religious communities, liberation movements, and other less powerful groups can also develop systems of ideas that we might call ideologies. What requires explanation from a critical perspective is how particular symbolic forms participate in establishing, legitimating, and reproducing relations of domination.

John B. Thompson, in Ideology and Modern Culture (1991), provides an economical formulation: ideology is “meaning in the service of power.”

The concept of ideology is closely connected to Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony. Todd Gitlin, in The Whole World Is Watching (1980), describes hegemony as the penetration of dominant ideas and assumptions into common sense and everyday practice, producing consent to an established social order without requiring that this process be entirely—or even usually—deliberately engineered.

That formulation raises the empirical question that has interested me for much of my career:

How do historically organized relations of power become part of the common sense and everyday practices of ordinary people?

To address that question, I turn to ethnomethodology—the sociological investigation of commonsense reasoning and practical action.

Ethnomethodology and the Intellectual Origins of Studying Ideology-as-Text

Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology provides the primary sociological framework for much of the work discussed here.

Garfinkel revolutionized sociology with Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), opening major programs of research into everyday talk, texts, practical reasoning, and members' interpretive procedures. I continue to draw heavily on his extraordinary investigations of practical reasoning and practical action.

I also recognize that I am taking ethnomethodological ideas into territories Garfinkel himself might not have regarded as appropriate. Critical Interactionism is not ethnomethodology, nor should the two be collapsed into one another. What I take from ethnomethodology is an insistence that the recognizable character of social reality is an ongoing practical accomplishment.

That proposition becomes particularly interesting when placed alongside the critical theoretical problem of hegemony.

Gramsci helps us ask how historically situated relations of domination become sedimented into common sense. Garfinkel asks us to examine the practical methods through which members produce an intelligible and accountable social world. Bringing those questions into conversation—while respecting the substantial differences between the two projects—suggests a distinctly empirical problem:

How does a historically organized relation of domination become an ordinary fact of everyday life?

The broader interpretive traditions influenced by these developments—including cultural studies, discourse analysis, and various poststructuralist approaches—provide additional resources for examining ideology-as-text. Because ideological processes involve meaning, we need methods highly attuned to discourse and to the practical interpretation of texts.

Critical Interactionism therefore approaches ideology as an unfolding social process rather than a static package of beliefs. Particular discursive events establish contexts through which later events become intelligible. They help “frame” what is happening.

In Frame Analysis (1974), Erving Goffman describes frames as schemata of interpretation through which people locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences. Todd Gitlin similarly describes frames as principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation containing tacit theories of what exists, what happens, and what matters.

The question is therefore not simply what does an ideological text say? It is also: How was this version of reality produced? How is it organized? How does it travel? How is it interpreted? And what can people subsequently do with it?

From Three Sites to a Social Career of Ideology

I originally distinguished three essential sites for studying ideology-as-text.

First is the production of ideological texts in real-world circumstances: how journalists, officials, professionals, organizational workers, and others construct accounts through routine occupational practices.

Second is the discursive organization of the text itself: narrative structure, lexical choice, metaphor, rhetoric, categorization, visual representation, and other devices through which one version of reality is made intelligible.

Third is the interpretive work of audiences: the practical procedures through which actual readers, viewers, listeners, and organizational recipients make sense of a text within the circumstances of their lives.

I still regard that tripartite distinction as useful. But I would now add an important qualification. Texts do not move directly from production to reception. They have social careers. They circulate, are copied and quoted, enter records, become activated in new settings, acquire or lose authority, and become resources for subsequent practical action.

The analytic sequence can therefore be expanded:

Production → Textual Organization → Circulation and Activation → Interpretation → Reproduction or Resistance

This does not replace the original three-site model. It develops something that was already implicit within it: ideological power depends not merely on what texts contain but on what happens to them socially.

Ethnomethodology and the Study of Record-Keeping Activity

When I began graduate school at UC Santa Barbara in 1983, I read extensively in the sociology of knowledge and tried to understand how Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel, Mannheim, and others conceptualized the relationship between knowledge and society. As my interests in ethnomethodology deepened, I became increasingly interested in how one might examine the social construction of knowledge empirically, in actual situations.

That brought me to organizational record-keeping.

Inspired by Garfinkel and Bittner's “Good Organizational Reasons for 'Bad' Clinic Records,” I encountered a literature examining the actual work involved in making and using organizational files, records, and documents. Zimmerman, Smith, Meehan, Frankel, Heath and Luff, and others demonstrated that records are not transparent reflections of events. They are practical accomplishments produced for organizational purposes.

My mentor Don Zimmerman had written an especially important research report, “Fact as Practical Accomplishment,” which pointed toward close empirical investigation of how particular versions of events acquire the status of facts.

I became fascinated by what happens when there are competing versions of “what actually happened.” How does one account become accepted as fact while another remains a mere claim?

My MA research on 911 calls eventually led to “Accomplishing Fact in Police 'Dispatch Packages': An Analysis for the Situated Construction of an Organizational Record.” I examined how dispatchers transformed callers' descriptions into organizationally usable records, including how some complaints acquired factual standing while others remained qualified accounts.

Looking back, I now think this work on organizational records was more central to my developing theory of ideology than I understood at the time. The question was never simply whether an account was objectively true or false. The sociological problem was how one version of reality acquired an organizational career as fact—how it became recordable, credible, portable, actionable, and available to organize subsequent action.

That question continues to occupy my work.

Dorothy E. Smith, Harvey Molotch, and the Production of Ideological Reality

The ethnomethodological literature on organizational records strongly influenced my reading of research on media production by Dorothy E. Smith, Harvey Molotch, Gaye Tuchman, and others.

Smith's work was particularly important. Drawing upon ethnomethodology and phenomenology, she developed an approach to textually mediated social organization that treats texts as active constituents of social relations. Her concept of the “ideological circle” describes the recursive relationship between an interpretive schema and the particulars assembled through it: the schema organizes which particulars count, while those selected particulars appear to confirm the schema.

Harvey Molotch, one of my central mentors at UC Santa Barbara, approached similar problems through the sociology of news. His work with Marilyn Lester showed how news emerges from routine occupational practices and unequal access to the machinery through which events become publicly recognizable.

Their classic study of the Santa Barbara oil spill demonstrated that federal officials and business representatives possessed greater access to national news media than conservationists and local officials, while symbolic issues received greater attention than questions concerning the distribution of wealth.

This is crucial for Critical Interactionism. Ideological hegemony does not require a room full of powerful people deciding what everyone will believe tomorrow morning. It can be accomplished through mundane occupational routines, established categories, organizational access, professional judgments, deadlines, documentary practices, and taken-for-granted definitions of what counts as newsworthy.

Domination can be reproduced precisely while people experience themselves as simply doing their jobs.

Stuart Hall and British Cultural Studies

In the late 1980s I became deeply interested in British Cultural Studies, particularly the work of Stuart Hall. Hall's encoding/decoding model transformed media studies by refusing to treat communication as the simple transmission of a message from sender to receiver.

Hall defined ideology as the images, concepts, and premises providing frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.

Several of his propositions became central to my thinking. Ideology involves the articulation of different elements into chains of meaning. Ideologies predate particular individuals and belong to the social formations into which we are born. And ideological formations construct positions from which people can speak ideological “truths” while experiencing those truths as their own authentic understanding of reality.

Hall's work on race and articulation was a major turning point for me because it offered a non-reductionist way of thinking about historically specific racisms. Racist representations need not remain identical across history. Elements can be disarticulated from one ideological formation and rearticulated within another.

My subsequent reading in Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Eco, Jameson, Butler, and other approaches to language and representation widened this concern with discourse. Teun van Dijk's News as Discourse was especially important because it demonstrated the possibility of systematic empirical analysis of ideology in actual news texts.

But throughout these theoretical excursions, my ethnomethodological training continued to exert a peculiar discipline: look closely at the thing itself.

Ideology in Empirical Detail

Conversation analysis taught me to expect order at extraordinarily fine levels of social activity. That sensibility carried into my studies of newspaper headlines, obituaries, tourist postcards, racist imagery, and news stories.

Rather than beginning by announcing that a text was ideological, I wanted to discover how it worked.

My study of Los Angeles Times obituaries of people who died of complications associated with HIV and AIDS became an early example. I examined narrative sequencing, lexical choices, metaphors, rhetoric, and other discursive particulars. At each point in the unfolding text I asked the conversation analyst's question:

Why that now?

That question transformed textual analysis for me. A text became something temporally organized, each element providing an interpretive environment for what followed.

My subsequent studies of racist postcards and other representations of African Americans investigated a different dimension of ideological organization: what I called the “grammar of race.”

In “Postcards from the Edge of the Color Line,” “Representing Blackness in the White Imagination,” “Towards a Critical Analysis of Tourism Representations,” and “White Fantasies, Black Bodies,” I examined recurring representational forms through which Black people were transformed into racialized Others.

The individual stereotypes mattered, but the larger point concerned their patterned relationships. Images of the supposedly savage Black brute and the supposedly contented slave could appear contradictory while working together ideologically. One represented Black people as dangerous when outside white control; the other represented them as happy when subordinated within it. Together they provided what Marlon Riggs called a double-edged defense of racial domination.

Ideology therefore need not achieve logical consistency in the philosophical sense. Contradictory representations can perform complementary ideological work.

Interpretation, Decoding, and Resistance

Studying ideological texts also requires studying what people do with them.

The message a producer intends is not necessarily the meaning a recipient constructs. Hall's encoding/decoding model made this point foundational for cultural studies, while Dorothy Smith's work on interpretive schemas suggested ways of investigating the practical procedures through which texts become intelligible.

During my research on racist postcards, I examined handwritten messages on the reverse sides of the cards, hoping to find evidence of resistant readings. I found none. That negative finding itself proved useful: it pushed me beyond the immediate reader-text relation when looking for resistance.

I subsequently examined counter-representations such as the work of African American artist John Henry Adams and the anti-racist imagery of Sue Coe. Resistance, like ideological domination, has to be practically accomplished. It can involve refusing inherited categories, rearticulating existing symbols, producing counter-images, creating alternative narratives, or disrupting the taken-for-granted interpretive schema through which an image ordinarily becomes recognizable.

Media Images of the “Gang Problem”

My work on representations of the Los Angeles “gang problem” brought several of these concerns together.

Beginning in 1994, I collected Los Angeles Times stories concerning “gang murders,” examining headlines, images, narrative forms, and patterns of selection. I became interested in the very different treatment of gang violence across television and newspapers, as well as the spectacular forms through which violence became consumable media.

In “Newz from the 'Hood: The Stephanie Kuhen Murder in the Los Angeles Times,” I focused on the extraordinary attention given to the murder of three-year-old Stephanie Kuhen. I approached the case not simply as an example of biased reporting but as an occasion for examining the interpretive procedures through which a particular death became recognizable as an “innocent victim” story within an already established discourse of the “gang problem.”

That led directly to what I now regard as one of the most important connections in this entire project.

Ideology and the Documentary Method of Interpretation

Garfinkel recovered the “documentary method of interpretation” from Karl Mannheim and made it central to Studies in Ethnomethodology. Members treat particular appearances as documents of an underlying pattern while simultaneously using that presupposed pattern to interpret the particulars.

This recursive relationship is enormously important for understanding ideology.

The Stephanie Kuhen murder, for example, could be recognized as another instance of the “gang problem” because an interpretive framework called the gang problem already existed. Yet once interpreted in those terms, the murder itself became additional evidence demonstrating that the gang problem was real.

The pattern interprets the event.

The interpreted event confirms the pattern.

This creates a potentially self-reinforcing documentary circle:

Underlying Pattern → Interpretation of Particular Event → Event Becomes Evidence → Reinforcement of Underlying Pattern

Pre-existing narratives and maps of meaning are brought to new events, making those events recognizable as versions of stories we already know. The newly interpreted event then enters the stock of examples through which future events will be understood.

This is one important way ideologies work.

It also helps explain their extraordinary resilience. Counterevidence need not simply falsify an ideological schema because evidence itself is never encountered without interpretation. What counts as an instance, exception, anomaly, confirmation, or irrelevant detail is itself practically accomplished.

This does not mean ideological systems are logically closed or immune to change. It means that explaining ideological transformation requires studying the practical processes through which established interpretive schemas lose credibility, alternative schemas become available, and previously unremarkable events become visible in new ways.

From the “Meth Epidemic” to the Social Construction of Drug Scares

An unpublished project I was developing when I originally wrote this essay concerned media representations of the “meth epidemic.” I approached it as an investigation of the social construction of a drug scare.

The project examined recurring rhetorical practices: epidemic metaphors; “dope fiend” mythology suggesting that controlled use is impossible; what Reinarman and Levine call the routinization of caricature, in which extreme cases become representative cases; associations between drug use and “dangerous classes”; scapegoating; the displacement of structural inequality by individualized explanations; and moral rhetoric presenting the political alternatives as total prohibition or social chaos.

I would formulate that project somewhat differently today, particularly given what I have subsequently learned about drugs, homelessness, harm reduction, and the institutional production of social problems. But the underlying Critical Interactionist question remains valuable:

Through what representational and organizational practices does a particular pattern of drug use become publicly recognizable as an “epidemic,” and what forms of intervention become reasonable once that description has acquired the status of common sense?

Ideology as a Practical Accomplishment

Looking back at this body of work, I would now formulate the Critical Interactionist argument somewhat differently.

Ideologies do not exercise power simply because they exist as coherent systems of ideas, nor because powerful people somehow insert ideas into everyone else's heads. Ideological domination has to be accomplished. Categories must be made relevant, events assembled into recognizable narratives, some accounts granted credibility while others are discounted, texts circulated and activated, and particular interpretations made to appear reasonable, obvious, natural, or simply commonsensical.

This is why ethnomethodology remains important to a critical theory of ideology. Gramsci helps us ask how historically situated relations of domination become sedimented into common sense. Garfinkel directs our attention toward the practical methods through which members produce a world recognizable as the world they already know.

The documentary method provides one mechanism connecting those concerns. We encounter a particular event and recognize it as an instance of an already-known pattern: a “gang murder,” a “drug epidemic,” a “dangerous neighborhood,” a “welfare cheat,” an “illegal immigrant,” a “terrorist,” a “homeless person.” Yet the relationship runs in both directions. Once interpreted through the pattern, the event becomes another document of the pattern's existence.

Texts matter enormously in this process, but texts do not act alone. They are produced within organizations, fashioned through occupational routines, circulated across settings, activated for practical purposes, and interpreted by socially situated people. Some acquire institutional authority. Some disappear. Some are repeated until their categories become extraordinarily difficult to think outside of. Others are contested, mocked, reinterpreted, or turned against their producers.

The study of ideology therefore requires following meaning through its social career:

production → textual organization → circulation and activation → situated interpretation → practical consequences → reproduction or resistance.

Critical Interactionism approaches that career at close range. Its concern is not merely whether an ideological proposition is true or false, or whether an individual consciously believes it. We need to ask what people and institutions can do with a particular version of reality once it has become recognizable as common sense.

Who can invoke it successfully? What actions does it authorize? What alternatives does it make implausible? Whose experience becomes legible through it, and whose disappears? How does today's interpretation become part of the background knowledge through which tomorrow's event will be understood?

Ideological hegemony, from this perspective, is never simply given. It is continuously reproduced through situated practices of representation, classification, documentation, interpretation, recognition, and action.

So too is resistance.

People can refuse categories, challenge accounts, produce counter-texts, reinterpret inherited representations, expose the practical work through which apparently natural facts have been assembled, and create alternative ways of making the world intelligible.

The question with which I began therefore remains the right one: How do ideologies work?

But I can now state my answer more precisely.

They work when historically organized relations of power become embedded in the ordinary methods through which people produce facts, interpret texts, classify persons, recognize events, and make a shared social world appear to be simply “the way things are.”

The task of Critical Interactionism is to make that accomplishment visible.

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. — originally published 2012; revised 2026