Analysing Practical and Professional Texts focuses on texts as constituents of human usage, showing how written documents and other 'texts' are integral to social organization. It reveals social organization itself to be not only textually-mediated in nature, but also textually-constituted, showing how texts - professional, technical or otherwise - as well as various social-scientific methodologies employ the resources of ordinary language. Theoretically sophisticated and illustrated with empirical examples, this book will be of interest not only to those with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, but also to social scientists and anthropologists concerned with text analysis, textual sense and the 'linguistic turn' in the methods of their own disciplines.