Treating family as an everyday, working vocabulary or discourse for assigning meaning to social relations, the analysis considers the social processes and descriptive conditions through which meaning is established, managed, and transcended. Highlighting both the descriptive utilities and the limits of organizationally embedded discourses, the article presents ethnographic material to show how family, although discursively and interactionally constituted, is a local enactment of practical reasoning substantively bounded by local culture yet offering grounds for resistance. The article suggests analytic orientations and strategies for examining family discourse and meaning in organizational context.
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