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Uses family discourse perspective to analyze social relations in a Work Incentive Program (WIN). Analysis focuses on ways in which WIN staff members oriented to and assessed family as an excuse and extenuating circumstance, instructed clients on the organizationally preferred relationship between WIN and family, and responded to clients whom they assessed as making excuses. (Author/ABL)

An ethnographer's reflections on her discipline are presented. Topics include research of brief psychotherapists, testing the boundary between subject and researcher, highlighting assumptions made through research, and changing the ethnographer's target audience.

The article describes the ethnography of institutional discourse perspective. Institutional discourses are made up of the assumptions, concerns, and vocabularies of members of socially organized settings, and the ways in which they interact. The perspective is an analytic framework and research program that combines ethnographers' concern for in-depth observations of everyday life with aspects of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and Foucauldian discourse studies. The perspective focuses on the ways in which setting members use discursive resources in organizing their practical actions, and how members actions are constrained by the resources available in settings. The perspective is developed by considering how institutional discourses and settings are reflexively linked, institutions are organized as situated conventions, and institutional discourses involve talk and interpretation and are dispersed within and across settings.

This article re-examines whether and how emotions are an aspect of solution-focused therapy. A major theme in the article focuses on the usual ways that therapists define and discuss emotions in solution-focused and other therapies. We argue that these discussions are a source of much confusion about emotions and about solution-focused therapy, including the confusing idea that emotions are neglected in solution-focused therapy. The second major theme describes an alternative approach to these issues, one that we believe better fits with the assumptions and concerns of solution-focused therapy. The approach is based on Wittgenstein's writings about language games, private experience, and how emotions are rule-following activities. Viewed from this perspective, solution-focused therapists take account of their clients' emotions by helping clients to create new emotion rules to follow. Fam Proc 39:5-23, 2000