Page 187 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

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PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

fluctuation. Instead, linguistics should focus on the underlying sets of
rules and conventions that make parole possible and guarantee its
intelligibility.
There is nonetheless a close and complementary relationship
between langue and parole. Parole may be seen as a continual
implementation of the underlying system constituted in the langue;
but conversely the continual practice of speaking adorns and adjusts
the langue, moulding it gradually into a different form. No single
individual can control or shape the langue; but generations of speakers
can and do alter it from one historically specific state to another.
Like many of the terms originally developed in Saussure’s lectures
between 1906 and 1911, langue and parole achieved new currency
during the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of semiology as the
study of sign systems (see semiotics). In this study a particular film or
fashion garment could be seen as an individual instance of parole
against the backdrop of the underlying system of film language or
fashion codes. One difficulty with this application of the term is that it
was much more difficult to think of ways in which film as a system of
signification was available for study except through its parole,
whereas language was more generally available through introspection
because of its mental basis.

See also: Code, Langue

Further reading: Culler (1976); Montgomery (1986); Saussure (1974)

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

A method used in the social sciences to study the lived practices of a
community or collective of some sort in a ‘natural’ environment, i.e.
outside a laboratory or experimental context. Participant observation
is a form of ethnography that has been used in media studies as a means
of understanding howselected audiences make sense of and utilise
media texts in their daily routines. Research of this kind seeks to
garner a greater understanding of individuals through the submersion
of the researcher into the lives of their research subjects.

See also: Audiences, Ethnography, Methodology