One consociate mechanism for the distribution of knowledge: A contribution to the Festschrift for Wes Sharrock

Following Wes Sharrock’s lead in his classic paper On Owning Knowledge (1974),
this paper explores the nature of collective representations as recipient designed
consociate social objects. The example it examines is a Corporate risk register as
the collaborative production of a Lebenswelt pairing, namely the written/read format
constructed documentary analysis. The paper brings out how the document’s
structure is used to shape the meanings the risk analysis carries, as well as how that
structure is tuned in terms of an indealisation, namely the ‘proper reader’. The paper
concludes with some remarks on the possible use of sociological theory as a resource
for Ethnomethodology.