Doing the fine thing: a rejoinder to Jonathan Potter.

The article presents comments of the author on sociologist Jonathan Potter's response to his article. Potter thinks the author is confused, but the author suggests that even if this is true, it arises at least in part from the character of approaches to research he was discussing and how they present themselves. Potter is right to baulk at the choice between paradigm and method which the author's title seems to offer. There are different ways of interpreting each of these options and this means that simple dichotomy is involved. So the author accepts all what Potter says about the diversity of discourse analysis and that it is not a paradigm in full Kuhnian sense. The focus of the author's article was more specific, it related to whether conversation analysis and discourse analysis can be justified as self-contained approaches to social research and whether claims about their methodological superiority can be sustained. Potter questions the author's attribution to constructionism of the idea that social phenomena do not have the kind of objective reality normally ascribed to them by social actors and most social scientists.