This article is an application of the author’s theory: the everyday world as problematic. It analyzes text-mediated discourse (T-discourse) as ‘social relations’ coordinating multiple local historical sites and the locally bounded activities of ‘actual’ people. As a principle which orders and organizes texts across discursive sites, Smith suggests “ideological codes”, an analogy to a genetic code (p51b). The SNAF is an ideological code which is a constant generator of procedures for selecting syntax, categories, and vocabulary in the writing of texts and the production of talk and for interpreting sentences, written or spoken, ordered by it (p52t). SNAF says: the adult male is in paid employment; his earnings provide the economic basis of the family-household; the adult female may also earn an income, but her primary responsibility is for the care of the husband, household, and children. Here are two examples of SNAF-ordered discourse.

Ex 1: Researching Women’s Work as Mother
Griffith and Smith (the author) started their research motivated by their experiences as single parents in their children’s schools. They realized later that their research design, interviews and even their feminist concerns were structured by the mothering discourse (p54b) which is channeled by SNAF: the intact family means that a child’s mother is available to do the work for school that is done invisibly in the home (p55b). Paid employment for women with small children is a deviation from the normative intact family (p57t). The researchers, without noticing, were trapped by their own competences as readers and writers of social science, as participants in T-discourse, into regenerating a discursive politics to which they are opposed (p63b).

Ex 2: SNAF as a Reading of The Black Family
In his study of the poverty and problems of black people in the inner cities, W.J. Wilson distinguishes between intact families and those that are not intact. His nonintact families are headed by females (pp57b-58t). The nonintact family is the result of poverty caused by black male unemployment (p58t) rather than by women who actively chose to live separately from their husbands (p60m). Women, rather than men, are divorced and separated (pp58b-59t). The SNAF code is the key structuring device: a theory of male dominance in family and economy is imported in the analysis without being enunciated (p58m).

Wilson’s research is based on statistical data produced by agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. The agencies already provide SNAF-ordered categories. A head of household would be designated: preference was given to men over women. The status of other household members must be defined relative to this person (p59). The operation of SNAF as an ideological code creates a conceptual isomorphism between the data base, the studies Wilson cites, and Wilson’s own argument (p61b). The ideological code behind the discourse is coordinating multiple sites.