Melvin Pollner’s radically reflexive ethnomethodology in historical context

Abstract

The article explores in a historical context Melvin Pollner’s way of integrating radical reflexivity in ethnomethodology. It is argued that a kind of double hermeneutic should prompt and assist this integration. The implementation of the double hermeneutic discloses a problematic that goes beyond Pollner’s program. It is a problematic that concerns the unintended effects and the unexpected consequences in members’ ongoing construction of local orders. The emergence of such effects and consequences is assigned to configured social practices capable of transcending members’ situated actions and activities. The way in which configured social practices avoid members’ control and regulation is not to be confused with a sort of ‘hidden collective intentionality’ that diverges from members’ apparent intentionality. In order to spell out the nexus of radical reflexivity and double hermeneutic, the article makes use of the ontological difference between the facticity of members’ interpretive-practical mode of being-in-the-world and the factuality of the manifolds of indexicalities resulting from the documentary description of members’ production of lived orders. Facticity is addressed in terms of interplay of practices and possibilities. This interplay is also the terrain on which unintended effects and unexpected consequences come into being.