New Release: History vs. Genealogy: Why Ethnomethodology was Forgotten in the Debate on Social-Scientific Reflexivity. By Andreas Langenohl
2. September 2009
in: Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10,3 (2009).
Reference
This paper addresses the almost complete disappearance of ethnomethodological approaches from the reflexivity debate in social-scientific theory and methodology since the 1980s. This disappearance is remarkable because many of the tropes and questions characterizing the debate around reflexivity had already been articulated in ethnomethodology. The main reason for this neglect, it is argued, is the productive effect it had, as it helped later debates find answers to the epistemological challenge of postmodern approaches entering sociological discourse from the direction of anthropology and science and technology studies. Those answers could never have stabilized in the presence of the fundamental ethnomethodological presupposition that reflexivity is an ontological feature of social reality. The paper ends with a number of suggestions concerning a revision of reflexivity in the social sciences, highlighting the performative aspects of social meaning, especially social-scientific meaning.
refer to article (German)
Dr. habil. Andreas Langenohl is Director of the research group “Idioms of Social Analysis.” Research Project „The Double Career of a Category: Uses of “Reflexivity” in the Social Sciences“ Abstract