We Make the World, but Who Can Change It?

We Make the World, but Who Can Change It?

Reflexivity, Power, and the Critical Interactionist Attitude

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

Another world is possible. The phrase carries a sociological proposition as well as a political hope: the world we inhabit has a history, is sustained through present activity, and can be organized differently. Institutions depend on people doing practical things—recognizing identities, interpreting rules, allocating turns, recording decisions, distributing resources, and deciding whose needs require a response. The familiar social world persists through accomplishments so ordinary that we frequently cease to notice them.

That intuition has guided Doing Modernity from its beginning. In an earlier essay, I wrote: “With every action, we make the world. With every action, we potentially make the world better or worse. Our ordinary activities count. For it is through these everyday behaviors that the social world is ongoingly constituted as an orderly event.” I retain that conviction, while recognizing that its implications require more careful investigation. The people who help sustain a social arrangement do not necessarily possess equal authority to alter it.

We enter institutions already organized, histories already underway, and material circumstances we did not choose. Some participants control budgets, eligibility rules, agendas, and official records. Others must accommodate themselves to decisions made elsewhere. Their actions contribute to the continuing production of social life, but their influence over its direction differs enormously. The problem is therefore how everyday accomplishment becomes connected to unequal capacities for intervention.

Anthony Giddens supplied an important starting point through his account of the relationship between agency and structure. My earlier discussion also drew on his account of reflexive modernity: institutions examine their practices in light of knowledge about those practices and potentially reorganize themselves. Yet that formulation leaves questions demanding further attention. Who produces the knowledge? Whose experience enters it? Who can dispute its categories? Who possesses the authority and resources to act on what becomes known?

Critical Interactionism brings these questions into contact with ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, institutional ethnography, and critical social theory. It investigates how social arrangements become consequential in situated activities and how those activities connect to relations extending beyond the immediate encounter. Its critical purpose requires empirical discipline: inequality must be demonstrated through the organization and consequences of practice, rather than inferred from every disagreement or institutional asymmetry.

Reflexivity provides an especially useful point of entry because the term names several different relationships. Giddens’s reflexive monitoring of action, institutional self-revision, and Garfinkel’s reflexivity of accountable practices cannot be treated as interchangeable. A fourth concern—the consciously critical attitude I previously called the reflexive attitude—also needs clarification. Becoming aware of one’s participation in an unequal arrangement does not automatically provide either an effective alternative or the means to sustain it.

The argument developed here is that the democratic promise of reflexivity depends on the relationship between practical knowledge and effective standing. People may understand their circumstances remarkably well while possessing little authority to alter the institutions organizing them. Conversely, institutions may collect extensive knowledge while making few changes to the conditions they document. Critical Interactionism asks how understanding acquires consequences, and how recognition, voice, and practical influence can be organized together.

Structure in the Work of Everyday Life

Giddens’s concept of the duality of structure challenges the image of society as an external machinery operating upon passive individuals. Rules and resources enable and constrain action while being reproduced through their use. The organization of a university, a court, or a service agency depends on activities undertaken by knowledgeable participants; its continuity cannot be explained solely by invoking a structure standing behind those activities (Giddens 1984).

Critical Interactionism follows this insight toward observable practice. In a meeting, who opens proceedings, recognizes speakers, interprets the agenda, and declares that a decision has been reached? In an intake interview, who asks the questions, determines whether an answer is adequate, and selects the category entering the record? These arrangements make authority available for use. They also create opportunities for challenge, repair, avoidance, and modification.

Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s account of doing gender provides a powerful example. Gender is accomplished under conditions of accountability: conduct is assessed in relation to expectations associated with sex categories (West and Zimmerman 1987). This directs attention toward how distinctions acquire practical force. A contribution may receive a different response depending on the speaker; an interruption may be excused as leadership in one participant and condemned as aggression in another. The relevant analytical work is to show how participants establish such differences and what follows from them.

The language of doing can be extended to hierarchy, expertise, exclusion, and equality, but it should never become a substitute for explanation. Announcing that participants are “doing domination” settles nothing. We must identify the conduct involved, examine its sequential organization, establish its institutional connections, and assess its consequences. Some unequal rights are necessary to particular activities; a clinician’s authority to order a test, for example, does not by itself establish domination. The questions concern how authority is exercised, bounded, challenged, and made answerable to those affected.

Nor does an accomplished social world become imaginary or freely selectable. Property, money, buildings, staffing levels, legal powers, and available housing have effects that exceed what participants can negotiate in a conversation. Their use nevertheless involves situated work: ownership is invoked, budgets interpreted, beds allocated, and rules applied. Following that work makes the relationship between interaction and material constraint more accessible to investigation.

Three Meanings of Reflexivity

Giddens’s first meaning concerns the reflexive monitoring of action. Participants routinely attend to what they are doing, the conduct of others, and the circumstances of the activity. Much of this occurs through practical consciousness: the tacit competence that allows people to proceed without continuously explaining their actions to themselves (Giddens 1984, 1990). A speaker notices confusion and reformulates; a worker adjusts a question after an unexpected answer; participants recognize that a discussion has moved away from the agenda.

This monitoring need not be private introspection. People display their understandings publicly, invite confirmation, correct misunderstandings, and make adjustments recognizable to others. Conversation analysis gives us methods for examining this coordination. A clarification request reveals a difficulty; the next response shows how that difficulty is treated. Practical understanding becomes available through sequences of conduct, without requiring the analyst to invent an internal mental process to explain every action.

A second meaning concerns institutional reflexivity. Modern institutions produce information about their operations and use it to revise them. Statistics, evaluations, scientific findings, professional classifications, and public criticism can reenter the practices they describe (Giddens 1990). A school changes its assessment procedures; an agency revises an eligibility rule; a workplace introduces a complaint process. Knowledge participates in institutional organization, although its influence depends on how it is received and used.

Giddens’s double hermeneutic identifies a related process: social-scientific interpretations can enter the understandings of the people whose conduct sociology studies. Categories such as stigma, burnout, or gender discrimination can become resources through which participants describe experience and demand action. Their circulation may alter the very activities an analysis initially described. This relationship also obliges sociologists to examine the consequences of their own vocabulary.

Reflexive modernization, as developed by Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994), brings further questions concerning risk and the consequences of modern institutions. Beck’s emphasis on self-confrontation cautions against equating reflexivity with deliberate enlightenment. Societies encounter consequences they have helped produce, sometimes before they have agreed on an adequate interpretation or response. Ecological damage can become increasingly evident while the arrangements generating it remain powerful. Knowledge and effective intervention can move on different timetables.

A third meaning comes from ethnomethodology. Garfinkel’s reflexivity concerns the relationship between activities and the accountable settings those activities constitute (Garfinkel 1967). Accountable here means available to participants as recognizable and intelligible, rather than merely answerable to a moral authority. Calling a gathering to order, recognizing speakers, and recording decisions help constitute it as a meeting. Those actions become intelligible through the meeting while contributing to its recognizable organization.

The example also reveals why reflexivity in this sense cannot be treated as a scarce virtue. The chair who suppresses disagreement and the participant who challenges that suppression both undertake activities intelligible within, and constitutive of, the occasion. A discriminatory procedure can be reflexive in Garfinkel’s sense. Michael Lynch (2000) cautions against treating reflexive self-scrutiny as a special warrant for superior knowledge; ethnomethodological reflexivity is an ordinary feature of action, not a certificate of political wisdom.

The distinctions matter throughout the argument. Everyone’s accountable conduct participates in reflexively constituted settings. People nevertheless face different demands to monitor themselves, and they possess different opportunities to contribute to institutional self-revision. The inequality lies in burdens, protections, resources, and authority—not in some people having reflexivity while others lack it.

The World That Seems Already There

The natural attitude concerns the practical acceptance of the everyday world as available and familiar. In Schutz’s phenomenology, people ordinarily proceed through shared assumptions and typifications rather than suspending activity to investigate every premise (Schutz 1967). It would be misleading to reduce this to a belief that society is wholly external or permanently unchangeable. Everyday life requires practical trust even among participants who criticize its arrangements.

An organization’s familiar procedures can nevertheless conceal the work sustaining them. The chair’s right to summarize, the professional’s right to categorize, and the applicant’s obligation to explain may become unremarkable. Their familiarity can make alternatives difficult to recognize. Critical inquiry asks how these expectations are maintained, who can question them, and what happens when someone does.

Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography supplies a way of following these relations beyond the immediate scene. People’s local activities become coordinated through texts, regulations, professional discourse, and organizational procedures extending across sites (Smith 2005). A form is completed in one place, activated in another, and used to authorize a decision elsewhere. Participants need not know the entire organizational sequence for their work to contribute to it.

A record therefore merits attention both as a local accomplishment and as a means of coordination. An interview becomes an entry; an entry becomes a report; the report informs a decision. At each point, someone must interpret and use what has been written. Documentary continuity can preserve information, but it can also preserve a mistaken interpretation long after the circumstances producing it have changed.

This connection between the encounter and the traveling text strengthens Critical Interactionism’s account of institutional power. We can examine how the person’s account is reformulated, which details disappear, how classifications are stabilized, and what later workers can see. We can also investigate correction: who may amend a record, whether a disagreement is retained, and whether a corrected account reaches the people making subsequent decisions.

Knowing People Through Institutions

Homelessness services offer a consequential setting for these questions. My experience of homelessness, outreach, and community advocacy has made me attentive to the distance that can open between being known by a system and receiving effective assistance. Assessments, databases, counts, and performance measures may improve coordination and reveal unmet need. Their value depends on the uses to which they are put and the resources available for responding.

Consider an illustrative intake sequence rather than a report of a particular encounter. A person describes pain, interrupted sleep, a lost telephone, and difficulty reaching appointments. The worker must translate the account into fields appropriate to the assessment. Some details fit readily; others require interpretation; still others have no obvious place. The completed document is a workable institutional rendering of the person’s circumstances. Its adequacy should be investigated, not assumed.

The recorded version then travels. Someone who did not hear the interview reviews it when determining priority, arranging a referral, or explaining why a case remains unresolved. The person’s circumstances may have changed by then. An appointment missed because of illness or transportation difficulty may acquire a different meaning if the record contains only the absence. A provisional interpretation can become durable when later decisions repeatedly rely on it.

The critical question concerns the organization of that durability. Can the person inspect and contest the account? Can the frontline worker preserve uncertainty? Does the reviewer have discretion to request clarification? Are staff given enough time to investigate? Does a revised assessment lead to an available service? These questions identify mechanisms through which knowledge becomes consequential or fails to do so.

Scarcity remains essential to the explanation. A fairer interview cannot create a housing unit that does not exist. Yet scarcity does not settle every question about how access is organized. Requirements concerning telephones, identification, transportation, repeated attendance, and deadlines can distribute the burdens of seeking assistance unevenly. Investigating those requirements can reveal avoidable barriers while keeping the material shortage plainly in view.

An institution can thus recognize need extensively while possessing limited capacity, limited willingness, or poorly organized means to respond. These possibilities must be distinguished. Otherwise the analyst risks calling every unsuccessful outcome abandonment without establishing what happened. Critical claims gain force when they show which decisions were possible, what constraints operated, and where an alternative course was foreclosed.

The Reflexive Attitude and Its Limits

The reflexive attitude names a deliberate effort to examine one’s own participation in social arrangements. I may oppose patriarchy while interrupting women, expecting them to perform emotional labor, or receiving deference I rarely notice. Bringing these practices into view connects political commitments with conduct. It gives criticism a practical object and exposes the limits of good intentions.

West and Zimmerman’s emphasis on accountability also shows why changing gendered conduct cannot be reduced to individual choice. Others may reinterpret, resist, or sanction an attempted departure from expectations. Institutional arrangements may continue conferring advantages even when a participant wishes to relinquish them. Francine Deutsch (2007) directs attention to interactions that reduce gender inequality and to the relationship between interactional and institutional change.

A useful reflexive practice therefore asks how an alternative is received and whether it can persist. Yielding a turn may give someone an opportunity to speak; it may also be followed by another participant taking the floor. Acknowledging an overlooked contribution may alter a decision, or the acknowledgment may remain ceremonial. The response and subsequent sequence supply evidence of what the intervention accomplishes.

Similar questions apply to professional expertise, housing status, disability, race, sexuality, and class. They cannot all be analyzed through an identical template. The relevant categories, histories, risks, and institutional connections must be established in each setting. Critical Interactionism offers an orientation to inquiry, not a ready-made verdict about every encounter.

This is also why the reflexive attitude should avoid becoming a demand for personal purity. Endless self-examination may leave the allocation of resources and decision-making authority untouched. Its political value depends on whether it helps participants identify practices they can change, organize support for those changes, and connect them with wider reforms.

Reflexivity Under Pressure

People occupying vulnerable positions often face intensive demands to monitor how they are perceived. Du Bois’s account of double consciousness describes a historically specific experience of racial domination and divided self-apprehension (Du Bois 1903). Smith’s account of a bifurcated consciousness examines tensions between lived experience and institutionally organized ways of knowing. These arguments illuminate imposed forms of self-monitoring without becoming interchangeable descriptions of every marginalized condition.

A person living outside may have to anticipate how a passerby, police officer, shopkeeper, or outreach worker will interpret ordinary conduct. Resting, carrying possessions, asking for help, or remaining in one place can attract scrutiny. Such monitoring may require substantial practical knowledge and effort. It can protect someone in a particular encounter while leaving the arrangements producing that vulnerability largely beyond their control.

The relationship between knowledge and power is therefore uneven. A participant can understand precisely how a procedure disadvantages them and still lack an accepted opportunity to challenge it. Conversely, someone with institutional authority may be insulated from the need to examine assumptions that others must navigate continually. These are possibilities to investigate in particular settings, rather than universal claims that powerful people are unaware or marginalized people always possess superior insight.

Goffman’s civil inattention helps specify one part of this organization. In public settings, people can briefly acknowledge another’s presence and then withdraw attention in a way that permits ordinary coexistence (Goffman 1963). That withdrawal differs from treating someone as socially absent. Its meaning depends on the sequence, the setting, and participants’ orientations.

For an unhoused person, intrusive scrutiny and dismissive avoidance can both undermine ordinary standing, but a glance or averted gaze alone does not establish either meaning. An analysis needs context: what preceded it, whether an approach received a response, whether others were treated differently, and how the person understood or responded to the conduct. Civil inattention can support a moment of equal public standing without demonstrating equality across the wider society.

The critical issue is the relationship between compulsory monitoring and opportunities for influence. Institutions may require people to make themselves legible repeatedly while offering little opportunity to revise the terms of that legibility. Practical knowledge remains consequential for survival but acquires limited institutional reach. Reflexivity becomes burdensome when the obligation to understand others’ expectations is disconnected from authority to question them.

The Interactional Infrastructure of Domination

The interactional infrastructure of domination names a proposed field of investigation: recurrent arrangements of speaking, attention, accounting, categorization, and correction through which unequal authority is exercised and sustained. Its usefulness depends on specifying those arrangements and connecting them to demonstrable disadvantages. The phrase should help organize evidence rather than announce an explanation in advance.

One revealing arrangement concerns the right to demand an account. A participant may be entitled to ask why someone missed an appointment, while the person questioned cannot obtain an explanation for a delayed decision. Another concerns credibility: an institutional account may travel as authoritative while the person’s disagreement remains an unverified annotation. A third concerns time: administrative deadlines may be enforced against an applicant even when the organization cannot say when it will respond.

These asymmetries are consequential when they shape access, impose avoidable burdens, restrict correction, or expose people to risks others do not bear. Their persistence may depend on formal rules, material constraints, routine interpretations, or combinations of these. Evidence should distinguish those sources. A worker’s dismissive response, an inflexible database, and a funding rule are connected possibilities, but they are not the same mechanism.

Repair provides an especially useful point of investigation. What happens after an error is identified? Can the affected person reopen a decision? Must they repeat the entire process? Does the organization acknowledge its own contribution to the problem? The distribution of opportunities for repair can reveal power more clearly than an institution’s stated commitment to inclusion.

Critical Interactionism also needs to remain answerable to contrary evidence. An organization may protect disagreement, correct a mistaken record, alter an exclusionary procedure, or allocate resources differently after criticism. Such outcomes matter analytically. A theory that treats both institutional responsiveness and institutional resistance as equally conclusive evidence of domination has ceased to discriminate among the situations it claims to explain.

Recognition, Voice, and Traction

Recognition, voice, and traction provide three related questions for examining democratic participation. Recognition concerns whether someone is treated as a relevant participant with a legitimate claim. Voice concerns whether their account can be expressed, understood, and challenged on workable terms. Traction concerns whether that contribution enters deliberation, decision, or practice in a consequential way.

These are dimensions of participation, not a fixed ladder. Speaking may establish recognition; an organized campaign may secure influence before an institution fully accepts its participants’ legitimacy; a preliminary decision may create new opportunities for testimony. The relations can move in several directions. What matters is examining how they become connected and where that connection fails.

Consider an illustrative advisory meeting that includes people with lived experience of homelessness. A participant explains that a referral procedure assumes access to a functioning telephone. Others thank the speaker. That response provides evidence of reception, but its practical meaning remains unsettled. Does the chair formulate a proposal? Is someone assigned to investigate? Does the concern enter the minutes? Is an alternative contact procedure introduced and made available to staff?

Following those steps makes traction investigable. A proposal may be considered seriously and rejected for reasons participants can examine; influence does not require every contribution to prevail. Conversely, enthusiastic agreement may conceal the absence of any assigned responsibility or subsequent action. The relevant distinction concerns effective engagement with a contribution and accountability for what follows.

The means of participation also matter. Transportation, scheduling, compensation, accessible formats, preparation, and assistance with unfamiliar documents can shape who can contribute. Institutions can invite people into a room while retaining procedures that make effective participation difficult. Doing equality requires attention to these material and organizational conditions as well as the allocation of turns.

Doing Equality as Institutional Practice

A more equal meeting must be assessed through its conduct. Facilitation can protect turns, make interruptions repairable, distinguish a chair’s summary from participants’ agreement, and ensure that disagreement does not automatically threaten membership. These practices create opportunities for influence, but their effects depend on how participants use them and how the meeting connects to decisions elsewhere.

Formal consensus illustrates both possibilities and difficulties. Rounds, queues, blocks, and stand-asides can redistribute participation rights. They can also privilege procedural expertise or allow a facilitator’s interpretation to become difficult to challenge. A critical assessment follows how procedures are invoked, who understands them, and whether participants can question their application. A democratic procedure requires continuing work to keep its operation contestable.

Institutional equality also includes rights of correction and intelligible explanation. A service user’s opportunity to inspect a record, preserve a disagreement, obtain an accessible account of a decision, and pursue review can alter the practical relationship between institution and participant. These arrangements provide specific avenues through which knowledge from below may enter institutional self-revision.

No single meeting or corrected form abolishes inequality. Durable change requires connections among interactions, organizational rules, staffing, resources, and collective action. Local interventions become more consequential when they are maintained, extended, and supported by arrangements that survive the goodwill of particular individuals. Critical Interactionism can investigate both the initiating change and the work needed to keep it available.

Another World as an Ongoing Accomplishment

My original account overstated the difference between modern and earlier societies. Human beings have long imagined alternative worlds and acted to bring them about. Giddens’s more defensible claim concerns the institutional organization of self-revision: extensive systems of expertise, information, and intervention become integral to modern social life. Their expansion creates possibilities for change alongside new forms of control.

The three meanings of reflexivity clarify the stakes. Practical monitoring enables ongoing action; institutional reflexivity organizes knowledge and revision; ethnomethodological reflexivity concerns how accountable practices constitute their settings. The consciously critical attitude can draw attention to inequalities within these processes, but it gains political significance through the alternatives people can organize and sustain together.

Institutions should therefore be judged by what happens to knowledge within them. Whose experience is preserved? Who can challenge an interpretation? How are disagreements considered? What decisions follow? What resources support their implementation? These questions make reflexivity’s democratic promise concrete while avoiding the assumption that more information necessarily produces better outcomes.

“With every action, we make the world” remains a useful beginning. Its critical development requires tracing the unequal conditions under which actions become authoritative, durable, and consequential. A person may help constitute an encounter while having little control over its direction; a record may shape subsequent decisions while remaining difficult for its subject to correct. Those relations belong inside the analysis of social accomplishment.

Another world becomes more plausible when people can revise the practices coordinating their lives: when an objection can reopen a decision, a record can be corrected, a meeting can redistribute authority, and recognition can lead to effective assistance. The significance of such changes lies partly in their reach and continuity. The task is to connect local possibilities with institutions capable of sustaining them.

Critical Interactionism begins with close attention to what people do and follows the relations through which that activity acquires wider force. Its emancipatory question concerns how those relations might be reorganized so that people’s knowledge of their lives can help shape the conditions of living them. Another world is possible; making it endure requires practical work, shared authority, and material support.

References

Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Deutsch, Francine M. 2007. “Undoing Gender.” Gender & Society 21(1): 106–127.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press.

Lynch, Michael. 2000. “Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge.” Theory, Culture & Society 17(3): 26–54.

Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125–151.