Perceptual Formation by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 Perceptual Formations

Toward a Developmental Sociology of Perception

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Introduction

Every sociology contains an implicit theory of attention. Before institutions distribute resources, before interaction constitutes social reality, before identities are negotiated or moral judgments rendered, someone must first notice something. Sociology has long examined what people do once realities become visible. The present statement asks a prior question: how do organizations cultivate the very capacities through which realities become visible in the first place?

Across my work on homelessness, documentary organization, political activism, ritual, ethnomethodology, professional vision, recognition, and religious naturalism, a single theoretical problem has gradually come into focus. These projects appear at first to investigate separate empirical domains, but each ultimately converges on the same question: how do organizations cultivate durable ways of noticing that become the basis for human capacities, institutional realities, and moral life?

This question extends my earlier research program in Critical Interactionism rather than replacing it. That program showed that institutional realities are interactionally constituted, sedimented into documentary systems, and subsequently organize recognition, resources, and life chances, through an architecture of Observation, Constitution, Sedimentation, and Consequence. The present program asks a complementary question: how are the members capable of constituting those realities themselves produced? Organizations, I will argue, do not merely transmit information. They cultivate perception, and in cultivating perception they cultivate particular kinds of persons.

This developmental account is deliberately distinct from, though complementary to, the framework of attentional orders developed in a separate essay, which analyzes attention as a stratified resource whose conversion into recognition, obligation, and allocation determines survival.⁹ That essay asks who receives attention and at what cost to those denied it; the present essay asks how attention, once organized, builds the perceptual capacities of the persons who give and receive it. I use the term perceptual formations here to keep the two projects distinct while signaling their common root.

I. Theoretical Statement

Attention is the medium through which social worlds become real. This is not a claim about psychology; it is a claim about sociology. What a person, a profession, or an institution treats as noticeable, relevant, or actionable is not given by the world itself but produced through socially organized practices of noticing and ignoring. The sociology of attention I am developing here asks a question that classical attention theory has largely left underdeveloped: how do organizations and interaction orders cultivate durable capacities to notice, and with what consequences for the people who are, or are not, noticed?

William James supplied the founding insight a century before organizational sociology caught up with it. In the Principles of Psychology he treated selective attention as the constitutive act of consciousness itself: out of the buzzing confusion of experience, the mind picks out a world. James also proposed that reality is plural rather than singular. Consciousness moves among “sub-universes”—the world of physical things, the world of science, the worlds of opinion, myth, and madness—each of which is real only so long as it is attended to. As James put it, each world is real after its own fashion only while attention sustains it. This is a claim later sociology absorbed but rarely credited: attention is not a spotlight that reveals a pre-existing reality; it is partly constitutive of the reality it reveals.

Alfred Schutz took James's plural universes and gave them a social phenomenology. In "On Multiple Realities" (1945), Schutz argued that everyday life is organized around a paramount reality—the world of working, of practical action among physical things and other people—from which we can be jolted into other finite provinces of meaning by a "shock": the shift into dream, theory, fantasy, or play. Crucially for a sociology of attention, Schutz specified the cognitive style that marks a province of meaning as real: a particular tension of consciousness, a particular epoché or suspension of doubt, a particular form of sociality and self-experience. Attending to a world, for Schutz, is not simply looking at it; it is inhabiting its distinctive stance toward time, others, and one's own action. Institutions, I want to argue, are in the business of training members into a paramount reality of their own—a professional or organizational "world of working" with its own accent of reality, its own shocks, and its own boundary between what is attended to and what recedes into unmarked background.

Erving Goffman gave this problem its interactional architecture. Frame Analysis (1974) treats the organization of experience as a matter of frames—principles of organization that answer the question "what is going on here?" and thereby tell participants what to notice and what to disattend. Goffman's earlier concept of civil inattention already showed that not-noticing is itself a skilled, normatively organized accomplishment, not a simple absence of perception. Focused and unfocused interaction, keying and fabrication, the rules of relevance and irrelevance that govern any encounter—all of these are, at bottom, a sociology of what participants are obliged to notice and permitted to ignore. My own outreach work depends on exactly this Goffmanian competence: reading which frame a street encounter is operating within, and recognizing when a shift in bodily orientation signals a reframing from ordinary passage to crisis.

Harold Garfinkel radicalized the question by insisting that attention itself be treated as a practical, observable accomplishment rather than an inner state to be inferred. Ethnomethodology's foundational discovery was that the sensible, orderly, attended-to character of everyday scenes is members' own ongoing achievement, produced through methods that are simultaneously used and, for the most part, unnoticed by those using them. Garfinkel's studies of the "seen but unnoticed" background features of ordinary settings are themselves a sociology of attention: they show that competent membership requires knowing what does not need to be pointed out. This is the ethnomethodological warrant for treating professional "noticing"—the outreach worker's read of psychiatric decompensation, the dispatcher's ear for an emergency buried in an ordinary-sounding call—not as private cognition but as publicly displayed, accountable, teachable practice.

Eviatar Zerubavel completes this theoretical constellation by showing how these situated accomplishments become collective and durable. His cognitive sociology describes "optical socialization": the learned, community-specific separation of the relevant from the irrelevant, such that members of different "thought communities" quite literally see different worlds in the same scene.¹ Zerubavel's related concepts—islands of meaning carved out of an undifferentiated perceptual continuum, the discreteness with which cultures mark some things as noticeable and render others invisible—give the sociology of attention its properly Durkheimian register. Attention is not simply an interactional accomplishment (Goffman, Garfinkel) situated within a phenomenological structure of multiple realities (James, Schutz); it is also a social fact, transmitted across generations of members through curricula, mentoring, and institutional memory.

Taken together, these five thinkers yield the theoretical proposition that organizes my current research: organizations and interaction orders function as attentional schools. They select what counts as noticeable, stabilize that selection through recurring practices and artifacts, and thereby sediment perception into durable, transmissible competence. Because attention determines what becomes actionable, and because what becomes actionable determines what receives recognition, resources, and care, the organization of attention is not a peripheral cognitive matter. It is where moral and political consequence begins. A missed symptom, an overlooked intake form, an unhoused person who never becomes visible enough to enter a caseload—these are not failures of individual conscience so much as the downstream effects of perceptual formations that were built, over time, to notice some things and not others.

Every organization, in this sense, functions as an attentional school. Medical schools cultivate clinical perception; police academies cultivate suspicion; scientific laboratories cultivate anomaly detection; journalism schools cultivate a sense of newsworthiness; housing-justice organizations cultivate institutional witness; street outreach programs cultivate recognition of trauma, vulnerability, and relational trust. The curriculum through which this happens is rarely explicit. It is carried by meetings, mentoring, manuals, checklists, technologies, performance evaluations, and organizational ritual, each repeatedly enacting the same practical instruction: notice this, not that. Repeated often enough, the instruction ceases to feel like instruction and becomes perception itself.

II. The Developmental Proposition

The theoretical statement above establishes how attention is organized. It does not yet answer why sociology should treat attention as more than one variable among others. The developmental proposition supplies that answer, extending an argument I have made elsewhere about the cultivation of durable human capacities through repeated practice rather than singular experience:¹⁰ human beings are not born compassionate, democratic, wise, scientific, prejudiced, or bureaucratic. They become persons of these kinds through the repeated social organization of attention. This extends, rather than replaces, the symbolic interactionist account of socialization running from Mead's treatment of the generalized other, in which the self is built out of internalized patterns of others' regard. The present argument inserts a step: what a person internalizes from the generalized other is not only a set of expectations but a trained way of noticing, so that the classical Meadian sequence of generalized other and self acquires a middle term—generalized perceptual formation, then perception, then self.² This connects, at its edges, with Gibson's ecological psychology and Ingold's anthropology of perception, both of which argue that noticing develops through engagement with an environment rather than through internal computation; the present program shares that commitment but locates the environment sociologically, in organizations, rather than ecologically, in the physical surround. Compassion, on this view, is sustained attention to suffering; justice is sustained attention to exclusion; scientific expertise is sustained attention to anomaly; democratic citizenship is sustained attention to fellow citizens; wisdom is sustained attention to pattern across time. None of these is primarily a belief a person holds. Each is a perceptual habit a person has been trained into, by identifiable organizations, through identifiable practices, over identifiable stretches of time. Attention is therefore not simply a topic sociology can now examine; it is the developmental mechanism by which sociology's oldest object, the social self, gets built.

This developmental logic has a documented precursor in my own earlier writing. In a 2022 essay on ecological consciousness, I described a sequence linking sustained, particularized attention to felt appreciation, and appreciation to a sense of obligation: focused attention on the up-close details of a place lets a familiarity develop, familiarity motivates appreciation, and appreciative perception motivates care.⁸ That essay named ecological consciousness rather than perceptual formations and did not generalize the claim beyond a person's relationship to place, but the underlying sequence—repeated attention produces familiarity, familiarity produces attachment, attachment produces obligation—anticipates the sedimentation stage of the present model and supplies it with a mechanism the organization-centered formulation above leaves underspecified: attention does not simply train perception, it also, over time, produces affective attachment to what is perceived. I will call this appreciative attention: attention that lingers on particulars long enough to generate care for them, rather than attention trained only toward categorization or documentary completeness. The same essay distinguishes a familiarizing mode of perception, which builds intimacy with particulars, from a defamiliarizing mode, in which attention deliberately loosens habitual focus to notice a whole rather than its parts—a distinction with an evident affinity to Schutz's account of the shock that moves a person from one province of meaning to another, and to the ethnomethodological interest in what becomes visible only when routine expectancies are breached.

This is a stronger claim than it might first appear, and it is worth distinguishing from a more familiar one. Almost every sociologist would agree that organizations shape what their members attend to; that claim is a restatement of professional socialization theory and adds little on its own. The distinctive claim here is that attention is not simply one channel through which socialization operates alongside norms, values, and roles. It is the developmental mechanism through which durable capacities—ethical, epistemic, professional, and civic—are produced in the first place, and through which documentary and institutional realities become constituted as facts. Socialization theory generally asks what members come to believe and value; the present argument asks what they come to see, on the premise that belief and value presuppose a prior, organizationally trained perception of what there is to believe or value about.

Two limits on this claim should be stated plainly. First, the present argument is not intended as a replacement for cognitive psychology or neuroscience, and it does not deny that attention has innate perceptual and neurological substrates; it concerns the social organization of attention rather than the biological mechanisms that make attention possible in the first place, and it asks how organizations differentially cultivate those underlying capacities into socially consequential, transmissible forms of perception. Second, the claim is developmental and organizational, not universal or deterministic: perceptual formations shape what becomes easy, habitual, or unremarkable to notice, not what is, in any given case, possible for a member to notice despite that training. Members depart from, resist, and are surprised by the perceptual formations that trained them; that capacity for departure is itself, on this account, evidence that attention is trained rather than simply given.

III. Attention Before Ethics, Knowledge, and Documentation

Three implications follow from the developmental proposition, each worth stating explicitly rather than left implicit, and each stated here as an organizational claim rather than a settled philosophical one.

Attention precedes ethics in the sense that most ethical theories begin with a choice already in view: an agent weighing known options. A great many ethical failures occur earlier, when a fact never becomes perceptually available to be weighed at all—the missing person behind a completed form, the subtle symptom a physician was never trained to look for, the erosion of a democratic norm no one nearby has flagged as worth noticing. One cannot deliberate about what one has not been organizationally prepared to see. Organizations therefore shape the conditions of moral life before anyone within them makes a moral decision.

Attention precedes knowledge in a narrower sense: discovery regularly begins with a reorganization of noticing rather than an increase in information—an anomaly someone was trained to see where others were trained past it, a condition a movement teaches its participants to recognize as injustice rather than as background circumstance. This is consistent with, rather than a substitute for, the philosophy-of-science literature on the theory-ladenness of observation; the claim here is organizational, about who trains the noticing, not a general epistemological thesis.

Attention precedes documentation. Institutions do not begin by producing records; they begin by producing perception, and records are the means by which organized perception becomes stabilized and transmitted. This connects the present argument directly to my earlier work on documentary organization, institutional ethnography, and Critical Interactionism: what a case file, an intake form, or a chart entry finally states is downstream of what the institution had already trained its members to notice.

IV. Three Levels of Perceptual Formation

The theory operates simultaneously at three analytically distinct levels. At the interactional level, attention is organized moment by moment through the sequential machinery Goffman and conversation analysts have described—gaze, turn design, repair, category selection. At the organizational level, attention is organized across time through training, mentoring, artifacts, and professional vision; this is the level at which most of the present research program operates. At the civilizational level, attention is organized across entire populations through media, religion, education, and economic systems that determine, for enormous numbers of people at once, which realities are collectively treated as real. These levels are not competing explanations; they are nested. An outreach worker's gaze during a single encounter is trained by a specific program's supervision practices, which in turn draw on wider cultural determinations of who counts as a person worth noticing at all. Distinguishing the levels keeps the theory from collapsing into either pure micro-interactionism or vague claims about culture in general.

V. Perceptual Formations and the Two Architectures of Critical Interactionism

I use the term perceptual formations, extending Goffman's interaction order and Garfinkel's and Zerubavel's accounts of institutional and cognitive order, to name the organized production of perception itself. Every perceptual formation accomplishes four developmental processes: selection, in which an organization determines what deserves attention; stabilization, in which artifacts, routines, mentoring, and ritual repeatedly redirect members toward what has been selected; sedimentation, in which repeated attention becomes embodied competence, so that members no longer consciously remember to notice but simply see; and transformation, in which sedimented attentional capacities become the basis for professional expertise, ethical judgment, political participation, or, just as readily, administrative indifference. The outcome depends entirely on what an organization has repeatedly taught its members to notice.

This developmental model stands beside, rather than inside, the architecture I have used elsewhere to describe Critical Interactionism. The first architecture explains how organizations produce social objects: Observation, Constitution, Sedimentation, Consequence. The second explains how organizations produce social subjects capable of that constitutive work: Selection, Stabilization, Sedimentation, Transformation. The two architectures share a hinge at sedimentation but sediment different things—the first a documentary or institutional fact, the second a perceptual competence in a member. Read together they describe a single reproductive cycle: organizations cultivate attentional capacities; those capacities constitute actionable social objects; those objects sediment into documentary systems; those documentary systems organize the perception of the members who encounter them next. Reality and perception continually reproduce one another.

A perceptual formation is stabilized through what may be called attentional technologies: the concrete devices by which selection and stabilization happen in practice rather than in principle. Calendars, meeting agendas, intake forms, dashboards, checklists, architectural arrangements, ceremonies, mentoring relationships, and, increasingly, algorithmic feeds all perform the same underlying operation—they repeatedly direct members toward some portion of the perceivable world and away from the rest, whether the setting is a hospital, a courtroom, a newsroom, a monastery, or a smartphone. None of these technologies is unique to the present moment; what is distinctive about the current period is the speed and scale at which algorithmic technologies now perform a function that calendars, bells, and liturgies performed for centuries.

Attention, on this account, is morally neutral in itself, which is what makes it sociologically interesting rather than simply admirable. The same architecture that trains an outreach worker to notice psychosis within seconds trains a soldier to notice threat, an advertiser to notice exploitable desire, a bureaucrat to notice the completeness of a form and not the absence of the person behind it. Organizations are not simply schools of virtue; they are factories of perception, and the question a developmental sociology of attention has to ask about any institution is never whether it cultivates a way of seeing—it always does—but which way of seeing it cultivates, and at whose expense.

VI. Methodological Statement

This research program remains committed to the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic (EMCA) discipline in which I was trained: attention is investigated as a publicly observable, sequentially organized practice, never as an inferred mental state. The guiding methodological question is not "what was this person thinking?" but "what practice made this noticing, or this failure to notice, observably available to co-participants?"

Several data sources and procedures follow from this commitment. First, naturally occurring interaction remains primary: recordings and field notes of outreach encounters, intake interviews, dispatch calls, and organizational meetings, examined for the sequential machinery—gaze shifts, category selections, repair sequences, questions, reformulations—through which participants display what they are treating as relevant. Second, documentary and institutional-ethnographic analysis traces how situated noticing becomes textually fixed: how a clinical impression becomes a chart entry, how a chart entry becomes eligibility criteria, how eligibility criteria become the boundary of who receives a service. This follows Dorothy Smith's method of reading institutional texts as coordinators of attention across settings that never physically meet. Third, comparative and historical reconstruction—of professional curricula, training manuals, supervisory practices, and organizational artifacts—identifies the explicit and tacit pedagogy by which novices are inducted into a profession's characteristic ways of seeing, in the manner of Charles Goodwin's studies of professional vision.

Reflexivity is built into the method rather than bracketed from it. As a street outreach worker as well as a scholar, I am myself a socialized member of the attentional communities I study; the noticing I bring to a sidewalk encounter is itself professionally trained perception, and its display in my field notes is data about the very phenomenon under investigation. Rather than treating this as contamination, the program treats practitioner perception as a legitimate analytic resource, subject to the same requirement of demonstrable, participant-oriented evidence that governs any EMCA claim. Where a noticing cannot be shown in the observable conduct of the scene—in gaze, talk, documentation, or embodied orientation—it is treated as a hypothesis about attention, not a finding.

Finally, the program is explicitly comparative across settings—paramedic dispatch, psychiatric interviewing, homeless outreach, activist meetings, religious ritual, and human–AI interaction—on the premise that perceptual formations are a general organizational phenomenon rather than a peculiarity of any one field. The test of the theory is whether the same architecture of selection, stabilization, sedimentation, and consequence can be shown to organize noticing across settings that share no institutional history but face the common problem of directing members toward what matters.

VII. Research Program

Viewed retrospectively, the diverse projects collected under Doing Modernity no longer appear as independent investigations. They constitute a single developmental sociology of institutional perception, pursued across four connected sites.

The homelessness and outreach research examines how institutional perceptual formations determine which unhoused people become administratively "actionable" and which are sedimented into what I have elsewhere called administrative death—rendered invisible to the very systems built to serve them, in the sense developed at length in my research program on documentary constitution.³ Abandonment in Real Time documents not merely failures of policy but failures of organized perception: administrative death is produced when institutional perceptual formations repeatedly direct members toward documentary completeness while progressively rendering invisible the embodied human being those documents were originally designed to serve. Abandonment, on this account, begins not with cruelty but with organized attention directed elsewhere.⁴ The EMCA and documentary-organization research traces how professional vision is built and transmitted across paramedic, dispatch, and psychiatric settings, extending Goodwin's professional-vision program into a developmental account of how novices acquire a field's characteristic ways of seeing.⁵ The activism and public-testimony research treats social movements as attentional reorganizations, in which the first political accomplishment is not persuasion but making a previously unmarked reality noticeable, in Zerubavel's sense of shifting the discreteness of a social landscape; this extends the argument of my earlier essay on the politics of recognition, which held that visibility must be converted into obligation before it becomes care.⁶ And the religious naturalism research examines ritual and contemplative practice as attentional technologies—the vigil, the ceremony, the meditation—that stabilize attention long enough for a Schutzian shift of accent, a movement from the paramount reality of working into a finite province of meaning organized around reverence, gratitude, or grief, extending the argument of my essay on bearing witness as a spiritual practice and the ethnomethodological analysis of ritual frame-entry and frame-exit developed in "Making the Sacred Observable."⁷

Sociology has long explained how institutions distribute resources, authority, identity, and opportunity. This research program proposes that institutions accomplish something still more fundamental: they cultivate the perception through which those distributions become thinkable in the first place. They repeatedly teach members what deserves notice, what may be safely ignored, what counts as evidence, and what falls outside the boundary of concern—and repeated attention becomes perception, perception becomes competence, competence becomes the character out of which institutional action follows. Institutions therefore reproduce themselves not only through rules and incentives but through the attentional capacities they cultivate in each generation of members who pass through them. The deepest work of any institution is, in this sense, pedagogical: it teaches its members how to perceive the world they will spend the rest of their lives inhabiting. This program is accordingly organized around one of sociology's oldest questions, restated at its most fundamental level: how do societies produce the kinds of persons capable of perceiving, and therefore creating, the worlds they go on to inhabit?

Notes

1. Zerubavel's cognitive sociology is developed most fully in Social Mindscapes (1997); "optical socialization" and the related notion of "thought communities" recur throughout that book and in his subsequent work on cognitive traditions of noticing and ignoring.

2. This modification of the Meadian sequence is offered as an extension within the symbolic interactionist tradition, not a rejection of it; Mead's own account of the generalized other already presupposes that a self can register others' perspectives, which is itself an attentional achievement the present argument tries to make explicit.

3. "Administrative death" is developed at length in Abandonment in Real Time: Institutional Recognition and Premature Death Among the Homeless, a book manuscript in preparation intended for consideration in a series on interactionist theory, and in "The Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality: A Research Program" (2026), which traces the concept's genealogy through Garfinkel, Zimmerman, Cicourel, and Smith.

4. The formulation here compresses an argument made across several chapters of that manuscript concerning documentary completeness, eligibility determination, and the progressive institutional disappearance of unhoused clients.

5. See Goodwin (1994) on coding schemes, highlighting, and graphic representation as the discursive practices through which a profession's characteristic vision is produced and displayed.

6. See my essay "The Politics of Recognition," which argues that recognition requires a sequence of conversions—visibility into obligation, obligation into resource allocation, allocation into sustained care—any link of which can fail without the others being affected.

7. See my essay "Bearing Witness as a Spiritual Practice" (Noozhawk), which treats testimony and vigil as attentional disciplines rather than primarily as expressive or therapeutic acts, and "Making the Sacred Observable" (2026), which gives an ethnomethodological account of how ritual sequence accomplishes, sustains, and closes a sacred frame.

8. An earlier and more circumscribed version of the attention-familiarity-appreciation-care sequence appears in Mellinger (2022), which addressed a single empirical domain, environmental perception, and did not propose an organizational or developmental sociology. The continuity across the two pieces is one of enduring concern rather than a fully worked-out precursor theory, and I do not present the earlier essay as anticipating the present argument's organizational apparatus.

9. See Mellinger, "Attentional Orders: Toward a Sociology of Attention Allocation" (2026), which develops the Attention → Recognition → Obligation → Allocation → Holding → Survival chain and its application to homelessness, civil inattention, and panhandling as attention-claiming labor. The present essay's developmental model (Selection, Stabilization, Sedimentation, Transformation) and vocabulary (perceptual formations) are kept distinct from that essay's terminology to avoid conflating two related but separately argued frameworks.

10. See Mellinger, "Toward a General Sociology and Philosophy of Containment" (2026), which opens with the same premise—that compassion, skill, and ethical conduct are cultivated through repeated attention and practice rather than single decisive experiences—and develops it toward a theory of containing institutions rather than, as here, a theory of perceptual formation specifically.

Bibliography

Foundational Theoretical Sources

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

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

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

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Schutz, Alfred. "On Multiple Realities." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5, no. 4 (1945): 533–576.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Secondary and Related Literature

Brekhus, Wayne. "A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus." Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 34–51.

Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.

Goodwin, Charles. "Professional Vision." American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 606–633.

Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.

Mellinger: Related Writings on Attention and Recognition

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Attentional Orders: Toward a Sociology of Attention Allocation." Doing Modernity, June 15, 2026. Develops a related but distinct framework—attention as a stratified resource converted, or not, into recognition, obligation, allocation, and survival—complementary to the developmental account of perceptual formations offered here.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Bearing Witness as a Spiritual Practice." Noozhawk.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Constituting Actionable Social Worlds: The Architecture of an EMCA Research Program." Doing Modernity, July 8, 2026.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "The Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality: A Research Program." Doing Modernity, March 14, 2026.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "How You See the World Can Help You Develop Ecological Consciousness." Noozhawk, September 4, 2022.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Making the Sacred Observable: Sacred-in-Action and the Interactional Accomplishment of Spiritual Reality in Ritual." Doing Modernity, January 31, 2026.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Many Interaction Orders: Political Socialization and the Organizational Ecology of Housing Justice." Doing Modernity, July 1, 2026. Forthcoming, Studies in Symbolic Interaction.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "The Politics of Recognition." Unpublished manuscript, version 2, 2026.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. "Toward a General Sociology and Philosophy of Containment." Doing Modernity, July 3, 2026.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin. Abandonment in Real Time: Institutional Recognition and Premature Death Among the Homeless. Book manuscript in preparation.