Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

Jack Whalen and the Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality: The Santa Barbara School and the Ethnomethodological Study of Institutional Records Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. ——— Abstract This paper traces the ethnomethodological discovery of documentary constitution through the work of Jack Whalen and his collaborators within the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Drawing on Whalen's studies of emergency dispatch centers and copy shop service environments, it demonstrates how organizational records do not merely describe reality but actively produce it: documentary records constitute the persons, events, and categories upon which institutions act. The paper introduces the concept of the 'documentary person' as a theoretical formulation for understanding how organizations constitute, rather than merely record, the individuals they govern. It situates Whalen's program in relation to Don Zimmerman's foundational ethnomethodo...