Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

 Abandonment in Real Time:  Institutional Recognition and Premature Death  among the Homeless Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Book Announcement: Abandonment in Real Time: Institutional Recognition and Premature Death Among the Homeless  In preparation. To be submitted to  Routledge Interactionist Currents Series (edited by Simon Gottschalk and Dennis Waskul). Institutional sociology has long distinguished between organizational dysfunction and organizational accomplishment. This book argues that the distinction obscures more than it illuminates. Drawing on twenty years of immersion in the homeless services compl;ex in Santa Barbara, California, combined with theoretical resources from Critical Interactionism, institutional ethnography, and the sociology of death and dying, Abandonment in Real Time advances a precise and unsettling claim: premature death among the unhoused is not primarily the product of institutional failure. It is produced through the ordinary...

Habermas, Anthropocentrism, and the Real Speech Situation: Critical Interactionism and Dionysian Naturalism Beyond Modernity Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. I. The Cathedral and the Cul-de-Sac: Encountering Habermas I first encountered the work of Jürgen Habermas seriously in a graduate seminar on critical theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, taught by Richard Appelbaum. It was the mid-1980s, and the intellectual atmosphere was charged with a particular kind of theoretical urgency. The New Left had fractured; Marxism was under pressure from both poststructuralism on one flank and the apparent stability of late capitalism on the other; feminist theory and the emerging literature on race and intersectionality were exposing the blind spots of the grand theoretical traditions. Into this charged atmosphere, Habermas arrived with an extraordinary ambition: to reconstruct the normative foundations of critical theory on rational rather than metaphysical grounds, to rescue the E...

 The Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality: A Research Program Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Independent Scholar Santa Barbara, California Abstract Across more than six decades, three largely separate intellectual traditions—ethnomethodology, institutional ethnography, and critical sociology—have been working on the same problem without fully knowing it: how organizational documents actively constitute, rather than merely describe, the social realities they appear to record. This essay argues that these traditions collectively comprise a coherent, powerful, and politically urgent research program—the documentary constitution of organizational reality—and provides its first theoretical synthesis. The essay identifies six foundational propositions the program has established, traces their intellectual genealogy from Harold Garfinkel through Don Zimmerman, Aaron Cicourel, Jack Whalen, and Dorothy E. Smith, and maps the tensions and convergences that have kept the prog...