Συμφιλίωση Οικονομίας και Κοινωνίας Προεδρία : Γιώργος Τσομπάνογλου / Λάουρα Μαράτου-Αλιπράντη

1. Advances on Social Development and Employability. The Work of LEED Sergio Arzeni. Head, OECD Programme on Local Economic and Employment Development

(LEED). Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (ΟΟΣΑ)

2. Bridging the Gap: E-Governance for Development in Transitional Countries Θεόδωρος Τσέκος. Chief Technical Advisor. United Nations Thessaloniki Centre for Public

Service Professionalism

3. - Nikita Pokrovsky. Καθηγητής. State University, Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

– Dept. of General Sociology

4. Συζήτηση -

Τα ΜΜΕ στην Καθημερινή Ζωή Προεδρία : Τέσσα Δουλκέρη

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1. Concentration and Americanization of the Mass Media

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2. Web-Journalism, Digital Content and the Audience (Διαδικτυακή Δημοσιογραφία, Ψηφια-κό Περιεχόμενο και οι Χρήστες του Διαδικτύου)

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3. Κοινωνία Πολιτών και Κοινωνία της Πληροφορίας. Το Κίνημα της Αντι-Παγκοσμιοποίησης στα Δίκτυα Πληροφορικής

Κωνσταντίνος Σπηλιώτης. Κοινωνιολόγος – Εκπαιδευτικός.

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5. ΜΜΕ, Μετανάστες και Πρόσφυγες Γεωργία Δάμα. Δημοσιογράφος στην «Ελευθεροτυπία». Εφημερίδα «Ελευθεροτυπία»

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2. Η Εργαλειοποίηση του Γέλιου Σήμερα Κώστας Αντ. Πετράκης. Κοινωνιολόγος – Δρ. Επικοινωνίας.

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Φαινόμενο: Τρομοκρατία Προεδρία : Ζήσης Παπαδημητρίου

1. Problem of Terrorism in Russian Press: Content Analyses Anna Semenova. Senior researcher. Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Valery Mansurov. Πρόεδρος. Russian Society of Sociologists

2. The Violence and a Possibility of its Conceiving in Contemporary Society Svetlana Veselova. Post-graduate student. St. Petersburg State University

– Faculty of Philosophy

3. Η Τρομοκρατία στον Κυβερνοχώρο. Όρια και Περιθώρια της Ελεύθερης Έκφρασης στο Δι-αδίκτυο

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2. Οι Γυναίκες στη Διακυβέρνηση της Ευρώπης Μαρία Στρατηγάκη. Λέκτορας. Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο

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– 5 –

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Αικατερίνη Ηλιού. Κοινωνική ψυχολόγος.

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6. Φύλο και Κοινωνικά Αποκλεισμένες Ομάδες: Η Περίπτωση της Γυναικείας Εγκληματικότη-τας στην Ελλάδα Σήμερα

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7. Συζήτηση -

Συμπεράσματα - Κλείσιμο Συνεδρίου Προεδρία : -

1. Συμπεράσματα - Κλείσιμο Συνεδρίου -

– 6 –

Nikos Bozatzis*

Reflexive Modernity’s Reflexive Actors:

Beyond self-monitoring and self-interpretation

In this paper I shall try to open the space for a social psychological perspective of enquiry

within contemporary social theoretical debates. Social psychology has historically fashioned

itself as a discipline destined to account for, to put it bluntly, the interface between “the

social” and “the individual”. The wider social, political and academic conditions of its

historical emergence though resulted in theoretical and methodological choices which were

often targeted with the charge of psychological reductionism or for espousing an uncritical

individualistic ethos (see, inter alia, Gergen, 1973; Israel & Tajfel, 1972; Parker, 1989; Parker

& Shotter, 1990). Such criticisms, which were initiated and flourished in the early 1970s,

have had a major impact in the landscape of the discipline. From the mid 1970s onwards, a

number of alternative approaches were articulated which aimed, to say the least, at re-

addressing the balance between “the social” and “the individual” in social psychological

theory and research practices (cf. Armistead, 1974; Henriques et al., 1984; Tajfel, 1981).

From the mid 1980s onwards, this self-critical social psychological re-fashioning took a

radical new form. At least in the anglophone academic world, the wider “turn to language”

that has swept across the social sciences informed the rise of a number of alternative social

psychological perspectives which have come to be known under the generic term “discourse

analysis” (e.g. Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Burman &

Parker, 1993). Discourse analytic approaches, by broadly adopting a social constructionist

perspective, have attempted to overcome, in terms of theory development and research

practices, the very binary opposition “individual / social” by focusing on language and on the

* University of Athens – Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration.

– 7 –

discursive constitution of both mental and social facts. Not surprisingly for the discipline of

social psychology, such processes of discursive construction are often sought to be elucidated

at the level of everyday understandings.

In my presentation today, I shall argue that the discursive turn in social psychology, with

its meta-theory of language and discursive practice and with its developed sets of analytic

tools and concepts, can make a significant contribution to one of the most interesting and

productive debates in contemporary social theory and sociology; namely, in the debate around

the “risk society” thesis. The thesis of risk society (or of reflexive modernization) occupies a

pivotal position within debates in contemporary social theory. Whereas its classical

formulation is to be found in a volume publish by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in

1986, the problematique of reflexive modernity has gained world-wide intellectual attention

with Anthony Giddens’ theoretical work in the 1990s (Giddens, 1990; 1991), the translation

of Beck’s book into English (Beck, 1992) and the initiation of a productive social theoretical

dialogue (e.g. Adam et al. 2000; Beck et al., 1994; Lash et al., 1996; Lupton, 1999a).

In my paper, I set to explore the theoretical possibilities for establishing a social

psychological niche within this social theoretical debate. My broad argument shall be that the

theory of reflexive modernization rests upon inadequate social psychological assumptions in

its treatment of the reflexive work that lay social actors undertake. My argumentative

endeavour is facilitated by the state of the art within the relevant social theoretical literature.

Various commentators have already initiated the task of mounting a critique towards the key

intellectual figures of the reflexive modernization thesis (Beck and Giddens), in a direction

that suits well my current intents and purposes. Moreover, the point has already been made

(cf. Lupton, 1999b) that the, more often than not, abstract mode of theorizing about the

reflexive condition of modernity either does not square well, or it does not facilitate, empirical

research in the field, particularly when the research focus is shifted from the macro-

sociological plane to that of the everyday experiences and understandings. In what follows, I

shall set, first, to present a broad outline of Beck’s and Giddens’ narratives of the late modern

condition. Next, I shall present existing critiques of these authors’ work within the relevant

academic debate, capitalizing on the social theoretical force of these to enhance the potency of

my broader argument, and, at the same time to draw the lines that demarcate them from the

approach I advocate. Finally, I shall set to blueprint a social psychological treatment of lay

reflexivity by recourse to the contemporary discourse analytic literature within that discipline.

– 8 –

Overview of Beck’s and Giddens’ account of reflexive modernity

Central to both Beck’s and Giddens’ narratives of the late modern condition is a concern

with “risk”. In their respective accounts, though in a somewhat different manner, life in late

modernity is presented as imputed with risks and uncertainties of a radical new kind.

According to Beck (1992), contemporary western societies are risk societies insofar as they

are forced to encounter the dark side of modernization processes, insofar as they are forced to

deal with the unintended consequences of their developmental trajectories. The main problem,

Beck argues, of the contemporary late-industrial societies is not any more the production and

distribution of “goods” (wealth, for example), as it was the case with pre-modern or early-

modern societies, but the prevention and minimization of “bads”. In Risk Society, Beck paints

an apocalyptic / dystopic image of the late industrial condition. In his account, a sharp

distinction is drawn between the dangers and hazards existed in previous eras and the ones

prevailing today. Typical of the latter are environmental pollution, ionizing radiation and the

toxic chemicals to be found in mass produced and consumed foods.

For Beck, there are certain distinguishing characteristic which differentiate between the

type of risks that endanger contemporary societies from the risks which faced pre-industrial or

early industrial societies (e.g. famine, plague and natural catastrophes). The sheer enormity of

contemporary risks is the first distinguishing characteristic that Beck points to. In pre-modern

and early modern times, the dangers, hazards and threads to human life were delimited in

terms of space, time and social location. However big the destructive force of, say, floods,

plague and famine might have been, they do not compare with the magnitude and the global

nature of their late modern counterparts, which threaten with destruction all life on earth.

Moreover, contemporary risks are increasingly difficult to quantify, calculate and prevent. As

Beck argues, in the course of industrialization the hazards and dangers of earlier times were

gradually transformed to calculable risks through the ever growing instrumental rational

control of environmental and social conditions. In contemporary risk society, the assessment

of risk is a highly ambivalent affair insofar as risks are rooted in highly complex social

conditions and bodies of technical knowledge. Science, which once was thought to be the

steam-engine of progress, with all the concomitant allusions to safety that the word progress

entailed, has been gradually loosing its kudos. This has happened both because scientists and

experts of all shape and sizes more often than not contradict each other in public over risk

assessment questions, as well as because of the growing public awareness that the high

consequence risks, which contemporary societies face, are themselves products of techno-

scientific developments, which constituted the very essence of the modernist utopia of

“progress”.

– 9 –

In Beck’s macro-sociological account, the term “reflexivity” takes more the semantic

content of “self-confrontation” than “reflection”. It is used to describe the condition in which

the process of modernization, in its continuous unfolding, has been led in a critical

confrontation with its own practices through their consequences. The contemporary societies,

which find themselves in risk, are reflexive / risk societies insofar as they become a problem

for themselves, insofar as risks trigger institutional responses at national and international

levels and insofar as political differences come to be superceded by global alliances that cut

across political boundaries. As Beck argues, the stage of reflexive modernization has been

reached as part of the modernization process itself. As such, it does not entail the repudiation

of modernity, rather it entails the application of its principles to itself. In this sense, the

reflexive quality of contemporary late modern societies is a deeply political quality. It paves

the road for a “creative self-destruction” of an entire epoch: that of industrial society. It is not

coincidental that for Beck the paradigmatic political struggles in (world) risk society (cf.

Beck, 1999) are the struggles of grass-root political movements like the environmental one. In

his narrative, Beck conveys a strong sense of disenchantment on behalf of the lay people

directed towards once esteemed modern institutions like politics, industry, science,

technology and so on. The sheer magnitude of contemporary risks and the widely

disseminated awareness that these very institutions are accountable for the generation of these

risks are singled out as the driving motors of this disenchantment.

In Beck’s outline of reflexive modernization, the notion of individualization has been

suggested to denote the other (private) side of globalization processes. Put in a nutshell,

individualization refers to the growing loosening of the structuring impact of traditional and

modern institutions, like social class, gender roles or the nation, in the life-world of late

modern citizens. In late modernity, as Beck argues, individuals are gradually freed from the

structural constraints of social institutions of previous eras and are forced to compose their

personal biographies and identities in a much more flexible and open-ended manner. In

Beck’s (1994: 14) words, individualization entails “the disintegration of the certainties of

industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and

others without them”. Individualization, as a social trend, has been brought about by diverse

social factors such as the spread of mass education, feminism, changes in the labour market

and the improvements in living standards.

In Beck’s account, the concept of individualization is imputed with agentic overtones to

the extent that it endows (or burdens) individuals with the task of “making choices”.

Individuals are described as finding themselves in a condition where decision-making in a

– 10 –

wide range of arenas is a societal necessity. One cannot just escape it. However strong the

“freeing” overtones of his account of individualization may be, Beck does not make the

mistake to suggest that social inequalities have disappeared altogether. Neither he suggests

that the structuring of opportunities or of life-paths, in an era where one is forced to

accomplish their own reflexive biography, may not be channeled any longer through social

attributes like social class, gender or ethnicity. His argument is that today it is becoming

increasingly common the effects of such structures on the lives of individuals not to be

acknowledged and to evade private and public scrutiny. Instead, societal inequalities leading

to “failures” in the business of authoring a reflexive biography come to be widely understood

as psychological matters in the form of personal inadequacies, generating guilt feelings and

anxieties.

Anthony Giddens’ work in the 1990s deals also with issues pertaining to risk and

reflexivity in late modernity and, indeed, his approach converges with Beck’s at a certain, at

least, extent. Giddens’ narrative is also a narrative on social change and transformation in late

modernity. Central to his approach is his concern for a social theoretical establishment of the

linkage between processes of globalization and of changes in everyday life and personal

identities. For Giddens (1991), late modernity can be characterized as a “risk culture”. This is

so, as he argues, not necessarily because individuals today are confronted with more dangers

and hazards compared to what was happening in previous eras. Late modernity can be

characterized as a risk culture due to the widespread and ever-growing contemporary

awareness that current dangers and hazards are mostly produced through human interference

rather than through fate or divine intervention. Of central importance to Giddens’ account of

reflexive modernity is his discussion of the effects that a series of, what he calls,

“disembedding mechanisms” have been having on the nature of everyday life and conduct in

modernity, as well as his discussion of “trust” and its societal (dis)placement in the late

modern condition. According to Giddens, the move from traditional society to modernity has involved an

increasing trend towards the disassociation of “time” and “space” from “place”, within which,

traditionally, localized activities gave shape to the social fabric. With globalization this trend

has accentuated to an unprecedented degree, and relations with absent / distant others

constitute the core of current economic and societal processes, replacing the contextual and

fragmented nature of pre-modern social experience. Giddens (1991: 242) calls

“disembedding” this “[…] lifting out of social relationships from local contexts and their

recombination across indefinite time / space distances”. For Giddens, one of the

“mechanisms” by means of which such a process of disembedding is being accomplished is

– 11 –

what he calls “expert systems”, or systems of expert knowledge. According to him, expert

systems “bracket” time and space, since they produce and disseminate bodies of knowledge

endowed with validity independent of the agents who deploy them and the clients who

purchase them. Giddens sees virtually the entirety of the late modern life-world as penetrated

by such systems of expert knowledge: food, medicine, architecture and the care of the self are

seen as arenas within which the colonization of life-world by expert systems is unfolded.

Giddens draws a sharp line of distinction between reflexivity as the reflexive monitoring

of action, which he sees as an intrinsic element of human activity throughout history and

reflexivity in late modernity. In late modernity, he argues, reflexivity involves an

unprecedented -in previous eras- susceptibility of most aspects of social activity to chronic

revision in the light of new information or knowledge. Such information and knowledge,

Giddens notes, is not incidental to modern institutions but constitutive of them. Reflexivity is

conceptually linked to the methodological principle of doubt, which constitutes the

cornerstone of scientific ethos, and, as such is described as both a product of the

Enlightenment thought, as well as a factor that confounds its expectations. While the

Enlightenment utopia of certainty and progress was founded on the idea of the ever unfolding

victories of “reason” over the dogmas of tradition through a radical questioning of the

arbitrariness of established habits and customs, the ethos of radical doubt imported by science

has come to bite its own tail, as it were. Since any scientific fact is amenable to revision or

rejection in the light of new information and knowledge, the promised certainties of the

Enlightenment are always in want. For Giddens, the consequences of this ostensible vicious-

circle are far reaching. As long as the image of science as an uncertain and ever changing

terrain gains public recognition and as long as scientific debates are channeled and gaining in

familiarity and currency in the public sphere, radical doubt becomes formative of the

existential parameters of the late modern condition. At this point, Giddens’ elaboration on the

notion of trust becomes relevant. Giddens (1990; 1991) draws heavily, on one hand, on psychological approaches (Erikson,

1965) and, on the other, on the micro-sociology of Goffman (1963) and on the

ethnomethodological approach, as developed by Garfinkel (1963), in order to substantiate the

vital importance of ontological security and trust, both for the successful psycho-dynamic

development of the individual as well as for the successful accomplishment of everyday

routines and practices. Whereas trust emerges in Giddens’ synthetic account as a

psychological and sociological sine qua non condition of sociality both in traditional society

as well as in modernity, he discerns a radical transformation or, rather, displacement of trust

in late modernity. Traditional society and early modernity, within which localized activities

– 12 –

occupied a center place in the social organization of life, provided for an ample environment

for placement(s) of trust: kinship, local community, religious cosmologies and traditions

facilitated an easy type of social bonding. On the contrary, in late modernity, while systems of

expert knowledge saturate everyday experiences and the life-world, trust is by necessity

invested in expert systems and requires a ‘leap of faith’ on behalf of individuals. Insofar as

systems of expert knowledge provide for a contested terrain, fraught with internal challenges

and the prospect of future revisions, the placement of trust on certain bodies of knowledge or

agents of expertise (and not on others) becomes a thoughtful calculative exercise.

According to Giddens, this calculative attitude with regard to the open possibilities of

action does not refer solely to late modern experiences of risks and uncertainties over present

conditions, which set themselves as quandaries and puzzles within conflicting contemporary

discourses of expertise. More and beyond the present condition, reflexivity in late modernity

involves the reflexive organization of the future in the present. Giddens’ account of self-

identity in late modernity as a reflexive project is a good case in point. With the demise of the

traditional order, which more or less provided for fixed passages into the life-course, Giddens

argues that biography and self-identity gradually and increasingly emerged within modernity

as reflexive projects, with the responsibility for their scripting placed on the individual. The

key-words in such processes are these of “choice” and “lifestyle”. As Giddens (1991: 85)

maintains:

“In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life-planning becomes of special

importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an

inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial

content of the reflexively organized trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of

preparing a course of future actions mobilized in terms of the self’s biography.” (Italics in

original).

Towards a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective: Emerging

issues

It has been argued (Lupton, 1999b) that Beck’s and Giddens’ accounts of reflexive

modernity waver uncertainly between “a realist” and a “weak constructionist” position. At

times, both Beck and Giddens, seem to advance a realist account of risk: risk(s) are treated as

objective dangers that exist and can be calculated independently of social and cultural

processes, with the admission that this calculation may be distorted by social and cultural

– 13 –

frames of interpretation. At other times though, Beck and Giddens seem to suggest that

despite the fact that risks are objective dangers, existing “out-there”, their existence is

inevitably mediated by techno-scientific discourses.

Despite the fact that most social psychologists of a discourse analytic persuasion, largely

due to their disciplinary location, would not go on to produce an alternative to Beck’s and

Giddens’ macro-sociological account of the late modern condition, they would have a certain

objection to these authors’ epistemological predilections. Given the fact that the dominant

discourse analytic tradition within social psychology (e.g. Potter, 1996; Potter & Wetherell,

1987; Wetherell & Potter, 1992) acknowledges the formative influences of post-structuralism

and of relativist perspectives within the discipline of sociology of scientific knowledge in the

development of a discourse analytic approach to social psychological phenomena, I suggest

that what Lupton (1999: 35) describes as a “strong” constructionist epistemological position

with regard to risk fits more easily to the discourse analytic / social psychological outlook.

Namely, the broad assumption that nothing is a risk in itself and that what comes to be

understood as a risk is a product of historically, socially and politically contingent “ways of

seeing”, or of “discourses” with the canonical Foucauldian sense of term.

The probable broad agreement with such an epistemological stance towards risk

notwithstanding, most social psychologists of a discourse analytic persuasion would not start

their research engagement with risk from such a threshold1. From the perspective of the most

productive and influential strand of discourse analytic work within social psychology, a direct

analytic engagement at the level of discourses forecloses instead of exemplifying the social

construction of whatever historically and politically contingent “objects” and does not

facilitate empirical research in the field of everyday understanding. A direct analytic

attestment to discourses operating within the social and cultural fabric (or, better, within texts)

has been criticized as amenable to what Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) call the danger of

ascriptivism: that is, the danger of imputing discourses to social texts without making explicit

the analytic grounds that warrant such an imputation. Instead, as we shall see in some detail

later on, what is usually favoured is a more ethnomethodological course of analytic action,

which places great emphasis on the ways in which social actors themselves orient to and

accomplish situated understandings of discursive practices. What is useful to point to at this

stage is that a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective on the everyday

understanding of risk cuts some distance away from a realist epistemological position, with all

1 Of course, for discourse analysts who adopt an explicit and exclusively post-structuralist perspective (e.g.

Parker, 1992) such a threshold is a perfectly legitimate one.

– 14 –

the cognitive assumptions that the latter may have. Discourse analysts would not approach

risks as objectively existing entities which come to be known, assessed and subsequently

acted upon by lay social actors. Neither would they treat life choices as outcomes of a rational

/ instrumental balancing act upon competing expert-knowledge options on offer.

Nevertheless, quite some contemporary social theorists writing from within or from the

outskirts of the risk society debate do not espouse either such an objectivist understanding of

risk and life options and its concomitant cognitive rendering of reflexivity. Let us turn to a

brief consideration of such alternative social theoretical treatments.

Social theoretical critiques and alternatives

a. Aesthetic / hermeneutic reflexivity and the project of reflexive sociology

Writing from within the core parameters of the risk society debate, Lash (1994) proposed

a radical re-conceptualisation of the risk society thesis. According to Lash, such a radical re-

conceptualisation is only possible if the theory of reflexive modernity is set against and co-

articulated with, what he calls, this theory’s “unarticulated others” or its “doubles”. These

“doubles”, for Lash, are: (a) the structural conditions of reflexivity, which have not been

recognized in Beck’s and Giddens’ accounts, overstressing as they are “the agency” (and

power) of social actors in late modernity vis-à-vis “the structure”, (b) the aesthetic dimension

of reflexivity, which Beck and Giddens have largely ignored by conceptualizing it as an

essentially cognitive process and (c) the notion of community, arrived at through the

conceptual transformation of the concept of aesthetic reflexivity in a hermeneutic direction,

against the strong individualization theme that underscores the work of Beck and Giddens.

Whereas Lash’s critique is well-worth of a more thorough and detailed consideration, for my

current needs and purposes, I shall restrict myself in a brief reference to his proposal for an

aesthetic and, eventually, hermeneutic treatment of reflexivity.

At the core of Scott Lash’s critique lies a deep social theoretical dissatisfaction with the

strong “utilitarian individualism”, as he calls it, that underpins Beck’s and Giddens

elaboration of reflexivity. Lash is not content in conceding the full latitude of the concept of

reflexivity to “cognition”. He is not prepared to consent to a social theoretical constitution of

the social agent (solely) as a rational, calculating actor. He acknowledges that such a

treatment of reflexivity has a strong philosophical resonance in the conventional

Enlightenment tradition of intellectual modernism. Nevertheless, as he goes at length to show,

the cognitive understanding of reflexivity is by no means the only understanding of reflexivity

– 15 –

to be excavated from the landscape of intellectual modernism.

Unfolding his argument against the exclusive understanding of reflexivity (or of

“critique”) in cognitive terms, Lash pinpoints, to start with, to the notion of “aesthetic

reflexivity”. According to him, whereas cognitive reflection involves a greater or lesser extent

of abstract mediation and the process of information, aesthetic reflection is of a more

“proximal” mode and involves mimetic mediation through cultural symbols (like, images,

sounds and narratives). Lash embarks in a detailed philosophical and social theoretical

narrative which traces the intellectual lineage of the notion of aesthetic critic and the mimetic

in a modernist intellectual tradition that runs in parallel to the conventional Enlightenment

tradition of critical theory. In Lash’s account, this parallel modernist lineage is populated,

amongst others, by Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the contemporary deconstructionist

philosophers Derrida, Rorty and Bauman. The details of this intellectual journey could not be

reviewed here. Nevertheless, what is particularly worth mentioning here is the upshot of this

narrative tracing of philosophical roots. Whereas the philosophical establishment of the notion

of aesthetic reflexivity challenges the image of a rational calculating actor as the only possible

subject of modernism, this challenge is not the argumentative end of Lash’s account.

Lash is emphatically critical of the radical individualism that, as he argues, lurks in

aesthetic modernism and deconstruction. As he notes, this individualism does not resemble

the individualism of the “utilitarian” calculating subject, which underlines the writings of

Beck and Giddens. All the same, it is an expressive or aesthetic type of individualism, which

does not allow for a conceptualization of “community” or of the “we” within the reflection

process. For him, what is needed in order to open up a space for the conceptualization of a

notion of “we” or “community” is not the prevalent intellectual mode of the “hermeneutics of

suspicion” that characterizes the deconstructionist ethos but its polar opposite: a

“hermeneutics of retrieval”. An intellectual posture that would “not unendingly sweep away

foundations but [would] attempt to lay open the ontological foundations of communal being-

in-the-world” (Lash, 1994: 146). For Lash, this intellectual space can be found in Pierre

Bourdieu’s project of reflexive sociology.

According to Lash, the tantalising problem of individualist underpinnings that informs

both Beck’s and Giddens’ cognitive treatment of reflexivity as well as aesthetic counter-

treatments can be social theoretically tackled only if one starts with a notion of self that is

already situated in a matrix of background practices. As Lash argues, both cognitive as well

as aesthetic reflexivity pre-suppose a subject that is somehow drawn out of the world and for

whom the world is by necessity mediated, conceptually or mimetically. Lash is in search of an

– 16 –

approach that would be able to capture the “throwness” and the embeddedness of the

individual into a web of always already existing practices and meanings. Bourdieu’s notion of

habitus (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984) and his blueprint of a “reflexive sociology” project (Bourdieu &

Wacquant, 1992) hold, for Lash, the promise for such an approach.

The project of reflexive sociology entails the systematic uncovering of the unthought

categories which themselves are preconditions of more self-conscious practices. Lash

appreciates that the notion of habitus cuts a radical distance away from the structure – agency

dualism. Reflexivity, in contrast to Beck and Giddens, is not on social structure, neither on

institutional or other rules. The individual is not implicitly theorised in terms of a rational-

choice theory of action, as a cost-minimising and benefit-maximising, preference-scheduled

actor. The notion of habitus entails an understanding of reflexivity which is on unthought

categories. These unthought categories are not easily accessible, as are social structures,

neither to lay social actors within the run of their everyday activities nor to sociologists. But

they are not inaccessible in principle. As Lash maintains, in Bourdieu’s blueprint of reflexive

sociology, the relationship between conscious self and the unthought categories is not a

subject – object monitoring relationship as it would be in Beck and Giddens’ cognitive

understanding of reflexivity, but it does not take a psychoanalytic object-subject “causal”

form either. These unthought categories provide for the ontological foundations of practical

consciousness and, in Lash’s understanding of Bourdieu, the relationship between them and

conscious self is a hermeneutic one: they are to be hermeneutically interpreted. Elaborating

through Bourdieu’s lenses on the notion of unthought categories, Lash exemplifies them as

classificatory taste categories or schemata. They are the categories which inhabit mundane

and immediate habits and practices. For analytic reasons, they can be described even more

accurately as predispositions or orientations: as the “learned, yet unthought, techniques of the

body […] which […] would be foundational for conscious conduct” (Lash, 1994: 155).

Lash pinpoints to the influence that Bourdieu’s outline of a reflexive sociology has

exerted on the development of a critical “reflexive anthropology” in the writings of Clifford

and Rabinow. The project of reflexive anthropology entails a radical departure from the

objectivism and realism of classical anthropology and necessitates what Lash (1994: 156)

calls a “partial fusion of horizons with the world of one’s respondents”. The reflexive social

scientific enterprise needs to understand itself as a hermeneutic enterprise, by rendering its

own “categories” as a particular, culture specific kind of “orientations”, “predispositions” and

“habits”. It needs, as Lash argues, to work towards the emergence of a translation between its

own categories and schemata and the ones deployed by the lay social actors who are enlisted

– 17 –

as “respondents” within research projects. The reflexive social scientific enterprise needs to

“understand itself as just another ‘ethnomethodology’” Lash (1994: 156) concludes.

Lash through his quasi genealogical “excavation” of aesthetic reflexivity within the

intellectual history of modernism provides for philosophical / social theoretical leverage in

overturning the imperium of cognition over reflexivity. From a social psychological /

discourse analytic perspective, of major importance is his critique of cognitive reflexivity for

the individualist assumptions it rests upon. His turn to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus in order to

capture the image of a self always already embedded in a web of habitual social practices and

shared meanings should be welcomed. Indeed, quite recently discursive psychologists have

also started employing Bourdieu’s notion of habitus in order to account for mundane /

habitual practices of ideological reproduction (e.g. Billig, 1995).

Nevertheless, whereas Lash’s suggestion for social scientific enterprise to become a

reflexive enterprise (“another ethnomethodology”) is a programmatic call, it may well be

argued that discursive psychologists have gone further than that. Drawing upon the

ethnomethodologically derived micro-sociological school of enquiry of Conversation

Analysis, they have developed a principled analytic methodology which brings to the fore the

participant’s own orientations in the accomplishment of the habitual / routine nature of

conversational interaction (e.g. Antaki, 1994; Edwards, 1997; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter

& Wetherell, 1987). Of course, one could not argue that discursive psychology comes to fulfil

the mission of Bourdieu’s project for a reflexive sociology; neither it would aspire to do so.

Nevertheless, it offers a viable analytic alternative to the cognitive / individualistic

assumptions that underlie traditional approaches to “everyday understandings”. Everyday

understanding, in the form of the occasioned production of socially accountable descriptions

and conversational turns, is treated within the discursive perspective as an inherently social

phenomenon. Indeed, its intrinsically social dimension does not come merely to be a priori

supposed but in situ exemplified.

b. Reflexivity as lay hermeneutics: Risks, institutions, social dependency

and identities

Whereas Scott Lash’s (1994) advocacy of a non-cognitive, non-rationalist conception of

reflexivity allows for a an understanding of lay reflexivity as a hermeneutic endeavour and

not as instrumental calculation, his account has been purely theoretical, with no particular

insights gained from concrete research settings. Brian Wynne (1996), while maintaining some

critical distance from Lash, further elaborates on what hermeneutic reflexivity may mean in

– 18 –

actual socio-cultural settings, with concrete social actors’ cases invoked for exemplification.

As it was the case with Lash (1994), at the argumentative sights of Wynne is Beck’s and

Giddens’ understanding of (lay) reflexivity as a calculative, cognitive operation which

imposes in social theoretical terms an image of lay social actors as “rational-choice” decision

makers, infused with instrumental rationality. Wynne argues that this implicit understanding

of reflexivity in Beck’s and Giddens’ writings emerges clearly if one considers their

respective treatments of the notion of “trust”. As I noted earlier on, Beck in his dystopic

depiction of the late modern condition attributes to the wider public a growing sense of

disenchantment, which comes as a result of both the sheer enormity of contemporary risks as

well as of the failed promises of techno-science for an earthly utopia of progress. As Wynne

notes, such a notion of public mistrust is instrumental – calculative and it takes aboard an

unfounded rationalistic and contractual assumption about the foundations of social action and

of social response. Wynne makes a similar argumentative case with regard to Giddens’

account of public (dis)placements of trust in expert systems. As we saw earlier on, according

to Giddens, while in early modernity trust was unproblematically placed on social institutions

and agents, in late modernity, the saturation of the life-world by expert systems entails, on the

one hand, a –by default- placement of trust in the realm of expert systems, and on the other, a

rational-choice model of deliberation between competing alternatives within that very realm

of expertise. Wynne’s critique of Giddens is a particularly forceful and a particularly interesting one.

He suggests that Giddens’ distinction between early and late modernity in terms of

unqualified versus qualified trust placements is misconceived. He argues that Giddens’

depiction of early moderns as placing unqualified trust on institutions constructs them as

“cultural dupes” and makes the mistake to confuse unreflexive trust with a state of reflexive

dependency and private ambivalence. Indeed, Wynne draws on a number of research studies

conducted in the 1950s, focusing on the public understanding of nuclear energy well before

the rise of a public debate on that matter, which show that public mistrust to the relevant

authorities and institutions was already evident in that phase and occasion of early or “simple”

modernity. Wynne’s broader argument is that the relation of the public towards expertise and

its institutions has always been reflexive, although in a hermeneutic rather than a rational,

calculative manner. Wynne’s argument rests on the recognition, arrived at through his own empirical work as

well as by reviewing previous sociological findings (e.g. Erickson, 1976; Wynne, 1992), that

an integral element of expert interventions in the lifeworld of lay social actors has always

been the generation of a condition of social dependency and the ensuing feelings of lack of

agency and alienation on the part of the public. The sociological analyses on which Wynne

– 19 –

draws upon reveal the reflexive treatment of expert institutions by the lay public even on

occasions marked by a lack of overt manifestations of public mistrust. On those occasions, as

Wynne argues, the lack of public dissent or distrust, should better be treated as “virtual” or

“as if” trust than simply trust. People seem to be aware of their dependency on expert

institutions and this awareness is associated with anxiety and the exhibition of an active

interest in evidence on which they (should) base their “as if” trust in those expert institutions.

Such occasions, according to Wynne, are instantiations of hermeneutic reflexivity to the

extent that people engage in a problematisation of their relationships with expertise as part of

their negotiation of their own identities.

If the relationship between expert institutional interventions in the life-world and the lay

public stance’s towards them is so much ambivalence-ridden as a hermeneutic understanding

of reflexivity comes to suggest, then an interesting question that may surface is why this

ambivalence is being so systematically overlooked by sociologists. Brian Wynne’s answer to

this question is a particularly interesting one. His argument is that the recognition of social

dependency and lack of agency on behalf of lay social actors vis-à-vis powerful and ever

present expert institutions in their life-world comes to be both normalised and consolidated

via specific types of widely circulating cultural narratives, which provide for convenient

rationalisations of such distressing and disorienting social experiences. These cultural

narrative often mobilise themes of fatalism and of spectral forms of condensed agentic power

pitied against lay social actors. Such rationalisations, while obviously consolidate a sense of

powerlessness against the colonising forces of expert systems within life-world, at the same

time provide for a refuge and a narrative protective cocoon against the more pervasive danger

of the explicit recognition of a dominated, powerless and marginal social identity.

Taking aboard an explicit constructionist perspective, Brian Wynne challenges the

dominant assumption within the reflexive society thesis regarding risk perception. Whereas in

Beck’s and Giddens’ writings risk perception is rendered to relate to perceptions and

evaluations of objectively existent physical risks (as objects of experience), for Wynne lay

perceptions and responses to risk

“are rationally based in judgements of the behaviour and trustworthiness of expert

institutions, namely those that are supposed to control the risky processes involved. That

is, the most germane risks are (social) relational” (Wynne, 1996: 57; italics in original).

According to Wynne, the rationalist discourses of modern institutions, in penetrating the

lifeworlds of lay social actors, impose “prescriptive models” of what ought to count as human

– 20 –

and social conditions proper in concrete situations and these models are found wanting in

actual terms by the social actors on whom they are imposed. Therefore, the most immediate

dangers that social actors encounter in their social lives are neither the objective dangers that

expert systems aim at countering nor the objective (again) dangers which come as by-

products of expert systems’ functioning; rather, they are the identity-risks

“arising from the fundamentally impoverished and morally-emotionally threatening

models of the human which are silently embodied in the objectivist science of those

modernist expert institutions, ironically intervening increasingly in the name of ‘public

protection’ from risks” (Wynne, 1996: 60).

Brian Wynne’s account is particularly important for the development of a discursive

psychology niche within the theory of reflexive modernity. To start with, it goes beyond a

mere social theoretical exemplification and seeks to ground the argument about hermeneutic

reflexivity in empirical evidence. Moreover, it emphasises the role of cultural narratives and

of the identity work accomplished within processes of lay reflection. Nevertheless, while his

hermeneutic emphasis on cultural narratives and identity work –rightly- substantiate a critique

towards the cognitive understanding of reflexivity by Beck and Giddens, at the same time his

hermeneutic turn may be amenable to further scrutiny from a discursive psychology point of

view.

Discursive psychologists would point out that the hermeneutic reflexive work which

social actors seem to engage in, in Wynne’s account, namely their social identity concerns

and the deployment of cultural narratives, are presented as acontextualized naturalistic

findings. An ethnographic perspective is indeed adopted by the researcher, but this is the

perspective of a “view from the mountain” (cf. Condor, 1997). The researcher seems to be

engaged in an observational exercise, subsequently informing her readers about the

happenings in the world “out-there”. In so doing, scant attention is being paid to the

specificity of the research context within which cultural narratives are mobilised by research

participants (informants). Neither the context of the research is treated as (just) another type

of expert system intervention into the life-world of the research participants. It may well be

argued that the context of the research may occasion particular types of identity concerns (and

work) for the participants. It may be the case that it is not merely the danger posed by

intervening institutions “out-there” which occasions hermeneutic reflection on behalf of the

participants. It may be the case that when (private) hermeneutic concerns come to be voiced

within another expert system intervention (i.e. the research encounter), then more hermeneutic

– 21 –

concerns for the establishment of an accountable social identity profile may become relevant.

These identity concerns, while habitually practised by the research participants themselves

should better become a topic of analytic interest for the observing or listening social scientist.

From the perspective of discursive psychology, Wynne’s treatment of lay reflexivity vis-

à-vis institutions as a “rational judgement” is also seriously problematic. Discursive social

psychologists, apart from treating instances of lay reflexive processes as occasioned

discursive processes, would also seek to ground what Wynne treats as “rational judgements”

of institutional functioning to culturally specific “traditions of argumentation” (cf. Shotter,

1993) vis-à-vis the role of (specific) institutions within a particular sociocultural setting. Such

an analytic course of action would aim at highlighting the genealogical provenance of

particular, historically and culturally rooted, resources of representational and narrative

themes. c. Reflexivity through cultural myths: Salvation and apocalypse in risk

discourses

Alexander and Smith (1996) articulate a full-blown critique of the risk society thesis.

Their overall argument is that the risk society thesis, as outlined by Beck (1992), fails to

account for the role of culture both in the ontological constitution of risks as well as in the

epistemological level of contemporary (lay) risk perception. Alexander’s and Smith’s account

begins with an alignment with relativist strands of work within the discipline of sociology of

scientific knowledge, which have established that there cannot be a truly rational discourse on

science and technology, given the fact that the techno-scientific enterprise is infused with

“culture”: rules of the thumb, rhetoric, and “operative fictions” have been shown to constitute

integral features of science in action (cf. Garfinkel et al., 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979;

Knorr-Cetina, 1994). In a similar vein, Alexander and Smith set up their account as an effort

to highlight the mediating impact of culture in structuring social scientific and lay discourses

on science and technology. To start with, they note that in sociological theory, from Marx and

Weber onwards, technology has been overwhelmingly understood to produce rational

discourses which respond in a more or less unmediated way to the objective materiality of

technology and its effects. Nevertheless, Alexander and Smith disagree with such an

assumption about the demystifying properties and potentiality of technology. They suggest

that a failure to recognise the role of culture in mediating the impact of technology on society

and on lay discourses about technology and its effects has detrimental effects for social

theory. Beck’s risk society thesis provides for them a good case in point.

Alexander and Smith take issue with Beck’s depiction of risks as objective facts

– 22 –

generated by techno-scientific developments, with the latter unmediated by wider cultural

factors, as well as with his treatment of risk perception as a simple (reflex-like) consequence

of the sheer enormity of contemporary risks. As they argue, Beck fails systematically to

answer questions such like how and when risks are detected and how these risks are placed on

the public agenda. Alexander and Smith discern, what they call, a “time-lag” between the

generation of objective risks and the public perception of those risks in Beck’s account. This

time-lag, they argue convincingly, is unsuccessfully accounted for by Beck. In order to

address this “time-lag” question, Alexander and Smith argue, Beck would have to consider

more thoroughly the role of culture at two levels. First, he would have to appreciate the role

of culture in the very ontological constitution of the risk society itself. He would have to

acknowledge the importance of a strongly and widely held –albeit tacit- social commitment to

solving the problems of the world through rationalising techno-scientific endeavours. Second,

at an epistemological level, he would have to appreciate that the contemporary public

rendering of the techno-scientifically based society as a risk society involves a certain shift in

cultural ways of understanding.

Alexander and Smith seek to articulate the cultural dimension they see as missing from

Beck’s objectivist account by recourse to the late-Durkheimian work on religious sociology.

The key finding here relates to the pervasive manner in which even within modern society the

symbolic / mythological categories of “sacred” and “profane” continue to inform lay

understandings.

“Whereas the sacred provides a social representation of the good in relation to which

actors seek to build communities, the profane defines an image of evil and establishes a

zone of pollution from which humans strive to be saved.” (Alexander & Smith, 1996:

257)

This type of secular / religious imagery, as Alexander and Smith note, provides for an

alleviation to earthly suffering by, on the one hand, promising a millennial utopia and, on the

other, by defining the social evil from which the forthcoming utopia allows an escape.

Alexander and Smith draw upon an extensive range of research findings which show that

social discourses of technology, from the early 19thC onwards have always been endowed

with a dilemmatic quality. On the one hand, technology has come to be represented within a

utopian / salvationary narrative genre. On the other hand, technology has also been constantly

represented with dystopic / apocalyptic overtones.

Alexander and Smith argue that from 19thC until the late 20th C, the dystopic / apocalyptic

– 23 –

theme has been subordinated to the utopian / salvationary one. They maintain that the

remarkable social consensus which provided the motivational dynamic for the establishment

of modern industrial society depended more than anything else on the widely shared cultural

belief that technology would bring salvation from the earthly sufferings of modernisation

processes itself. Moreover, as they point out, the salvationary theme on technology came as

part and parcel with a representation of nature as profane, as a force that needed to be tamed

by humans through technology. The research evidence on which Alexander and Smith draw

upon suggest that the domination of this representation of technology and nature only started

to be shaken at the late 20th C. As it is argued, the several decades within the 20th C, which

came to be marked by the extensive techno-wars have had a decisive impact in public

consciousness. The tables were turned and the representation of technology as profane gained

currency, while nature fully assumed its sacred representational profile and, in the discourse

of ecology, came to be associated with innocence, peace and self-regulation. The

argumentative endpoint of Alexander and Smith has been to treat Beck’s thesis of risk society

not merely as an inadequate social theoretical representation of risk dynamic but as a

culturally situated argument, which, more than relaying empirical evidence, is translating the

contours of the cultural mythology of technology into a social scientific genre.

From a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective, Alexander and Smith’s

account is important for two reasons. First, it provides a (potential) genealogical backdrop to

the reflexive invocation of representational themes within lay understandings. Acts of lay

reflexivity are deemed an inherently cultural endeavour to the extent that these are

accomplished through culturally specific and familiar narrative themes. Moreover, their

account allows for and introduces the notion that frameworks of cultural understanding

comprise contradictory / dilemmatic themes. As we shall see next, this is a pivotal analytic

assumption and research finding within the discursive psychology literature. The problem that

can be discerned with regard to their approach from a discursive psychology point of view is

that their overwhelming emphasis on cultural codes distracts analytic attention from the level

of the concrete utterances within which cultural codes come to be instantiated (cf. Billig,

1997). It should be noticed that this something more than a simple difference of perspective.

Attention to the semantic content of narratives at the expense of their pragmatic deployment

does not allow for a theorisation and analytic attestment to the situated discursive practices

through which social actors embed themselves within an ‘always already there’ life-world of

shared meanings and practices.

– 24 –

Outline of a social psychological / discourse analytic treatment of lay

reflexivity

So far, in the bulk of this paper, I have briefly discussed critical social theoretical

approaches towards the understanding of (lay) reflexivity in the work of Beck and Giddens.

As I made it clear at the beginning of this paper, the rationale of this discussion has been quite

“instrumental”. I wanted to benefit from the social theoretical force of the discussed

objections towards the overwhelmingly cognitive, utilitarian, individualistic and rational-

choice assumptions that underpin the conceptualisation of reflexivity in Beck’s and Giddens’s

work. While discussing these multi-faced critiques, I took the chance to point towards some

major converges and discrepancies between each of them and a social / psychological

discourse analytic approach to lay reflexivity. I should like now to spell out in a more

integrated fashion the core elements of such an approach.

Before doing so though, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the discursive turn

in social psychology provides for too many entry points, as it were, to an analytic treatment of

reflexivity. The approach I have already started outlining unavoidably takes sides and locates

itself within ongoing methodological and theoretical debates within the discursive turn in

social psychology. Indeed, it resonates with methodological proposals that seek to offer a

balanced perspective in the analysis of discourse, as operating both at micro- as well as

macro- social levels (cf. Billig, 1991; Potter, 1996; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell,

1998). Let me elaborate briefly then on what I consider to be the major “road-stations” that

would navigate us through the discursive turn in social psychology with regard to lay

reflexivity. a. The rhetorical / ideological meta-theory of language

The work of Michael Billig (e.g. 1987; 1991; Billig et al., 1988) has exerted a paramount

influence in the establishment of the discursive perspective within social psychology. Indeed,

most social psychologists espousing a discursive perspective generally agree with Billig’s

rhetorical / ideological meta-theory of language. The basic tenets of Billig’s meta-theory of

language can be summarised as follows.

For Billig, thought and language should better be treated as dialogical phenomena. One

cannot study phenomena of thought (neither of perception) without recourse to the

performative aspect of language. Both thought as well as language in its use are

argumentatively / rhetorically organised: that is, every argument (in a public or an internal

dialogue) for a position explicitly or implicitly takes its meaning from the position it aims at

countering. For Billig, rhetorical / argumentative processes are inherently ideological

– 25 –

processes: the argumentative positions upheld or countered in thought or talk are parts of

wider, culturally specific social controversies. As such they have a history and this history is

indicative of social struggles for hegemony. Ideologies, either in their formal statements or in

their everyday transmutations, comprise of dilemmatic themes and quandaries. Everyday

thinking and arguing then, since it is framed within these dilemmatic themes, is the

cornerstone of thoughtful ideological reproduction.

Let me figure out then how the rhetorical / ideological approach of Billig might enrich the

social theoretical debate considered so far. By taking aboard the rhetorical / ideological meta-

theory of language, we arrive at a social psychological understanding of reflection, which

does not need to be cognitive. For Billig both processes of thinking (i.e. their argumentative

organization), as well as their subject matter (i.e. argumentative content) are inherently social,

modeled as they are upon wider social controversies. In that sense, it may be argued that

culture enters the culturally vacuous terrain that Beck’s account of risk society provides us

with. In addition, by treating thought and talk as rooted in wider culturally and historically

defined social controversies and dilemmas, Giddens’ image of the life-world as saturated with

life choice-options provided solely by bodies of expert-system knowledges is challenged. The

Gramscian origins of the rhetorical / ideological approach (cf. Billig & Sabucedo, 1994) allow

for a “kaleidoscopic” view of common-sense ideologies, which are thought to integrate

traditional, modern as well as late-modern themes and postulates. The rhetorical / ideological

casting of (lay) reflexivity then renders it as an integral aspect of the human / social condition.

Such a rendering can be paralleled with Wynne’s critique of Giddens for presenting a

“cultural dupe” model of the person in conditions of “simple modernity”.

Nevertheless, a rhetorical / ideological treatment of lay reflexivity would cut some

distance away from a certain position advanced within Wynne’s account. As we saw, for

Wynne, lay social actors rationally assess the performances of institutions and expert systems

on the basis of the social identity dangers that these pose to them through their penetration of

their life-worlds. From a rhetorical / argumentative perspective the story would be somewhat

different. Assessments for and / or against institutions and institutional performances would

not be treated as rational conclusions reached within a mental ‘black-box’ and subsequently

spelled out for the benefit of the over-hearing researcher. Instead, the emphasis would be

placed on the very rhetorical process by means of which the “rationality” of a certain

argumentative assessment would come to be established discursively. Such a rhetorical

achievement of “rationality” might come to be substantiated through the invocation and the

puzzlement over the validity of the counter position of the assessment proposed. Such a

– 26 –

rhetorical situation then would be indicative of the inherently dilemmatic outlook of the

tradition of argumentation about institutions and institutional performances. Moreover, it

would also be indicative of the cultural dilemmas prevailing with regard to the social identity

proper to be espoused when thinking and arguing about institutions and institutional

performances.

b. Conversation Analysis (CA) and the Discursive Action Model (DAM)

From its inception, the discourse analytic turn in social psychology has been formatively

influenced by the research tradition of conversation analysis, which has sprung out of

ethnomethodology (e.g. Goodwin & Heritage, 1990). Despite the fact that conversation

analysis is often (rightly, I would think) criticised for its exclusive micro-social focus on talk

in interaction, its analytic potential should not be underestimated. When its analytic scope is

relocated within the frame of other meso- or macro- social analytic approaches to language,

like Billig’s rhetorical / ideological approach for example, then an expanded latitude of

analytic reach is being opened-up.

The fundamental characteristic of CA is that it dispenses with the representational view of

language. Language is not treated simply as a representational medium of mental and / or

social entities which lie beyond it. For CA, language (usually, talk in interaction) is a field

within which are unfolded social practices. It may well be argued that CA provides for a

sociological microscope which magnifies the mundane, often unnoticed but nevertheless

orderly and consequential accomplishment of the inter-subjective space between conversant

(therefore active) social actors. CA is well-known for its strict focus on talk in interaction and

its puritan abstinence from theorising any layers of context to talk apart from the context that

the conversing participants themselves explicitly signal to. In CA terminology, a central focus

and tool for analysis is the participants’ own orientation to whatever social phenomena are at

stake within the unfolding of talk in interaction. CA, then, manages to capture and to bring to

social scientific attention the most elementary –and therefore basic- habitual practices which

concern the co-construction and ethno-orientation towards shared meanings. The social actor

of CA is the embedded social actor that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus also seeks to capture;

albeit is an image of a social actor embedded in the most minimal -but already social- of

possible contexts: in the ephemeral but consequential -and not at all whimsical context- of

mundane social interaction.

The spirit (if not the letter) of CA has been successfully transplanted into the discursive

turn in social psychology via what has come to be know as the discursive action model

– 27 –

(DAM) (Edwards & Potter, 1992). A core feature of the DAM is provided by the heuristic

that people in everyday interaction (and beyond) treat each others as well groups as entities

with motivations, stakes and interests. As analytic evidence suggest, talk which furnishes

attributions of blame and responsibility on another part is more often than not rhetorically

designed to disavow inferences about a potential stake or interest of the speaker in making

such attributions and inferences. It is shown, therefore, that social actors in their normative

pursuit of an accountable social identity are constantly faced with a dilemma of stake or

interest: how to attend to interests in talk, without being undermined as interested. Edwards

and Potter have shown that such a dilemma of normative morality is usually solved by

recourse to the discursive genre they call “factual discourse”. That is, accounts and

descriptions are rhetorically constructed as factual and mere representations of the world “out-

there” through a number of rhetorical devices.

All that may –in the first glance- may seem largely irrelevant to the main subject of this

paper; nevertheless, it is not quite so. Let us, for example, be reminded of the hermeneutically

reflexive social actor of Brian Wynne’s account. As it was argued, lay social actors engage in

a rational assessment of institutional performances, and this more often than not entails a

critical stance towards the prescriptive introduction of expert knowledge within their life-

world, which deprives them from valuable aspects of their social identities. We may well

assume, of course, and Wynne himself is quite explicit about that (Wynne, 1996: 79) that

what counts as a rational assessment is a an analytic gloss. What is usually the case is that

interview materials within which blame is allocated on institutions by relevant social actors

while, at the same time, these social actors’ own local, grass-root knowledge is praised as

superior to expert interventions, is taken at face value by the (politically committed)

researcher. The claim to the moral and political high-ground by valorising local knowledge

notwithstanding (for a detailed criticism, see Condor, 1997), a discourse analysis using the

heuristics of DAM might be able to reveal a more complicated picture. The rationality of lay

assessments may come to be highlighted as a rhetorical accomplishment which is “done”

interactionally by means of specific rhetorical devices. One may also suppose that such a

discursive accomplishment may rely on rhetorical disavowals of a potentially hearable

“prejudiced” towards science moral profile. For example, other instances in which techno-

science is thought to be superior to local knowledge may be invoked and rhetorically used by

lay social actors in their discussions with the sympathetically predisposed researcher. If

something like that is the case, then such a finding may not be as trivial as maybe thought in

the first place. It could be the case that such a finding may be indicative of the dilemmatic

– 28 –

nature of everyday ideologies. Perhaps an argument can be established pointing towards the

dilemmatic identity postulates that are oriented to by the research participants themselves,

while talking to the social scientist about the conditions of their social existence. Discourse

analysts would maintain that such discursively oriented to conflicting identities may be more

indicative of lay habitual practices and meaning making procedures compared to a plain social

scientific attestment to the rationality of lay actors’ assessments.

c. Post-structuralist / genealogical insights

As I hinted above, while discussing Alexander and Smith’s critique of Beck and his risk

society thesis, most discourse analysts would appreciate the genealogical tracing of the

cultural history of particular representations mobilised within lay reflexive acts. An integral

tenet of discourse analysis is that historical familiarity provides for both the intelligibility as

well as for (part of) the persuasive force of a particular representation of, say, technology

within a reflexive account (cf. Potter, 1996; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). So, a discourse analyst

might be tempted to explore whether a critical assessment of a particular techno-scientific

expert system by lay social actors relies upon an assumption about technology as “profane”

and polluting the “peaceful” “innocence” of the lay actors life-world. Nevertheless, as I noted

before, ascriptions of cultural codes or discourses into everyday discursive practices may be a

methodologically problematic endeavour. Discourse analysts who share a concern to keep a

balanced perspective between the content and organisation of talk, would rather avoid

ascribing a discourse on the basis of the propositional content of talk. Instead, they would

seek to exemplify the ways in which a discourse may come to inform not the content of talk

but discursive practices within which propositional content is “packaged”.

The injection of a social psychological / discourse analytic twist in the treatment of lay

reflexivity definitely complicates the ostensibly neat methodological grounds of cognitive

treatments of reflexivity. Nevertheless, both critical social theoretical work within the risk

society debate as well as theoretical developments within critical social psychology urges us

to critically overcome the calculative, instrumental profile of the self-monitoring social actor

implied in the core works of the reflexive modernity literature. Moreover, the adoption of a

social psychological / discourse analytic perspective radicalises the hermeneutic

understanding of lay reflexivity advocated by some authors. Discursive psychology teaches us

that reflexive acts of self-interpretation are always more than acontextualized productions of

hermeneutic statements. Questions about the relation between the research setting and the

data collected need to be asked, as well as questions about the historicity and the cultural

– 29 –

specificity of the traditions of argumentation which inform reflexive, representational

practices. The dilemmatic quality of these common sense ideologies needs to be analytically

disentangled in order for a more complete picture of habitual ideological reproduction to be

highlighted. Discursive social psychology may not be able to furnish the complete picture that

the reflexive sociology project of Bourdieu aspires to. Nevertheless, it is a reflexive social

scientific enterprise in itself and, most importantly, it offers a methodologically principled

way in highlighting the reflexive, in the sense of rhetorical cum ideological, work

accomplished within everyday understandings. Future social psychological / discourse

analytic work in this field of social theoretical and empirical enquiry may come to

substantiate the programmatic convergences and divergences discussed here.

Acknowledgements

The incentive for the development of the arguments presented in this paper has been provided

by my involvement in the E.C.-funded research project “Uncertainty and Insecurity in

Europe”. I should like to thank my colleagues in that project, Konstantinos Tsoukalas,

Michalis Lianos, Lilla Vicsek and Michelle Dobre, for their varied and valuable contribution

in the development of my ideas and Vassilis Arapoglou for his perceptive criticisms of an

earlier draft of this paper.

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