Melvin Pollner: A View from the Suburbs

Abstract

This paper considers the relationship between Melvin Pollner’s sociology of mundane reasoning and conversation analysis. We suggest, first, that Pollner’s revolutionary view of the role of accounts in everyday life provides a basic framework for understanding how norms of conversational organization are sustained across time periods ranging from the evanescent moment to the longue duree of historical time. Second, we argue his work on conflict and reality disjunctures is important for the light it sheds on conversational processes concerned with the avoidance and/or management of disagreement. Although Pollner was not personally engaged with conversation analysis, his theorizing is nonetheless of great significance in understanding some of its basic preoccupations.