Moving Forward by Looking Back: Revisiting Melvin Pollner's “Constitutive and Mundane Versions of Labeling Theory”

Abstract

Melvin Pollner's article on "Constitutive and mundane versions of labeling theory" appeared in the very first volume of Human Studies, twenty-five years ago. I came upon it in the mid-nineties, as a graduate student in sociology at Boston University. I was studying deviance with Jeff Coulter, who recom? mended Pollner's paper to me as a "must read," more or less in combination with Atkinson's Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death (1978). Reading this combination of texts was somewhat of a turning point for me in my graduate studies. I began to appreciate the great variety and the many subtleties of "lay" and professional categorization prac? tices, and I began to appreciate the fact that they, no less than social scientific methods, were seriously addressed to the problem of describing and explain? ing social reality. Consequently, I began to doubt whether the study of such practices really neglects such concerns as "what really happened" and "why did it happen," as critics of ethnomethodology and "qualitative" methods continue to charge. Pollner suggests, for example, that a concern with the correspondence (or lack thereof) between accounts and reality is in the first instance a feature of "mun? dane reason," not the sole prerogative of sociologists. Pollner suggests fur? thermore that laypeople and professionals routinely and methodically evaluate accounts in the course of their mundane, practical activities, making skillful distinctions between truth and falsity, objectivity and subjectivity, etc. On another front, Atkinson illustrates that a concern with understanding the "real" or "true" causes of events, such as sudden deaths, is a practical concern of laypeople and professionals, which they address by complex and subtle pro? cedures of practical action and practical reasoning, or ethnomethods. Thus conventional sociological distinctions and concerns are not only potentially encompassed within the scope of ethnomethodology; they have at times been addressed directly and empirically. Alternative varieties of sociology are oriented to these same ethno concerns and employ these same ethno methods of reasoning, description, explanation, etc., but they do not study mundane reason and ethnomethods as empirical topics in their own right (nor do they expect anything consequential from those who do), and consequently they have not appreciated the ethno origins and