The Management of Temporality: Ethnomethodology as Historical Reconstruction of Practical Action

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There has been a cleavage within the sociological community regarding the question of reflexivity. While some see ethnomethodology as inevitably adopting a constructivist point of view and argue that it can in no way avoid the problem of referential reflexivity, others cherish Harold Garfinkel's teaching that ethnomethodology should not be engaged in an ironic mode of theorizing and argue that the problem of referential reflexivity is totally misconceived. In this article, after showing why the advocates of referential reflexivity fail to indicate the nature of constructive work involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical action, I will analyze some of the ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice conducted by the antireflexivists and demonstrate that, despite their arguments to the contrary, the antireflexivists are engaged in an ample dose of constructive work to render a sequence of experimental action intelligible. More specifically, I will argue that antireflexive ethnomethodologists” alleged recovery of the temporally situated logic of the members involves the narrative logic of history.