Reflexivity, Recursion and Social Life: Elements for a Postmodern Sociology

The paper examines, and seeks to develop, the sociological concept of reflexivity. It identifies two senses of reflexivity, one associated with ethnomethodological accounts of members' practical reasoning, the other with a more philosophical sense of conscious self-referencing, and analyses their relationship. The paper argues that the development of this form of analysis leads to a form of propositional undecidability which makes it typically ‘postmodern’. The development is linked to ideas of recursion, as these are expounded in computer science and mathematics, and to Derrida's interpretation of ‘textual fold’ – this also being used to ground the association of reflexivity with postmodernism. The analysis ‘returns to the social’ by considering aspects of Niklas Luhmann's explication of social reflexivity. It concludes by examining the understanding that a postmodern sociology might have of a postmodern society in which the grounds for social order have become undecidable.