Reflections on Reflexivity: Sociological Issues and Perspectives

Reflexivity is actually a key term in the dramatic and rapid changes confronted by the human sciences (especially sociology) during the last four decades and “yet the word is used in so many different senses that it often sustains confusion rather than clarifying any underlying issues” (Holland, 1999: 463). In general, reflexivity was comprehensively defined by George Herbert Mead as “the turning back of the experience of the individual upon [heror himself]” (Mead, 1934: 134) and by Sara Delamont as “a social scientific variety of self-consciousness” (Delamont, 1991: 8). It still constitutes a rather ubiquitous sociological and epistemological problem. Methodological reflexivity (also known as “epistemological circularity”), as a systematic means to deeper and better understand the complex “knowledge-making enterprise, including a consideration of the subjective, institutional, social, and political processes whereby research is conducted and knowledge is produced” (Alvesson, 2007), has been rendered one of the most attractive sociological/epistemological buzzwords of our time, especially after the advent of post-modern theory. In particular, the radical reflexive awareness of the mutual dependency of sociological categories (e. g. risk, citizenship, space, time, modernity, morality) and social practice has been increasingly brought right at the forefront of hot academic/epistemological debates.1