Reflexivity

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Reflexivity
Author(s):	Jakub Mlynář (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
To cite:	Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Reflexivity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]

The notion of reflexivity as a constitutive property of naturally organized activities (see, e.g., Lynch, 2002; Czyżewski, 1994) provides a fundamental background for studies in IL and CA. In ethnomethodology, the essential reflexivity of actions (including ‘talk-in-interaction’) is closely related to their indexicality. Actions acquire sense in and through their practical embeddedness in specific ongoing situations or settings. While the situation provides sense for practical actions, it is not the case that their sense is fully determined by the context. Practical actions simultaneously establish and give sense to the ongoing situation. Any action depends for its sense – indexically and reflexively – on the situation in which it happens, but it also immediately becomes part of this situation, to whose sense it contributes. It is in this way that the relationship between a setting (such as a recruitment interview or a board game) and a practice (a question, a move) is said to be reflexive (see Llewellyn, 2010; Liberman, 2013, ch. 3). As Wieder put it, “each utterance [gives] sense to the context and [obtains] sense from its place in that context” (1974: 163). Each formulation or account is part of the same setting that it ‘describes’, and any utterance is also a ‘circumstance’ or a ‘practical feature’ of the setting of activities in which it is produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Reflexivity is a way to characterize this double directionality as simultaneous and parallel, capturing “the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context” (Lynch & Peyrot, 1992: 115).

The centrality of the reflexive character of practical actions can be seen as a bond between ethnomethodology and CA (Maynard & Gill, 2024). As pointed out by Schegloff (1992: xxxvi) and discussed by McHoul (2025), Sacks’ characterization of culture as “an apparatus for generating recognizable actions” is grounded in the reflexivity of social action: “… if the same procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable” (Sacks, 1992[I]: 226; original italics). The resonance becomes clear when this quote is compared with Garfinkel’s introduction of ethnomethodology’s “central recommendation … that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’” (Garfinkel, 1967: 1).

A relatively simple example of the reflexive relationship between an object or an event (such as a piece of advice) and its setting (such as a ‘consultation’) is the illustration of ‘gestalt contextures’ given by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (2010[1964]) and developed by Garfinkel (see Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022).

Figure 1: Two dots

Presenting a depiction similar to Figure 1, Gurwitsch observes that once we see the two points as “constituents of a unitary group”, which is “most likely to occur spontaneously when the points are in close proximity to one another”, we do “not see one point plus the other located a short distance away. Rather one point appears as the right member, the other as the left member of the pair.” (Gurwitsch, 2010[1964]: 103; original emphasis) The ‘left-hand member’ gives sense to the ‘right-hand member’, and vice versa, and this perceived mutual relationship also reflexively gives sense to their recognizable unity as a pair. In a similar sense, to return to the previous example, giving advice co-constitutes a consultation as a specific activity, and advice as an action obtains its sense from being done within a consultation.

Elaborating Gurwitsch, Meyer (2022) demonstrates how this essential reflexivity of social action can be used to illuminate CA’s phenomena such as adjacency pairs (Schegloff, 1968; Sacks, 1992 – e.g., question–answer or greeting sequences): “Only when both pair members adopt a ‘functional significance’ in relation to one another the pair is actually established as pair – and only then a felicitous gestalt contexture for good continuation is realized.” (Meyer, 2022: 131) On the same subject, Lynch and Eisenmann (2022) add: “An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair.” (p. 114)

Following Garfinkel’s transposition of gestalt phenomena from the perceptual domain to practical and interactional work (Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022), reflexivity captures that “situations, actions, and rules determine one another’s sense as constituent parts of a gestalt contexture” (Wieder, 1974: 170). Instead of advancing a ‘bucket theory’ (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) of context as a space or time surrounding observable actions, the term highlights that the foundations of CA and IL are based on the ethnomethodological notion of gestalt contextures as reflexively organized ‘phenomenal fields’ of practical action.

Additional Related Entries:

• context
• epistemics
• indexicality

Cited References:

Czyżewski, M. (1994). Reflexivity of actors versus reflexivity of accounts. Theory, Culture & Society, 11(4), 161–168.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. Human Studies, 44(1), 19–42.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical action. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gurwitsch, A. (2010 [1964]). The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin (The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch [1901–1973], Vol. III). Springer.

Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. E. (2010). Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions. Wiley-Blackwell.

Liberman, K. (2013). More Studies in Ethnomethodology. SUNY Press.

Llewellyn, N. (2010). On the reflexivity between setting and practice: The ‘recruitment interview’. In Nick Llewellyn, Jon Hindmarsh (Eds.), Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (pp. 74–95). Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. Theory, Culture and Society, 17(3), 27–53.

Lynch, M., & C. Eisenmann (2022). Transposing gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. Philosophia Scientiæ, 26(3), 95–122.

Lynch, M., & Peyrot, M. (1992). Introduction: A reader’s guide to ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology, 15(2), 113–122.

Maynard, D. W., & Gill, V. T. (2024). Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis (pp. 512–540). Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A. (2025). Understanding (and) culture: Working out Sacks’s aphorism. Przegląd Socjologiczny, 74(3), 29–36.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality: Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’. Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 23, 111– 144.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist, 70(6), 1075–1095.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In H. Sacks: Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I (pp. ix–lii). Basil Blackwell.

Wieder, L. (1974). Telling the code. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings (pp. 144–172). Penguin.