ABSTRACT
The basic claim of this chapter is that the interrelatedness of practices never turns its potentiality-for-being into a static presence-at-hand. It constantly exists through the ways in which configurations of practices are contextualizing the constitution of meaning while being opened to further contextualization by broader configurations of practices. Thus considered, practices can never be hypostatized as a stratum of (what critical realists call) a “stratified social world” that includes “non-observable entities”. The interrelatedness of social practices in which the articulation of meaning takes place is characterized by (a) a continuous contextualization within open horizons of possibilities; (b) interpretive openness; (c) potential infinity; (d) the capability of constantly temporalizing – and “making-room” for – what comes into being through the actualization of appropriated possibilities; (e) fore-structuring what becomes meaningfully constituted; (f) being neither normative nor non-normative, but pre-normative in virtue of its characteristic hermeneutic situations; (g) being endogenously reflexive; and (h) containing its own transcendental conditions of possibility. The chapter approaches these traits by means of a critical examination of Melvin Pollner’s attempt to integrate radical reflexivity with ethnomethodology. This attempt is scrutinized against the background of criticizing some alternative developments in ethnomethodology.
