Individuals, institutions, and societies are reflexive: They "turn back" upon themselves to observe, reference, describe, predict, assess and explain their own ways and workings. Reflexive turns are not mere adjuncts to social life: They make it possible and increasingly comprise its very fabric. Selfhood, mind, and agency are constituted through the human capacity to reflexively make an object of oneself. Individuals interact with one another in light of their reflexive understanding of the contexts and consequences of their actions. Innumerable professionals—social scientists among them—audit, analyze, and forecast the functioning of organizations, institutions, and the society itself. Reflexive turns, then, are implicated in the very construction of social actors, social actions, and the disciplines and professions that study and monitor them.
Reflexive turns are complexly related to the circumstances from which they emerge. First, rather than mirror a preexistent domain, reflexive turns are constitutively entwined with the form, dynamics, and even existence of what is observed or described. Self-fulfilling prophecies illustrate one way reflexive "knowledge" about circumstances affects their development. In the classic example of self-fulfilling prophecies provided by R. K. Merton in 1948, rumors of insolvency precipitate a run on a financially sound bank culminating in actual insolvency. Second, while reflexive turns may claim an objective vantage point from which to observe, analyze, and explain, they are embedded in and informed by the embodied, interactional, organizational, and cultural contexts from which they emerge. A perspicuous example of the embed-dedness of reflexive explanations is provided by E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 study of Azande beliefs regarding magic, witchcraft, and oracles. Azande explanations of the occasional failure of oracles to correctly predict future events were predicated on the cultural assumptions that contributed to belief in the efficacy of oracles in the first place. Finally, reflexive turns efface their own embedded-ness and entwining. Forgetful of both their origins and contributions to what they "discover," reflexive turns (including this description of reflexive turns) treat the phenomena they discern as preexistent independent objects and themselves as (mere) observation, revelation, or representation.
INQUIRY INTO REFLEXIVITY AND REFLEXIVE INQUIRY
The embedded and entwined features of reflexive turns are topics of social scientific inquiry. Studies of social interaction, for example, highlight how discourse and background knowledge "about" a social setting contributes to its collaborative construction. Studies in economic sociology and kindred fields identify how lay and professional economic reasoning shapes financial markets and even the reasoners themselves. In examining how economic theories are appropriated by the society, Fabrizio Ferraro, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Robert I. Sutton in 2005 suggested that as the model of homo economicus of classical economics infiltrates the discourse, norms, and circumstances of society, individuals increasingly invoke, conform to and thereby "validate" the model intended to explain their behavior. Analysts of major sociohistorical developments suggest that "late-modern" social life is marked by unprecedented levels of institutional and individual reflexive monitoring. Modern life requires, as Anthony Giddens observed in 1991, that "the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat" (Giddens 1991, p. 14).
In addition to being a topic for social science, reflexive turns are also challenges to social science. Nourished by the sociology of knowledge and amplified by the heightened reflexivity of late modernity, a panoply of voices asserts that the social (and natural) sciences have yet to recognize the full extent of their own embedding in and entwining with the processes they study. Calls for reflexive inquiry (in contrast to inquiry into reflexivity) challenge social scientists to explicate how they themselves and their projects, perspectives, operations, and findings are embedded in a nexus of enabling and constraining relationships, presuppositions, interests, and practices whose operation and effects escape the delimited self-reflection of conventional inquiry.
Reflexive inquiry bids researchers to address themselves, their inquiries, and the inquiries’ products in terms of the processes found elsewhere in social life. On the micro level, reflexive inquiry focuses on tacit practices of categorization, interpretation, interaction, and textualization through which research is conducted. On the institutional level, reflexive inquiry examines how various contexts or fields foster intellectual dispositions and pre-judgments that form what Pierre Bourdieu in 1992 referred to as "the collective scientific unconscious" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). On the structural level, reflexive inquiry invites self-examination in terms of how the process and products of inquiry are shaped by the researcher’s social location in political, economic, ethnic, or gender hierarchies.
PROBLEMS AND PROMISES OF REFLEXIVE INQUIRY
Promising to deepen and even improve research, reflexive inquiry may give rise to unsettling problems. Reflexive inquiry tends to blur the very distinctions between observer and observed and between representation and reality upon which conventional inquiry is predicated. Further, explication of the embedded and entwined features of social scientific inquiry threatens to initiate an infinite regress in which each successive reflexive turn calls forth yet another to explicate its predecessor. Moreover, reflexive inquiry may so divest itself of analytic concepts (treating them as phenomena to be reflexively explicated) that it threatens to devolve into a vacuous exercise. Finally, the extent to which reflexive inquiry can access and explicate the effaced background of research is uncertain. Unsurprisingly, social scientists vary in their enthusiasm for taking the reflexive turn and exposing themselves to these (and other) problems.
The ways persons, institutions, and societies take account of themselves are constitutive processes of social life. The social sciences are themselves reflexive turns and thus are charged not only with inquiry into reflexivity but also with reflexive inquiry, that is, with explicating their own embeddedness in and entwining with the affairs they purport to illuminate. The dividends of reflexive inquiry include insight into the constitutive role of observation, description, and analysis and the practices and prejudg-ments implicated in such activities. As daunting as they may be, the unsettling problems of reflexive inquiry, in the very ways they unsettle, are potent resources for discerning fundamental assumptions, practices, and limits of social science.
