Contours in reflexivity: commitment, criteria and change

This article examines the intellectual contours in calls to reflexivity in social research. In charting changes in these calls and their ideas on the role of social research in society, the article draws out lessons for future orientation. Whilst highlighting that the contribution of social research to our common understanding is part of its vitality, different authors have sought to see it in terms of how social actions are produced in research texts, via the role of experience as a starting point for reflexivity, to deploying exclusion of the researcher from dominant forces in order to produce more accurate explanations of social relations. Overall, we can be left bewildered in the face of these differences. Yet the article concludes by arguing that each has its place for clarifying the role and place of social research in society, but that they should not be over-extended as that produces an inward-looking perspective and leads to a paralysis in practice.