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Membership Categorization

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, Ethnomethodology, Mundane Reasoning, membership categorization, Conversational Analysis

Membership Categorization Analysis is used to establish how the key figures involved in the conflict represented these events and the participants in them. We analyse public addresses made soon after the attacks by the US President George W. Bush, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. Each speaker distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ and formulated this distinction so as to justify past violent actions and to prepare grounds for future ones. Bush and Blair both distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in social, political and moral terms, whereas bin Laden did so in religious terms. The categorizations were not done in isolation from each other, but were instead networked. We discuss the relation between membership categorizations, presentations of happenings and violent actions, prior and subsequent and we extend our concept of a ‘dialogical network’ - On Membership Categorization: ‘Us’, ‘Them’and ‘Doing Violence’ in Political Discourse - Ivan Leudar, Victoria Marsland UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Jirí Nekvapil, CHARLES UNIVERSITY - Discourse & Society, Vol. 15, No. 2-3, (2004)

The reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis - William Housley
Cardiff University, Qualitative Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, 59-83 (2002)
Richard Fitzgerald, Cardiff University
This article briefly investigates the role that ethno-methodology has played in sociological analyses of language and interaction. The work of Harvey Sacks is investigated in relation to membership categorization and the analysis of talk-in-interaction. More specifically, the authors focus on how this strand of work has been developed in recent years and now represents a powerful apparatus for conducting sociological analyses of interaction in a diverse range of settings in a way that is sensitive to issues related to social organization, normativity, identity, macro-micro synthesis, knowledge and developments in social theory.

Observation and membership categorization: Recognizing “normal appearances” in public space - Andrew Carlin, Library and Information Studies, University College Dublin (Ireland)
© 2003, Andrew Carlin and Journal of Mundane Behavior. All rights reserved. Permission to link to this site is granted; all copyright permission requests under US copyright laws must be jointly approved by the authors and Journal of Mundane Behavior. Requests for reprint, archiving, and redistribution permissions beyond those expressly granted on this site should be forwarded to the managing editor of Journal of Mundane Behavior. The URL of this article is: http://mundanebehavior.org/issues/v4n1/carlin.htm.
Abstract: This paper looks at some mundane procedures that the sociologist, as a member of society, uses in making sense of observations. An ethnographic vignette presents a sociological problem: the observer categorizes a member as a pickpocket, even though no crime was actually witnessed. Membership Categorization Analysis shows how the categorial order is realized through observation of the visual scene. This paper discusses the nature of “serendipity” in sociological inquiries, highlighting the problematic nature of description, and what are to be taken as “data”.
Introduction
The functions and universality of categorization and classification systems are famously documented as parts of the anthropological and sociological canons (Durkheim 1971; Durkheim and Mauss 1963). Processes of categorization and classification, of people and things, are ubiquitous aspects of our lives (Bowker and Star 1999). Categorization is a routinized, mundanely available feature of academic, bureaucratic and everyday environments (Rose 1942).
Membership categories are ordinary descriptions and identifications of persons and collections of persons, which are used and applied by members on a commonplace and routine basis, in order to organize the social world in which they live. The use of membership categories is culturally methodic, i.e. membership categories are known and shared within a culture. Membership categories are features of the use of natural language, constituent features of ordinary language practices, i.e. culture. Membership Categorization Analysis is an attitude towards and explication of this aspect of people’s cultural logic.
This paper1 explores the generic and routine activity of observation. It moves towards the explication of observation as a linguistic, categorial activity, a gloss for an assemblage of members’ methods, such as categorization and making inferences, from visually available appearances. By examining the activities of serendipitous observations or a “discovery through chance” (Merton 1957:12), this paper is moving towards the procedural basis or the “how” of social analysis. It deals with unexplicated categorial order, taking visual appearances as researchable phenomena.
This paper remarks on the activities of observation whilst remaining neutral about what is being observed. A single-case vignette is presented to make available the practices of observation. Without providing a “preferred viewing” of observations, the vignette is available to analysis and interpretation. Therefore, this paper avoids stipulating the categorial order and attempts to present data derived from observations as transparently as possible. Hence, readers can “retrieve” the mundane cultural methods used in the analysis, and suggest alternatives.2 Whilst “a solution” is presented before “the puzzle”, this solution is a candidate solution rather than the solution to the puzzle.

Other-initiated repair and membership categorization—some conversational events that trigger linguistic and regional membership categorization - Maria Egbert,
IBKM, Universität Oldenburg
Abstract: In continuation of recent discussions in JoP and elsewhere concerning the aptness of conversation analysis (“CA”) as a research methodology for “intercultural” interaction, this CA-study shows some procedures by which interactants overtly or covertly orient to regional or linguistic category membership where apparent trouble in hearing or understanding the talk are addressed (“other-initiated repair” [Language 54 (2) (1977) 361]). These practices of membership categorizing are inferred from different kinds of structural elaborateness beyond the basic two-part repair sequence. CA is shown to provide analytic tools which are highly suitable to detecting and describing practices of membership categorizing along regional or linguistic lines both in so-called “native/native” and “native/nonnative” interaction.

Categories in action: person-reference and membership categorization
Emanuel A. Schegloff, University of California, Los Angeles, schegloff@soc.ucla.edu
Discourse Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, 433-461 (2007) DOI: 10.1177/1461445607079162
The article begins with an effort to clarify and differentiate a variety of terms used by analysts in dealing with mentions of persons in conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction — such terms as person-reference, identifying, describing, categorizing, and the like. This effort leads to the observation that `reference to persons' and `membership categorization' are quite distinct sets of practices, with most reference to persons not being done by membership categories, and most uses of membership categorization devices being in the service of actions other than referring. Two interactional sequences whose analysis turns on a connection to talk earlier in the occasion (a configuration termed `interactional threads') are then examined; first, to establish what is going on interactionally without respect to the mentioning of persons, and then as exercises in examining the various ways person-reference and membership categorization can figure in a stretch of interaction

Montreal Massacre, The: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis
by Peter Eglin, Stephen Hester
Product Description
The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis adopts an ethnomethodological viewpoint to analyze how the murder of women by a lone gunman at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal was presented to the public via media publication over a two-week period in 1989. All that the public came to know and understand of the murders, the murderer, and the victims was constituted in the description and commentaries produced by the media. What the murders became, therefore, was an expression of the methods used to describe and evaluate them, and central to these methods was membership category analysis — the human practice of perceiving people, places, and events as “members” of “categories,” and to use these to explain actions.
This is evident in the various versions comprising the overall story of the Massacre: it was a crime; it was a tragedy; it was a horror story. The killer’s story is also based on his own categorial analysis (he said his victims were “feminists”). The media commentators formulated the significance of the murders in categorial terms: it implicated a wider problem, that of violence against women, and thus the reasons for the murders were shown to be categorial matters.
As a contribution to sociology, and as a demonstration of the significance of ethnomethodology for understanding social life, the book reveals the methodical and particularly categorial character of how sense is made of events such as this and how such methodical and categorial resources are central to human interaction.

Studying the organization in action: Membership categorization and interaction analysis
Author: Psathas G, Human Studies, Volume 22, Number 2-4, October 1999
Abstract: A current set of concerns in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis includes the question of how conversation analysis (CA) can deal with studies of social structure or studies of talk in institutional settings.
In this paper a focus is placed on how the accomplishment of "work" and "categorization" are interrelated. Two particular instances are examined: a ski school and a package delivery service. Membership categorization is shown to be a complex, on-going, interactive accomplishment. The parties act in ways that are "predicatively-bound" (i.e. predicates of action, rights, obligations, etc.) which allow inferences to be made by each of the parties about the other based on these actions; these enable each to accept/confirm/validate the other's self-categorization and to produce, via their own actions, activities that are congruent with the other's self-categorization. Activities of the parties are category-relevant and category-generative. Thus, "work" or "the work of the organization", (e.g. for Choice, a package delivery service), is being accomplished in and through the talk and interaction of the parties.

Enrolling the Citizen in Sustainability: Membership Categorization, Morality and Civic Participation - Journal Human Studies, Publisher Springer Netherlands
Jennifer Summerville and Barbara Adkins
Abstract This article examines the common-sense and methodical ways in which “the citizen” is produced and enrolled as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning. Using Membership Categorization Analysis, we explicate how the categorization procedures in the Foreword of a draft regional planning policy interactionally produce the identity of “the citizen” and “civic values and obligations” in relation to geographic place and institutional categories. Furthermore, we show how positioning practices establish a relationship between authors (government) and readers (citizens) where both are ascribed with the same moral values and obligations toward the region. Hence, “the citizen” as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning is viewed as a practical accomplishment that is underpinned by a normative morality associated with the task of producing orderliness in “text-in-interaction.”

Membership categorization and professional insanity ascription - Carles Roca-Cuberes
UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA, SPAIN, carles.roca@upf.edu
Discourse Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 543-570 (2008)
This study, based on three years of research and over 40 hours of videotaped interaction in psychiatry, investigates the issue of insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews. Following Sacks's model of membership categorization analysis (MCA), this article analyzes the discursive resources that psychiatrists may draw on to achieve some conclusion regarding their patients' psychopathological status. As it turns out, psychiatrists' invocation of patients' putative membership categories plays a crucial role in the achievement of such a conclusion. I examine some fragments of psychiatric intake interviews (PIIs) and subsequent psychiatric interviews (SPIs). The analysis shows that the process that may lead to insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews basically involves the use of mundane, commonsense reasoning.

Membership Categorization Devices Under Construction: Social Identity Boundary Maintenance in Everyday Discourse. - Nilan, Pam
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, v18 n1 p69-94 1995
Argues that processes of evaluating and assigning membership of categories within given collectives may be identified as operating across diverse social contexts. The maintenance of social identity boundaries is dependent on "knowing" the status of one's own category membership and accomplishing this membership through the interactional work of hierarchical categorizations in writing and talk. (14 references) (Author/CK)

Mentality or morality? Membership categorization, multiple meanings and mass murder. Rapley M, McCarthy D, McHoul A.
School of Psychology, Murdoch University, Western Australia, Australia.
A central topic for social psychology is how we identify, categorize or represent ourselves to ourselves and to each other. Previous work on this topic stemming from attribution theory, social identity theory, self-categorization theory and social representations theory has tended to accept the dominant cognitivist tenet of an interior self which is (with varying degrees of success) re-presented in ordinary discourse. Against this tradition, and drawing on membership categorization analysis, we argue here for an attention to ordinary members' methods of categorizing the self. Such devices are constitutive of a culture. Accounts of the self (whether lay or professional) cannot avoid reliance on such devices. Our particular case involves a corpus of materials from the press surrounding the Port Arthur massacre: the shooting of 35 people by a lone gunman, Martin Bryant, in Tasmania in 1996. In this case, where public accountings for what 'makes up' a particular person are tied to an otherwise inexplicable but ultra-newsworthy event, we find that lay and professional methods of accounting are remarkably congruent. One of the reasons for this congruence, we suggest, is that the categorization of persons is a fundamentally moral matter. Devices for producing everyday moral accounts, in actual practical circumstances, precede and ground, for example, 'technical', 'clinical' or 'scientific' judgments. We conclude that describing such routine (but ultimately grounding) cultural devices can be a central goal of social psychology, as opposed to explaining 'the self' by tacitly relying upon those same devices in an unacknowledged and unproblematized fashion.

A tutorial on membership categorization - Emanuel A. Schegloff,
UCLA Department of Sociology, 264 Haines Hall, Box 951551, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551,
Abstract: After setting Sacks’ work on membership categorization in its historical and analytical context, and suggesting some ways of reading the original texts, I sketch the major components of membership categorization devices (MCDs) – collections of categories and rules of application, and then the categories themselves and their features. These discussions lead to some consequences for research practice – both for social science generally and for conversation-analytic practice in particular, and to an initial treatment of some problems that arise in advancing this line of conversation-analytic research.

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