Laurier2002a

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Laurier2002a
BibType ARTICLE
Key Laurier2002a
Author(s) Eric Laurier, Angus Whyte, Kathy Buckner
Title Neighbouring as an occasioned activity: “finding a lost cat”
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Ethnomethodology, Community, Neighborhood
Publisher
Year 2002
Language
City
Month
Journal Space and Culture
Volume 5
Number 4
Pages 346–367
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/1206331202005004003
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting, an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds, and property maintenance, suburbia suffers perhaps worst of all from weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary is frequently a premise for social scientists to define their version of “the good community,” bemoan its absence or decline, and has little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to advance one or another political agenda conventional stipulative studies miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level. Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice we proffer an alternative approach to the study of community and its moral and spatially implicated organisation. From our ethnographic fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat, how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours.

Notes