Smith2025
| Smith2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Smith2025 |
| Author(s) | Robin James Smith |
| Title | Membership Categorisation Analysis |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Membership Categorisation Analysis |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 214–225 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-21 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 18 |
Abstract
This chapter outlines the ethnomethodological treatment of “membership categorisation analysis” (MCA) as both analytic approach and members’ method. The initial analyses of categorisation practices, and their organisation in “category devices”, by Harvey Sacks are reviewed, along with the various maxims and corollaries that Sacks identified in explicating members’ category use. Categories are, initially, shown to be resources for the organisation of members’ “stocks of knowledge” concerning categories of persons, bound actions, and relational associations. The chapter then moves to describe how these beginnings were taken up and refined into what has become known as MCA. MCA is discussed in relation to the “radical local” critique of the “culturalist” treatment of categorisation, and the approach to categorisation practices as a situated means through which members organise and make sense of “culture-in-action” (including the related accomplishment of reasoning and moral order). This discussion also includes central debates relating to the relationship between categorisation and sequential organisation in talk and in bodily practices and will also consider the organisation of and work done by non-person categories in context. The chapter closes by considering the potential for future studies of categorisation beyond talk, for example in the organisation of perception, space, and time, indicating the continued vitality of MCA inquiries.
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