Membership categorization device

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Membership categorization device
Author(s):	Kevin A. Whitehead (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8817-1175)
To cite:	Whitehead, Kevin A. (2024). Membership categorization device. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

Harvey Sacks (e.g., 1972a, 1972b, 1992) coined the term “membership categorization device” (MCD) to describe an apparatus that he observed participants systematically orienting to and using as a resource for action and inference in relation to categories of persons and the common-sense knowledge associated with them. This apparatus consists of two parts – collections of categories and a set of “rules of application.” Sacks (1972b) famously developed his observations on these main features of MCDs by reference to the first two sentences of a story told by a child: “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.” These observations are summarized in the sections that follow.

Collections of Categories

Sacks (1972b: 332) observes that participants treat categories as comprising sets that “go together.” Thus, ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ are categories from the collection ‘family,’ which could also include further categories such as ‘daddy,’ ‘cousin,’ etc. Some MCDs (including ‘family’) are also what Sacks (1972b: 334) calls “duplicatively organized,” meaning they are duplicated in distinct ‘team-like’ units, with each unit (e.g., a specific family, such as ‘the Johnsons’) including members of categories that are also part of the overarching (e.g., ‘family’) MCD.

Sacks (1992, vol. I: 40) describes individual categories within collections as “inference rich,” referring to the way they serve as repositories for common-sense knowledge about characteristics and conduct associated with their members – which Sacks (1972b: 335) calls “category-bound activities”. For example, crying and picking up crying babies may be recognized as category-bound activities for babies and mommies respectively, and the mommy can be inferred to have picked up the baby because this is what mommies are expected to do. The inference-richness of categories thus makes them important resources for inference and action (Schegloff, 2007) – that is, for action formation and ascription.

This common-sense knowledge is “protected against induction” (Sacks, 1992, vol. I: 336), such that observing individual members of a category who appear to depart from what is known about the category does not result in the knowledge about the category being modified. For example, a baby who never cries or a mommy who doesn’t pick up a crying baby tend to be seen as individual exceptions from what is known about these categories, rather than prompting changes in the knowledge associated with them.

Sacks (1972a: 32-33) uses the term “Pn-adequate” (where “Pn” refers to any population of a size greater than one) to refer to MCDs whose categories could be used to categorize any member of a population, and notes that members of every known population have available to them at least two Pn-adequate collections (e.g., age and sex). The significance of this is that, since every member of a population is potentially categorizable by at least two different categories from different MCDs, “correctness” alone does not provide an adequate warrant for the selection of a particular category to categorize any given member (Sacks, 1972a: 33). Instead, the categorization of a person as a member of a particular category must also be done by reference to relevance – which gives rise to the rules of application Sacks observes.

Rules of Application

The second part of the MCD apparatus is a set of “rules of application” (Sacks, 1972b: 332), that participants use in relation to collections of categories. These serve as “relevance” rules (Sacks, 1972b: 333) that provide for the selection of categories in particular cases.

The first of these relevance rules is what Sacks (1972b: 333) calls “the economy rule,” which specifies that a single category from any MCD can be sufficient for adequately (recognizably) referring to a person (e.g., as “the mommy” or “the baby”). As such, the use of multiple categories can be inspected for what is accomplished by using more categories than needed for an adequate reference. For example, using the reference “single mother” rather than simply “mother” can be a way of mobilizing common-sense knowledge about this combination of categories in the service of action (see Stokoe 2009).

A second relevance rule is what Sacks (1972b: 333) calls “the consistency rule,” which holds that the use of a category (e.g., ‘baby’) from a particular collection (e.g., ‘family’) to categorize one person in a setting provides for using other categories from the same collection (e.g., ‘mommy’) to categorize other people in the setting. As a corollary to, and ‘strong’ form of, the consistency rule, Sacks (1972b: 333) describes a “hearer’s maxim.” It holds that “If two or more categories are used to categorize two or more members of some population, and those categories can be heard as categories from the same collection, then: Hear them that way.” This provides for hearing ‘baby’ as a category from the ‘family’ collection, rather than from some other collection that includes a similar category (e.g., ‘stage of life,’ which has ‘baby,’ ‘child,’ ‘adult,’ etc.).

Sacks (1972b: 338) also formulates a “viewer’s maxim”: “If a member sees a category-bound activity being done, then, if one can see it being done by a member of a category to which the activity is bound, then: See it that way.” This provides for categorizing a person (e.g., as a ‘baby’ or ‘mommy’) on the basis of seeing them engaging in an activity bound to that category (e.g., crying, or picking up a crying baby, respectively).

In addition, Sacks (1972b: 334; emphasis in original) formulates a further “hearer’s maxim” that applies specifically to duplicatively organized MCDs: “If some population has been categorized by use of categories from some device whose collection has the ‘duplicative organization’ property, and a member is presented with a categorized population which can be heard as ‘coincumbents’ of a case of that device’s unit, then: Hear it that way.” This hearer’s maxim provides for hearing the mommy and the baby as members of the same specific family unit, rather than as a baby and a mommy from separate families.

Importantly, and in keeping with CA’s privileging of participants’ orientations over those of analysts (e.g., Schegloff, 1997; Whitehead, 2020), Sacks focused on how these rules of application – and MCDs more generally – are used and self-administered by participants on particular occasions, rather than describing them as an invariant and “top down” theory of categories and categorization.

Further Development and Applications

In the years since Sacks’s initial descriptions of the MCD apparatus, other scholars (e.g., Baker, 2000; Edwards, 1991; Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015; Hester & Eglin, 1997; Jayyusi, 1984; Schegloff, 2007; Whitehead, Raymond, & Stokoe, frth.) have built on his observations and thereby expanded the foundational set of analytic resources available to researchers investigating categorial phenomena in social interaction. In addition, a rich and expansive body of research has further extended these foundational resources by applying them to examinations of numerous category systems of conventional social scientific interest, including gender (e.g., Raymond, 2019; Speer & Stokoe, 2011), race (e.g., Garcia, 2022; Whitehead, 2009), ethnicity (e.g., Shrikant, 2021; van der Weerd, 2019), sexuality (e.g., Kitzinger, 2005; Raymond, 2019), class (e.g., Lee, 2018; Whitehead, 2013), family and stage of life (e.g., Butler & Fitzgerald, 2010; Rafaely, 2023), and (dis)ability (e.g., Frankena et al., 2019; Yu & Sterponi, 2023).

Additional Related Entries:

• Action ascription
• Action formation
• Context
• Preference
• Reference
• Sequence organization
• Social action

Cited References:

Butler, C. W., & Fitzgerald, R. (2010). Membership-in-action: Operative identities in a family meal. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(9), 2462-2474.

Edwards, D. (1991). Categories are for talking: On the cognitive and discursive bases of categorization. Theory & Psychology, 1(4), 515-542.

Fitzgerald, R., & Housley, W. (Eds.). (2015). Advances in membership categorisation analysis. Sage.

Frankena, T. K., Naaldenberg, J., Tobi, H., van der Cruijsen, A., Jansen, H., van Schrojenstein Lantman‐de Valk, H., . . . Cardol, M. (2019). A membership categorization analysis of roles, activities and relationships in inclusive research conducted by co‐researchers with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 32(3), 719-729.

Garcia, A. C. (2022). A preliminary investigation of the use of racial/ethnic categories in emergency telephone calls in the United States. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 50(4), 345-362.

Hall, M., Gough, B., Seymour-Smith, S., & Hansen, S. (2012). On-line constructions of metrosexuality and masculinities: A membership categorization analysis. Gender & Language, 6(2), 379-403.

Hester, S., & Eglin, P. (1997). Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis. University Press of America.

Jayyusi, L. (1984). Categorization and the moral order. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Lee, J. (2018). Methodological applications of membership categorization analysis for social class research. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 532-554.

Rafaely, D. (2023). Self-categorization: A resource for the management of experiential entitlement in talk about child death. Text & Talk.

Raymond, C. W. (2019). Category accounts: Identity and normativity in sequences of action. Language in Society, 49(4), 585-606.

Sacks, H. (1972a). An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In D. N. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 31-74). Free Press.

Sacks, H. (1972b). On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 325-345). Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation. Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1997). Whose text? Whose context? Discourse & Society, 8(2), 165-187.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(3), 462-482.

Shrikant, N. (2021). Cultural difference as a resource for arguments in institutional interactions. Communication Monographs, 88(2), 219-236.

Speer, S. A., & Stokoe, E. (2011). Conversation and gender. Cambridge University Press.

Stokoe, E. (2009). Doing actions with identity categories. Text and Talk, 29(1), 75-97.

van de Weerd, P. (2019). “Those foreigners ruin everything here”: Interactional functions of ethnic labelling among pupils in the Netherlands. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(3), 244-262.

Whitehead, K. A. (2009). “Categorizing the categorizer”: The management of racial common sense in interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72(4), 325-342.

Whitehead, K. A. (2013). Race-class intersections as interactional resources in post-apartheid south africa. In C. M. Pascale (Ed.), Social inequality and the politics of representation: A global landscape (pp. 49-63). Sage.

Whitehead, K. A. (2020). The problem of context in the analysis of talk-in-interaction: The case of implicit whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. Social Psychology Quarterly, 83(3), 294-313.

Whitehead, K. A., Raymond, G., & Stokoe, E. (frth). Analyzing categorial phenomena in talk-in-interaction. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of methods in conversation analysis. Cambridge University Press.

Yu, B., & Sterponi, L. (2023). Toward neurodiversity: How conversation analysis can contribute to a new approach to social communication assessment. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 54(1), 27-41.

Additional References:

Baker, C. (2000). Locating culture in action: Membership categorization in texts and talk. In A. Lee & C. Poynton (Eds.), Culture and text: Discourse and methodology in social research and cultural studies (pp. 99-113). Routledge.

Lepper, G. (2000). Categories in text and talk: A practical introduction to categorization analysis. Sage

Sacks, H. (1975). Everyone has to lie. In M. Sanches & B. G. Blount (Eds.), Sociocultural dimensions of language use (pp. 57-79). Academic Press.

Sacks, H. (1979). Hotrodder: A revolutionary category. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology (pp. 7-14). Irvington.

Silverman, D. (1998). Harvey Sacks: Social science and conversation analysis. Oxford University Press.

Stokoe, E. (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies, 14(3), 277-303.