New book on Categories in Social Interaction

This book investigates the situated (re)production of categories, from the most mundane and unremarkable to those most strongly associated with power and privilege. By examining the reciprocal relationships between categorial phenomena and the basic structures and practices of social interaction, the book provides a new framework for integrating conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.

Across its ten chapters, the book describes a conversation analytic approach to studying categories and categorization, charts the development and history of membership categorization analysis, and addresses core methodological challenges and practices associated with using this approach. After mapping out the new framework developed in the book, each chapter describes intersections between categorial phenomena and the domains that comprise the infrastructure of social interaction. The book concludes by exploring applications, interventions, and impacts of understanding categories in ways examined across the preceding chapters, and by considering future avenues for excavating categorial practices in the ordinary, institutional, and technological settings of human social life.

Categories in Social Interaction is essential reading for social scientists with an interest in categories of people and categorizing practices, and especially for practitioners and students of conversation analysis, membership categorization, ethnomethodology, and discursive psychology.

 

* * *

Chapter abstracts:

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Categories in Social Interaction

In this chapter, we describe the approach we develop in this book. We locate it both in its broader social science context, where categories have been theorized and studied, and in its origins in both Harvey Sacks’s lectures on conversation and Harold Garfinkel’s challenge to mainstream sociology: ethnomethodology. We explain a basic distinction between the way categories are deployed, on the one hand, by academics in the course of their research (analysts’ categories) and, on the other, by (lay) people (members’ categories) – the latter as exemplified in the extracts presented earlier. We chart the origins and trajectory of this fundamental distinction from Sacks’s and Garfinkel’s early work through to the development of membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology, where most of the research on categories (and category-adjacent topics, like identity) has been conducted. We draw on empirical examples throughout the chapter, before setting out the book’s key themes and contributions, which centre on examining the reciprocal relationships between categorial phenomena and the “generic” organizations of practice for talk-in-interaction described by Schegloff (2006, 2007).

Chapter 2: Approaching Membership Categorization 

This chapter introduces the apparatus of membership categorization devices (MCDs) first described in Sacks’s early work, and subsequently developed by other researchers who adopted the label, “membership categorization analysis” (MCA). Throughout the chapter, we illustrate and demonstrate the concepts of membership categorization using examples from various domains, from newspaper texts to messaging apps to ordinary conversational and institutional interactional encounters. We also consider the (ontological and epistemological) world-building and moral-ordering “force of categorization practices in social and institutional life” (Baker, 2000, p. 112). 

Chapter 3: Methodological Principles, Practices, and Challenges 

In this chapter, we address the practical concerns that arise in conducting research on categories in naturally-occurring – and especially audio- or video-recorded – social interaction, using a conversation analytic approach. In particular, we discuss challenges associated with “capturability” (Stokoe, 2012), empirically grounding analyses in participants’ orientations, and dealing with tacit and/or ambiguous cases, while addressing criticisms that have been levelled at conversation analysis in relation to these challenges. We also offer some practical advice for undertaking the characteristically conversation analytic approach of building and analysing collections of cases, particularly in relation to studying categorial phenomena.

Chapter 4: Action Formation and Ascription

This chapter is the first of six that implements the primary contribution of the book in sketching out a framework for examining features of the reciprocal relationship between categories and fundamental structures and practices of talk-in-interaction. In this chapter, we focus on how actions are formed by speakers and recognized by their recipients, using resources grounded in talk, other embodied conduct, and their position in unfolding interactions – and how, in the process, participants’ observably take into account their respective memberships in particular categories. We begin by examining how categories can, both explicitly and tacitly, serve as bases for solving organizational problems encountered during the course of interactions. We then develop further accounts of how participants use explicit categorial practices to form and make sense of actions, and how they tacitly treat categories as bases for designing and evaluating actions.

Chapter 5: Referring to and Addressing People 

In this chapter, we examine how speakers’ selection of particular words in forming up references to persons – including “third person” references to a person other than the speaker or immediate recipients, “second person” references to an immediate recipient, and “first person” or self-references – can be done in ways designed to either do “nothing more than referring,” or to contribute to the action of the turn in which the reference is produced. In considering how these possibilities can be analytically distinguished, we examine some ways in which categories can be reproduced “incidentally” through their use as core resources for referring to persons, or can be deployed more directly or concertedly in the service of particular interactional work to which a person reference contributes. 

Chapter 6: Taking Turns at Talking and Selecting next Speakers 

This chapter considers the categorial features of turn-taking, focusing on the system underpinning the construction and allocation of turns at talk – that is, the question of who should speak, when they should begin speaking, and for how long. We start by introducing the basic machinery of the turn-taking system, before focusing on how the system provides the basis for understanding turn allocation, and overlapping talk or ‘interruption,’ as categorially-tied practices. We show how conversation analysis may both challenge and specify stereotypical notions of ‘interruption’ as practices in and of themselves, and as associated with categories in ways that reveal the workings of power, participation, and exclusion.

Chapter 7: Organizing Sequences of Action 

This chapter sketches out the features of “adjacency pair” sequences, which serve as fundamental “building blocks” (Schegloff, 2007, p. 12) for producing and maintaining mutually-intelligible courses of action in interaction, while also demonstrating how they serve as basic structures and resources for producing and recognising categorial phenomena. It then considers how categories may become relevant in and through the range of ways adjacency pair sequences can be expanded – namely “pre-expansion,” “insert expansion,” and “post-expansion,” as well as in “parenthetical sequences.” In doing so, it demonstrates both how the structures and expectations of sequences of action provide places for the use and/or management of categories, and how categories serve as extra-sequential sources of the organization of interactional occasions.

Chapter 8: Managing Troubles in Speaking, Hearing and Understanding

In this chapter, we examine how participants manage troubles that can occur when producing, partially producing, correcting or altering, hearing, and understanding categorial phenomena in social interaction. This includes exploring the practices of “repair” – that is, how people attend to the moment-by-moment production of their actions, and how they may halt, go back, reformulate, start again, add something; and prompt their interlocutors to do the same; in order to maintain intersubjectivity and progressivity in and through their interactions. Specifically, we focus on how these practices can be rich sites for the examination of participants’ orientations to and management of categorial matters, which are recurrently exposed through repair practices that implicate categorial considerations and troubles. We do this by explaining and illustrating the range of different structural positions at which (category-related) repair can be performed, including same-turn self-initiated repair, transition space repair, next-turn other-initiated repair, and repair after next turn. 

Chapter 9: Knowledge, Experience, and Entitlement

This chapter returns to an original and important component of work on membership categorization, concerning “category-bound rights and obligations” and subsequently developed as part of the conversation analytic subfield of “epistemics.” In this chapter, we examine the practices participants use for composing and positioning utterances that reveal their orientation to managing their relative rights to knowledge, and how these are recurrently associated with categorial phenomena. We thereby specify ways of observing how participants’ conduct reflects their pervasive monitoring, patrol and defence of rights to knowledge, experience, and entitlements associated with membership in particular categories. 

Chapter 10: What now and what next? Domain-specific applications of categorization practices

In the final chapter, we examine a number of different settings, including medicine, healthcare, crisis negotiation, sales encounters, and the proliferation of conversational technologies using artificial intelligence – and the relevance of categories to understanding those settings in ways that can be identified, described, and shared with practitioners in order to generate applications and impact. Such applications of category-based work include developing research-based materials and resources for helping multiple kinds of stakeholders to understand contemporary workplace concerns like allyship, speaking out, and discrimination. At the end of the chapter, we consider the categorial future, and describe potential future directions for the field.