Abstract
The point, in my opinion, of Fitzgerald and Housley’s edited book is that membership categorization analysis (MCA) is alive and well, and still useful in a postmodern world. Notions such as ‘categories’ and ‘membership’ can be taken as tending toward the stable, fixed and reified, in a time where notions like emergent, shifting and resistant often seem of much more relevance and interest. This book makes the argument – theoretically, analytically and, perhaps most importantly, via empirical and practical investigation – that MCA has in its historical DNA and in its present-day application the insight and utility to shed light into contextually bound and lived language use. After all, ‘category analysis is first and foremost a routine members’ practice and it is the task of MCA research to observe and reveal the ways in which categories are oriented by members’ (p. 19, italics in original). So, despite criticisms that MCA seeks and finds too much ‘concreteness’ and pre-existence in membership categories and related features, this book evidences that MCA has always been predicated on and dedicated to language users invoking, using and negotiating knowledge and categories that are particular, situated and emergent. This orientation is reinforced by chapter authors’ insistence and reminders that MCA is neither a method of inquiry nor a set of specific procedures for research, but rather an approach, a set of lenses and ‘devices’ through which to engage language users’ mundane, everyday symbolic work. This volume and approach could serve as a valuable bridge between postmodern values of reflexivity and relativity and the modernist desire to have a firm place to stand – or, can I say, a somewhat firm category to belong to.
This book is not for the novice or those unfamiliar with ethnomethodology or conversation analysis. Although the editors/authors do (especially early in the book) attempt to review the highlights of Harvey Sacks’ foundational thoughts and practices of MCA, the historical coverage would likely prove spotty and insufficient for the uninitiated. Opening chapters begin to make the case for how Sacks’ ideas were unique and useful and, more importantly, how they remain salient for today and going forward. That case, however, is really made as the book unfolds, with chapter authors making conceptual arguments for membership categorization that become much more persuasive as they are attested to and supported by empirical data made interesting through MCA lenses. This is how the book really begins to meet its goal of convincing readers of the value and utility of MCA in the more shifting, unfixed and less reify-able age in which we now live and work. In light of that, I found the theoretical heart of the book to be Rod Watson’s chapter ‘De-Reifying Categories’. Watson does the real work of making a case for MCA by reminding readers of Sacks’ treatment of member categorization analysis ‘as a primordial phenomenon’ (p. 31) done by lay members in context. Among my favorite points in the book is Watson’s problematizing of context itself. He argues for a ‘gestalt contexture’ that is a ‘phenomenological conception of context where the elements in a given contextual pattern are said to “exist through each other”’ (p. 37).
As stated earlier, the strength of this book lies in its mix of conceptual arguments for MCA and the very real arguments for MCA’s ongoing usefulness as made via authors’ applications of membership analysis to real-world settings and dilemmas. Following the mostly theoretical chapters by Fitzgerald and Housley and then Watson, subsequent chapters expand on and then explore, within specific contexts, various aspects of MCA.
Stokoe and Attenborough make the case for category work being a sequential phenomenon, with that argument well evidenced by data from media coverage of ongoing events. This chapter details how users employ categorization both prospectively and retrospectively in order to accurately cover larger news events. Similarly, Licoppe, in a chapter revolving around discourse from courtroom proceedings, chronicles the explicit and expert use of categorization via questions and answers that demonstrate its use toward attributing guilt and responsibility of participants. This very in-depth analysis, with ample data supplied to readers, makes quite a case for the use of categorization in persuasive settings and also for the life and death consequences of categorization work done well or not so well. Reynolds and Fitzgerald illustrate categorization work being used in publicly available videos featuring arguments. Their fascinating chapter analyses instances where language users challenge norms as they negotiate the relationship between a category and category features. The authors show use of three distinct types of relationships established between categories and features used in the videos and suggest such analysis as a tool for researchers. Participants in the videos make and challenge such ties as ‘parents’ to ‘caring for kids’ (p. 103), and other categories with features, to help make arguments and resist norms. Other parts of the book argue for and illustrate the use of categorization work as it relates to technology, and how context is understood and used therein, as well as a setting that may hit close to home for many readers – the use of MCA within research team interactions as they set about coding data.
This volume makes a good conceptual and empirical case for the use of MCA, although I must admit that I still have some misgivings about the static assumptions (see Stokoe, 2012) that may creep in with the approach. Perhaps those misgivings are just what call for such a book as this. If, like me, you have training and a background in ethnomethodology, conversation and/or discourse analysis, but have been wondering about the value and uses of MCA going forward, then this book may be what you need for a strong and well-illustrated argument for how MCA remains powerful and useful in today’s scholarly and situated, practical, ‘language-in-use’ world.