According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self usually is much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client’s conduct, shifting from (...) the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client’s story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video-recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists‘ shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings: • Whereas clients’ narratives often serve to support identity-claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients’ feelings, motives, current behavior and ways of interacting. • In response to clients’ stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients’ accounts, before shifting to clients’ performative self. • Therapists ground the shift to clients’ performative self by references to clients’ observable behavior. • Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients’ performative self. Rather they use such shifts to promote the clients’ self-exploration. Yet, if clients resists to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an argument for a systematic, technical approach to formulation in verbal interaction. I see this as a kind of expansion of Sacks’ membership categorization analysis, and as something that is not offered (at least not in a fully developed form) by sequential analysis, the currently dominant form of conversation analysis. In particular, I suggest a technique for the study of “occasioned semantics,” that is, the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation. I (...) propose that meaning and rhetoric be approached through consideration of various dimensions or operations or properties, including, but not limited to, contrast and co-categorization, generalization and specification, scaling, and marking. As illustration, I consider a variety of cases, focused on generalization and specification. The paper can be seen as a return to some classical concerns with meaning, as illuminated by more recent insights into indexicality, social action, and interaction in recorded talk. (shrink)

Social theory remains puzzled by the relation between practices and structures, or the link between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Grand theorists including Giddens and Bourdieu have gained distinction for their writings on these questions, trying to marry insights and concerns of a ‘micro’ sociological nature with traditional ‘macro’ structural questions including inequality, power relations, and social reproduction. These theorists arguably fail, however, in their attempts to move social theory beyond traditional dualisms. Relevant but neglected contributions from ethnomethodology are introduced and compared (...) to the work of Giddens and Bourdieu in an attempt to identify and outline an approach to practices and structures that more reliably avoids problems of dualism and reification, and at the same time offers an understanding of structures and their relations to practices that can be much more closely grounded in empirical studies. Key Words: micro-macro link • reification • ethnomethodology • Pierre Bourdieu • Jeff Coulter. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze a seven-page speech delivered by Sukarno, first president of Indonesia, at the opening of the First Asia-Africa Conference where he advocated Afro-Asian unity/ solidarity as the panacea for colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Our aim, by focusing on a single text, is to demonstrate the role of an intensive analysis of ‘outstanding’ singular texts within the broad field of discourse analysis. The analysis is rooted within a positive discourse analysis (PDA) framework, with special focus on lexical (...) choices and variation, modality, intertextuality/interdiscursivity, metaphorical representations, ideological use of pronouns, indexical meaning, and strategies of argumentation. Through these rhetorical techniques, we illustrate how an independence leader constructs an emancipatory discourse aimed at reconciling the ideas and beliefs of the leaders of two continents that have a common history of colonialism. The study sheds light on the role of key speeches and political leaders in promoting an emancipatory discourse, and exemplifies how (presidential) rhetoric can be construed as offering a message of hope, strength, and inspiration while playing the role of a unifier, thereby highlighting the major underlying assumption of PDA: a commitment to a discourse of social change. (shrink)

This paper attempts to uncover the interpretive models underlying the construction of social representations about the identity of young people associated with crime by El Salvador's written press. To achieve this goal, I explore the ways in which these young people are categorized and characterized and the metaphors used to represent them and their actions as well as the consequences of the latter. My research has been carried out from the interdisciplinary perspective I call ‘sociological and linguistic discourse analysis’. This (...) examines the resources and strategies used in oral and written texts to impose, maintain, justify, or propose certain interpretive models seeking to make sense of social reality. (shrink)

The paper discusses the early findings of ongoing research on the representation of labour, workers, industrial relations and their context in Argentine political discourse. Argentine Presidents' first addresses to Congress from 1983 to 2010 are examined from the standpoint of Sociological and Linguistic Discourse Analysis. The linguistic resources used by the speakers are explored, as well as their relation to the argumentative strategies through which proposals are justified.

This article examines the common-sense and methodical ways in which “the citizen” is produced and enrolled as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning. Using Membership Categorization Analysis, we explicate how the categorization procedures in the Foreword of a draft regional planning policy interactionally produce the identity of “the citizen” and “civic values and obligations” in relation to geographic place and institutional categories. Furthermore, we show how positioning practices establish a relationship between authors (government) and readers (citizens) where both are (...) ascribed with the same moral values and obligations toward the region. Hence, “the citizen” as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning is viewed as a practical accomplishment that is underpinned by a normative morality associated with the task of producing orderliness in “text-in-interaction.”. (shrink)

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal (...) in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach. (shrink)

This study, based on three years of research and over 40 hours of videotaped interaction in psychiatry, investigates the issue of insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews. Following Sacks's model of membership categorization analysis, this article analyzes the discursive resources that psychiatrists may draw on to achieve some conclusion regarding their patients' psychopathological status. As it turns out, psychiatrists' invocation of patients' putative membership categories plays a crucial role in the achievement of such a conclusion. I examine some fragments of psychiatric (...) intake interviews and subsequent psychiatric interviews. The analysis shows that the process that may lead to insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews basically involves the use of mundane, commonsense reasoning. (shrink)

This article shows how journalists deploy membership categorization in managing conversational drama among ordinary individuals in live television discussion. The scripted agenda for the discussion is analyzed as an interactional project, being prosecuted by the hosting journalists. The case in focus is a Finnish discussion program broadcast six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001. Five guests are invited to the studio and introduced to the audience. The membership categories that are activated at the beginning of (...) each entrance are consequential to the way the interactional activities unfold in the rest of the discussion, leading from experiential entitlement to accountability and accusation. Introductory identifications are utilized in the question formulation to push moral accounts from the category members and to build an institutionally proper identity for the journalists. The collaboration in realizing the moral casting vividly illustrates the cultural power of the categorization device in action. (shrink)

A current set of concerns in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis includes the question of how conversation analysis (CA) can deal with studies of social structure or studies of talk in institutional settings.In this paper a focus is placed on how the accomplishment of "work" and "categorization" are interrelated. Two particular instances are examined: a ski school and a package delivery service. Membership categorization is shown to be a complex, on-going, interactive accomplishment. The parties act in ways that are "predicatively-bound" (i.e. (...) predicates of action, rights, obligations, etc.) which allow inferences to be made by each of the parties about the other based on these actions; these enable each to accept/confirm/validate the other's self-categorization and to produce, via their own actions, activities that are congruent with the other's self-categorization. Activities of the parties are category-relevant and category-generative. Thus, "work" or "the work of the organization", (e.g. for Choice, a package delivery service), is being accomplished in and through the talk and interaction of the parties. (shrink)

This paper takes up the current discussion and disagreement among ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts concerning how conversation analysis should address questions of social structure. It also discusses the question of whether conversation analysis can address questions concerning the organisation of work as developed in the studies of work program of ethnomethodologists. Five different types of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies are delineated in order to show that, altough they differ in problem selection and formulation, methodological preference and foci, they are (...) not incompatible but complementary. (shrink)

In this discourse analysis of how memory acquires and is acquired in interview exchanges, we investigate remembering as a category-bound activity, both a tensional and collaborative process of moral ratification of `survivor' as membership category. We propose the term re-membering to mean piecing together possible versions of survivor experiences in talk; these versions, offered by respondents and elicited by interviewers through questioning strategies, are epistemic claims to acquire the Holocaust as memory, or institutional History. We explore the accounting dynamic of (...) interviewer and respondent, the relationship of ownership between survivors and memory, and the duties and moral obligations of the category `Holocaust survivor' that can be shown through the interviews of survivors and their adult daughters. (shrink)

In this study caring is shown to be a membershipbound activity to kin and gender categories with strong moral connotations. Being a daughter or being a son are good enough reasons for becoming a caregiver, more so for women than for men. Caregivers were interviewed within the research project The role of women in family care of disabled elderly conducted by the Social and Economic Research Department of INRCA, Ancona, Italy. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed through a detailed discourse (...) analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. Interview data are treated as interactional encounters that occasion members to display relevant aspects of their identities and morally adequate images of being a caregiver. In the interview interaction, interlocutors display an orientation towards the production of a moral order in which duty and responsibilities are allocated on the basis of gender distinction. Males are generally described as not being responsible for caring tasks, except for situations in which females are absent or sick, that is, for serious reasons. Caregivers'' perception of time dedicated to caring is pervasive. Most caregivers said it occupied all their time, but gender differences were noticeable. Caring tasks are recognized as gender specific practices, thus failing to carry out these tasks is morally sanctionable when women are involved, but not so for men. Many caregivers described caring for older relatives as an intense source of stress, involving serious physical and psychological problems. The study on moral and identity issues related to caregiving highlights endangering constructions of caring. (shrink)

This study identifies some of the ethical issues that arise in the everyday practice of researching in collecting interactional data. A form of conceptualizing ethics in research is proposed as awareness of the social dimension of research practices and their transformative nature. The collection of ethnographic data—including interviewing, observing, audiovisual recording, and other methods—is achieved by means of social interactions that necessarily imply issues of face, relevance, appropriateness, politeness, and identity, to name a few. Research activities have an impact on (...) both the setting and the participants in the study, in fact, they become part of the setting studied. At times, participants may be using the research activity for their own ends. It is important for researchers to be aware of and responsible for the impact they have on the setting under study. Some ethical problems encountered conducting actual research activities are discussed as an illustration: issues related to negotiation of consent in semipublic settings and to the protection of informants’ anonymity. The actual resolution of these problems is presented as research findings from the everyday practice of doing research. Systematic reflection on the social and interactional dimension of how ethical decisions are taken during actual research activities could make legislation on the protection of research participants and ethical guidelines more realistic and useful. (shrink)

This article examines discourse practices surrounding children’s participation, non-participation, and the ‘moral order’ of the family in the setting of family therapy consultations. The analysis focuses on two central issues. First, the relationship between therapists’ questions, the speaker selection techniques built into those questions, and the responses produced by family members. Second, the relationship between turn-taking and the linguistic features of person deixis in disputes that emerge around children’s orientation to implicit accusations in the talk of other participants about them. (...) The findings reveal how a familial ‘moral order’ is often at the root of how children’s competence as participants is managed by the parents, the therapist, and the children themselves. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates an empirical analysis of the visual order of membership categories in a way consistent with both an early ethnomethodological research interest and recent arguments in membership categorization analysis. Early ethnomethodological studies have highlighted that we can infer and understand the membership categories of observed people about whom we have no information in advance, even without talking to them. Recent membership categorization analysts have argued the methodological importance of using video data. Given this, fictional films serve as video (...) data to advance the investigation into the visual order of membership categories since audiences do not know the fictional characters’ information in advance and cannot talk to them. We analyze how potential audiences understand fictional characters’ membership categories and how production crew members organize the visual and conversational order of membership categories. The analysis illustrates that our practical inferences of fictional characters’ membership categories are based on conversations among characters and visually available information. Such visually available information includes environments and lighting, as well as characters’ clothes, body orientations, facial expressions, and physical distance from each other. In other words, production crew members of fictional films design the visual and conversational order for remote audiences by arranging visually available information and fictional characters’ conversations. The findings provide insights into the “possible correctness” and “defeasibility” of membership categorization practices. Particularly regarding fictional characters’ membership categories, production crew members can employ the “possible correctness” and “defeasibility” of categorization practices to mislead audiences. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn recent years, studies on discourses of resistance in politics have become prevalent, focusing mainly on the language of radical movements and rebel groups, but not the discourses on colonialism, imperialism, and repression which can be considered as potential sites for discourses of resistance. To fill this gap, this paper critically explores how an independence leader utilized metaphor to construct a discourse of resistance against colonialism and imperialism. It analyzes a number of speeches delivered by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering Pan-African (...) and Ghana's independence leader, using a combination of models, including critical metaphor analysis and membership categorization analysis. The analysis illustrates that Nkrumah deployed war/conflict/military and religious metaphors in conjunction with other discursive strategies such as labeling or stereotyping, category work, sentimentalism, victim-playing, and negative other-presentation to formulate a resistance discourse against colonialism and imperialism. These metaphors were exploited through representations of vilification, enemification, demonization, freedom and justice, and attack and defense. This paper provides insight into the use of language in the service of resistance and activism, thereby demonstrating that the use of metaphor by political actors serves manipulative and/or ideological purposes and illustrating that metaphor is essential to a leader's persuasive force. (shrink)

The interactional organization of meetings is an important locus of observation for understanding the way in which institutions are talked into being. This article contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on turn-taking and participation in business meetings, approached within conversation analysis in a sequential and multimodal way. On the basis of a corpus of video-recorded corporate meetings of a multinational company, in which managers coming from several European branches convene, the article takes into consideration the embodied orientations (...) of the participants as they address each other, as they turn to particular addressees or groups in a recipient designed way while describing, informing, announcing events and results, and as they make relevant specific participants’ identities – especially national categories – and, in this way, display specific local expectations regarding rights and obligations to talk and to know. (shrink)

Scholars of ethnomethodologically informed discourse studies are often sceptical of the use of interview data such as focus group data. Some scholars quite simply reject interview data with reference to a general preference for so-called naturally occurring data. Other scholars acknowledge that interview data can be of some use if the distinction between natural and contrived data is given up and replaced with a distinction between interview data as topic or as resource. In greater detail, such scholars argue that interview (...) data are perfectly adequate if the researcher wants to study the topic of interview interaction, but inadequate as data for studying phenomena that go beyond the phenomenon of interview interaction. Neither of these more and less sceptical positions are, on the face of it, surprising due to the ethnomethodological commitment to study social order as accomplished in situ, not as something that pre-exists or goes beyond the situated interaction. This article, however, challenges not only the first, but also the second position and suggests that it is, after all, possible to do committedly ethnomethodological studies of focus group data that demonstrate how members of a focus group setting accomplish certain rational orders, and, significantly, how they do so by utilizing certain available resources. (shrink)

This paper examines Alfred Schutz’s insights on types and typification. Beginning with a brief overview of the history and meaning of typification in interpretive sociology, the paper further addresses both the ubiquity and the necessity of typification in social life and scientific method. Schutz’s contribution itself is lacking in empirical application and grounding, but examples are provided of ongoing empirical research which advances the understanding of types and typification. As is suggested by illustrations from scholarship in the social studies of (...) social science, studies of social identity associated with membership categorization analysis, and constructionist social problems theory, typification can be found to be central to social research whether it is taken up as a largely unacknowledged resource or whether it is addressed by different names. The overview and illustrations suggest the continuing, widespread, and indeed foundational relevance of Schutz’s insights into types and typification. (shrink)

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not (...) always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life. (shrink)

Whilst the academic literature on leadership has identified authenticity as an important leadership attribute, few studies have examined how authentic leadership is evaluated in naturally occurring discourse. This article explores how authentic leadership was characterised and evaluated in the discourse of the British press during the 2015 Labour Party leadership election—won, against the odds, by veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. Using membership categorisation analysis, we show that the media discourse about authentic leadership was both ambiguous and ambivalent. In their representation of (...) authentic leadership, we found that a discourse of ‘ethical’ leadership was played out in tension with a discourse of ‘effective’ leadership. We propose that this complex and contradictory discursive landscape is also relevant in business contexts where ‘ethical’ leaders are subjected to praise for their virtues but also criticism for their ineffectiveness. Future research could usefully study how ‘ethical’ leaders in different settings can be subject to competing evaluations when their ethical values are discursively contrasted to expectations concerning what it takes to be an ‘effective’ leader. (shrink)

During the course of this article the themes of public accountability, government policy, and interaction in media settings are examined. In particular, we examine empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates, and configurations as a means of accomplishing policy debate in participatory frameworks such as radio phone-ins and the accountable frames of political interviews. This paper respecifies and explores the situated character of media settings as a means of documenting, describing, and (...) illustrating the interactional methods associated with policy debate, public participation/representation, and democracy-in-action. (shrink)

Our focus in this article is on some uses of categorial transformations. The discussion is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we begin by outlining our approach, namely membership categorization analysis (MCA), indicating the origins of the term and elaborating the conception of MCA as an ‘occasioned’ members’ apparatus. We then explain what we mean by the concept of categorial transformation, review some of the very few previous studies which have investigated this phenomenon and which are pertinent (...) to its further study, and indicate how categorial transformation serves to embody and illustrate the occasionality of MCA. In the second part of the article, we present an analysis of two extracts from a transcript of the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction which occurred in a particular family meal, involving two children and their parents. A variety of categorial transformation practices in this data are identified and their particular local usages described. In the concluding discussion we consider our argument and our analysis in light of previous discussions of the trajectory of Sacks’ work. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of conversational actions and category relations exhibited in an episode of argument between a brother and sister during a family meal. The paper is based on two sets of auspices: on a conversation analytic concern with the interconnection between the sequential and categorical ‘layers’ of organization to which parties to talk-in-interaction are demonstrably oriented, and on ‘Sacks’ Conjecture’ regarding children’s culture and adult—child ‘culture contact’. In terms of these auspices, the analysis shows that the children (...) use both sequential and categorical cultural resources to produce their argument. To adapt a concept of Garfinkel’s — the documentary method of interpretation — the category relationship between the children is the underlying matter that the sequential particulars are used to reflexively document and constitute. Specifically, through the sequentially organized particulars of degradation and resistance the children recognizably and reflexively constitute their category relationship. (shrink)

It is timely and important that new developments in conversation analysis become the subject of principled debate. John Heritage’s recent papers on the role of epistemics constitute one such development, and by re-analysing excerpts from this work, the articles in this Special Issue reveal some significant problems with a programmatic approach to epistemics. This commentary agrees with the critics that there are dangers in an overemphasis on epistemics and in using isolated utterances and proposing abstract scales and terms. But the (...) commentary also warns against totally rejecting epistemics as a domain of inquiry in CA and points to places where the critics exaggerate their criticisms in a way that makes them unnecessarily hostile. (shrink)

While justifications are used frequently by young children in their everyday interactions, their use has not been examined to any great extent. This article examines the interactional phenomenon of justification used by young children as they manage social organization of their peer group in an early childhood classroom. The methodological approaches of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were used to analyse video-recorded and transcribed interactions of young children in a preparatory classroom in a primary school in Australia. The focus (...) is an episode that occurred within the play area of the classroom and involved a dispute of ownership relating to a small, wooden plank. Justifications were frequent occurrences as the young participants drew upon justificatory devices to support their stances. The justifications related to the concepts of ownership and were used by those engaged in the particular dispute to support their positions and provide reasons for their actions. Four types of justificatory responses using child-constructed rules are highlighted. They are: justification based on the rule of transferred ownership; the rule of first possession; rules associated with custodianship; and the rule of third-party verification. The justifications are practices that work to build and reinforce individual children's status within the group, which in turn contributes to the social order of the classroom. (shrink)