Membership categorisation analysis

Abstract

The central concern of ‘Membership Categorisation Analysis’ (MCA) is the array of categorisation practices observable in naturally-occurring ordinary activities by lay and professional analysts. A central question for MCA is the possibility of social order, handled in and through an attention to the situated, ‘always occasioned’, accomplishment-in-use of categories, category devices, predicates and collectivities. Whilst it is commonplace to narrowly associate MCA with person descriptions, MCA forms an integral element of a ‘live apparatus’ (Housley, 2021) in and through which members organise their activities. MCA is thus the study of the organisation of multi-layered, occasioned, categorial-sequential order as the local grounds of ‘culture-in-action’ (Hester and Eglin, 1997; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2015).