Key concepts

1) Membership categorisation devices (MCD): MCD refers to ‘any collection of membership categories, including at least a category, which may be applied to some population containing at least a member (Sacks, 1974: 218). Sacks claims that it is imperative to ‘observe a collection composed of categories that go together. The iconic example, The baby cried. The mommy picked it up, is a good starting point to explicate this concept further. When people hear the sentence, they naturally infer that the mommy who picks the baby up is the mommy of that baby. As Jayyusi (1991) states, this is a ‘routine, un-problematic and natural hearing’ which is deeply rooted in our taken-for-granted attitude of everyday life (ibid: 238). Most importantly, baby and mommy can be assumed to be two categories from a single collection, family, which is the MCD of the categories. Schegloff (2007b) notes that the relevant categories of a person in a particular interaction and in social life are not straightforward/a single sum of categories (ibid: 467). Indeed, the categories in our conversation are organised into various collections of categories in relation to a person. Hence, a person can be

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Buddhist/Catholic/Protestant/Jew/Muslim (religion), Chinese/Japanese/Korean (nationality) and so forth.

2) The economy rule/The consistency rule: In elaborating MCD, Sacks proposes several rules of application such as the economy rule and the consistency rule. The economy rule indicates that ‘a single category maybe sufficient to describe a member’ (Stokoe, 2012:219). In this vein, the single category belongs to at least a membership categorisation device, which can be ‘referentially adequate’ (Sacks, 1974: 219). The consistency rule signifies that ‘if a certain category from a given MCD is deployed to locally characterise a member of a population, then a second category from the same MCD is used in close proximity to characterise another member’ (Jayyusi, 1991: 238). Put more simply, if a person is categorised as a psychologist in a project meeting with researchers from different disciplines, then further members of that population can be relevantly categorised by categories from the same MCD, for example, in this case, a linguist, a sociologist, a

geographer, a computer scientist and so forth. If a person introduced in the same meeting as a mother, then this category departs from ‘the relevancies already suggested’, therefore, this is able to ‘prompt a search for what has occasioned such categorisation now’ (Schegloff, 2007b: 471).

3) Hearer’s maxim: Several corollaries of the rules also discussed by Sacks, such as hearer’s maxim. Hearer’s maxim results from ambiguities of categories, as some categories can belong to several different MCDs due to alternative hearings. For example, the same example can be used from the Sacks’ original text again. In this context, the baby can be tied to the MCD, family as I previously noted, or it can be associated with the MCD, stage of life including other categories such as baby, child, adolescent, adult, senior citizens. Based upon this, Sacks modifies his first observation on the consistency rule, for example, if a first person is

categorised as baby, then the next person may be categorised as either the MCD, family or stage of life. The key issue of the hearer’s maxim is that it tends to resolve its ambiguities through connecting a category with a certain MCD. For instance, a person in the project meeting metioned above, is highly likely to be labelled as a psychologist, linguist, sociologist, geographer, computer scientist and so forth, rather than being categorised as mother or father.

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4) Category-bound activity: Category-bound activity is another key notion in MCA explaining how particular activities are common-sensically bound to specific categories and MCD. Again, Sacks’ iconic example, The baby cried. The mommy picked it up works well to grasp the concept again, as it shows that the action, crying is naturally associated with the category, baby. (Housley &

Fitzgerald, 2002). His example, in particular, clearly shows how crying is ‘tied to the category, baby in the MCD, stage of life. In this sense, Sack’s initial

elucidation of categories and its concomitant activity descriptions is predicated upon ‘an array of collections or a shared stock of common-sense knowledge shared by members of a society’ (ibid: 62). That is, particular kinds of activities and actions are regarded as key characteristics of a category’s members due to common-sense or vernacular culture in a certain society. Another interesting point relating to category-bound activities are the notion of incumbency. As members of a society implicitly implies that there is an activity that a category ought to do. For example, the mother should pick up of her own baby when it is crying, as this is a role common sensically related to a category, mother; however this is the point at which we can cast a doubt on, as identity or role of a member is not a fixed and rigid feature of interactants (Watson, 1978; Housley & Fitzgerald, 2002). Rather, identities and roles are assembled through over the course of a situated

interactional event, which are all recognisably activated by interactants themselves. MCA treats categories as well as category-bound activities are members’ fluid resources to undertake various interactional tasks in various settings.

As discussed, categories, action formulations and predicates never go together in a decontexualised way whilst being in a vacuum from a stretch of talk-in-interaction and context in situ (Stokoe, 2012: 282). Indeed, their going together is

accomplished through, and is to be discovered in ‘the local specifics of

categorisation as a social activity’ (Hester & Eglin, 1997 cited in Stokoe, 2012: 282). As such, the key concepts in MCA are highly context-bound, indexical and reflexive phenomena, which are distant from cognition-based, positivistic studies. Again, this is the point at which why MCA is a strictly emic and bottom-up approach putting great value on sequentially embedded evidence for any analytic

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claims. For example, the previously documented key concepts in sequence organisation, such as adjacency pairs and preference organisation, are all

interrelated to category and normativity embedded in interactants’ talk (Housley and Fitzgeral, 2009).