Membership Categorisation Analysis

Through inductive analysis (Duff, 2008) of interviews, triangulation with other interviewees’ accounts and examination of written artefacts, I demonstrate the ways in which participants achieve their goals of developing English academic writing by remaking academic literacy practices and identities. As such, I consider interviews as a window into INoPs and academic literacy development. However, it is necessary to warrant my descriptions of identity construction/socialisation and deepen the concept of INoP beyond a phenomenon-specific social network, investigating meanings of ties between individuals which are sequentially-produced in interviews. I used MCA to understand how identities were constructed moment by moment by employing categories and category-resonant devices in the semi-structured interviews. The insights gained from analysis of interviews and the contribution of MCA’s

methodological mindset have been fundamental to my analysis of all data. Although I present an in-depth membership categorisation analysis of only two extended extracts in Chapter 5, these extracts are key to my understanding of practices, identities and the participants’ individual networks.

As an ethnomethodological, inductive approach, MCA is designed to describe how individuals understand and produce the social order around them (Garfinkle, 1975) without filtering accounts through the preconceptions of the researcher. In contrast to Conversation Analysis (CA), MCA considers categorical rather than sequential concerns related macro levels of society such as gender, sexuality or identity (Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015; Stokoe, 2012) which are represented in how people categorise and are categorised by others at the level of talk and text (Myers & Lampropoulou, 2013). As the third layer of data, a membership categorisation analysis of interview accounts thus bridges the gap not only between talk and text (Lillis, 2008) but between talk, text and the social context. In this section, I will define the approach to MCA I used to analyse selected interview accounts.

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Individuals do their categorisation work through membership categorisation devices (MCD), a collection of interactionally-produced categories and rules for the application of these categories. MCDs store large amounts of knowledge about society which members often think of as “common sense” and thus categories are often implied rather than directly invoked (Fitzgerald, Housley & Butler, 2009). However, while categories and rules are treated by members as if they have an a priori

existence, they are produced in the moment, by members interacting through talk or text (Watson, 2015). Whenever people describe individuals, they use categories from collections; for instance, the category “family” could include mother, father or children, while the category “people in the classroom” could include teacher and student or classmate. Each collection contains at least one category applicable to a population of at least one member (Sacks, 1992). Individuals use rules of application to pair a category member to at least one population member (Kelly, 2003). Therefore, an MCD consists of a collection of categories and rules of application. In MCDs, particular features come to be associated with categories in different ways, representing what people expect members of a category to do, think or know. For Sacks (1974), such features were the activities typical of a member of the category, but features encompass rights, knowledge, beliefs, obligations, entitlements as well (Wowk & Carlin, 2004), encompassing what Stokoe (2012) refers to as activities and predicates. Features come to be associated with categories and are described as tied, bound or implied to MCDs (Reynolds & Fitzgerald, 2015). When features are tied to categories, the relationship is not taken for granted but is made explicit through sequential talk. Because of the work necessary, category-tied features are the weakest relationship, both locally-established and thus locally-contestable. On the other hand, category-bound features are viewed as natural, explicit but common-sense or taken- for-granted. As such, they are stronger and non-contestable. Finally, category-

predicated features are not explicit but are implied through the operation of an MCD or category. Reynolds and Fitzgerald (2015) also point out that some features or norms are not bound to any particular MCD but can be “held-in-common features of society that ‘anybody’ orients to” (p. 120).

I turned to MCA rather than other methods of discourse analysis because of the method’s ability to warrant inferences about the meso level of practice,

community/networks and identity in close analysis of micro-level sequential

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by my own expectations about categories of people but represented those of the participants. In my initial analysis described above, I inferred relationships between academic literacy practices and participants’ ties in social networks. These social ties included many potential categories and MCDs, and as teacher and research I held assumptions about the academic literacy socialisation role of such ties, such as expectations about how English teachers and students would usually behave or think. Through close analysis of categories in sequential interaction, my use of MCA ensured I represented the participants’ common-sense assumptions about these categories rather than my own. The strength of MCA was such that, even when my interview questions inadvertently invoked prior category assumptions, the

interviewees’ sequential responses to resist, accommodate or re-make these categories could be analysed as instances of negotiation of categories and identities.

I followed the process set out by Stokoe (2012) for conducting a membership categorisation analysis in five steps. Researchers should:

1. Collect data across different sorts of domestic and institutional settings… 2. Build collections of explicit mentions of categories … and category-

resonant descriptions…

3. Locate the sequential position of each categorial instance with the ongoing interaction, or within the text.

4. Analyse the design and action orientation of the turn or text in which the category, device or resonant description appears.

5. Look for evidence that, and of how, recipients orient to the category, device or resonant description; for the interactional consequences of a category’s use; for co-occurring component features of categorial formulations; and for the way speakers within and between turns build and resist categorizations.

(Stokoe, 2012, p. 280) In my analysis, I began by finding the instances of categories during my coding of academic literacy practices. In searching for categories, however, I was not only looking for “explicit mentions”, but the other, implied ways that individuals invoked categories through “category-resonant descriptions”. Because MCA is not only

concerned with categories but with how categories are used, I looked at the sequential position of the category in interactions or texts. One criticism of MCA has been that categories can come from the researcher rather than the participant (Schegloff, 2007).

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Thus, it is vital for researchers to not simply “look for” categories but provide

evidence that speakers orient toward these categories in interaction (Bushnell, 2014). In my membership categorisation analysis, I have aimed to represent the participants’ subjective understanding of their changing identities, tying academic literacy practices in the form of category-tied, -bound or -predicated features to their understanding of their position within individual networks of practice by the categorisation of

themselves and others through these devices.