Membership categorization analysis: Wild and promiscuous or simply the joy of Sacks?

Abstract

The recent resurgence of Sacks’ work on membership categorization has highlighted the growing analytic interest in how members’ social category orientations operate at multiple levels of interactional work. One of the outcomes of this, highlighted in Stokoe’s discussion, is the re-emergence of the question of whether membership categorization analysis (MCA) has been, is, or can be an approach in its own right. In this brief discussion I consider the emergence of ‘MCA’ as an approach to the study of social-knowledge-in-action, the relationship between MCA and contemporary directions in conversation analysis (CA), and finally the future of MCA as it continues to develop.