Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)

Membership categorization analysis (MCA) is a tradition of qualitative empirical research focused on the understanding of membership categories as they are used by people in talk and social interaction as well as in texts and other media of communication. Membership categories refer to identities, and MCA is focused on the study of identities as they are achieved or contested, organized, and understood within the practical contexts of social interaction and language use.

Membership categories are extremely numerous and diverse, referring, for example, to categories of class, race, gender, nationality, religion, linguistic community, age, and occupation; to memberships in associations, political parties, or social clubs; and many other types of identity that are more obviously contextual in nature, such as driver, applicant, and organ donor. The varieties of identity categories are termed membership categories with reference to the convention within ethnomethodology of referring to people (speakers, subjects, agents, actors, etc.) as members. The notions of member and membership often implicitly allude to the competence in cultural and linguistic methods of practical reasoning and practical action (folk methods or ethnomethods), which can be found in members of any culture or linguistic community. Thus, MCA, following ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, addresses issues and practices of identity very broadly without privileging certain types of identities, such as public speakers; without privileging certain types of communication, such as mass communication; and without privileging communication in institutional contexts, such as political or professional communication. MCA can and does encompass studies of specific varieties of identity and studies of identity with reference to specific kinds of communication or specific institutional contexts, but such interests are not exclusive of or privileged with respect to the study of membership categories and membership categorization practices observable in vernacular speech. Although MCA is situated within the social sciences, the approach is often philosophically informed and humanistic as well as empirical in approach, illuminating and explicating not only empirical data and patterns, but also the logic and the rhetoric of social identities in their relations to social practices and social organization.

Originating from the scholarship of Harvey Sacks at the time he was laying the foundations of conversation analysis (CA), MCA generally has been avoided in the subsequent trajectory of CA, which has focused on the analysis of conversational sequencing rather than questions of identity. This separation of MCA and sequentially oriented CA has been somewhat controversial. Although CA has generally diverged away from MCA, and much CA has diverged from ethnomethodological sociology as well, MCA has retained a more complementary understanding of the relationship between CA and MCA, and especially between MCA and ethnomethodology. Hence, MCA studies of identity can include elements of sequential analysis, as suggested especially in the work of Rod Watson, and often are attentive to methods of practical reasoning and practical action, in keeping with ethnomethodological interests. MCA is today an established international research tradition in its own right, with its own practitioners and literature, even as it continues to be identified in relation to either CA or ethnomethodology, if not both.

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