Categories and the moral order
Categories act as inference-rich filing systems (Stokoe and
Attenborough, 2015). The deployment of categories not only invites us to
pair certain members or categories, it also brings category expectations
into play. It is precisely a concern with ‘what we know’ about
categories, and indeed ‘what we expect’, of and from category members,
that MCA can alert us to. The concept of category predicates (Hester,
1998), points to a host of rights, obligations and knowledge that become
mundanely bound up with membership categories (see also Sharrock, 1974;
Watson, 1978, 1983). As Jayyusi (1984, 1991) makes plain, MCA invites
consideration of how mundane morality is cemented within common sense
understandings of how category incumbents should behave. Thus, in
Sacks’ example, the Mommy, picking up the Baby is an unremarkable
matter. Jayyusi (1991, p. 240) notes that it is “mundane reasoners”
who tie common-sense knowledge to moral praxis: expectations are locked
into place by everyday use of category labels. Normative practices are
maintained through the most routine interactions (Stokoe, 2003b) and, as
Baker (2000; p.111) points out, “the more natural, taken-for-granted
and therefore invisible the categorisation work, the more powerful it
is”.