Membership Categorisation Analysis
Approaching motherhood in this way positions us with conversation
analysis (CA), and membership categorisation analysis (MCA). CA and MCA
originate in the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks (Sacks, 1992) as
intertwined branches of the ethnomethodological study of
talk-in-interaction. Scholars have debated MCA’s status as an
ethnomethodological approach distinct from CA (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2012;
Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002; Schegloff, 2007; Stokoe, 2012), and
explored what some have cautioned as a lack of analytic specificity
within MCA. Such debates have also re-invigorated research that combines
what Housley and Fitzgerald (2015, p. 6) refer to as the MCA “analytic
mindset”, with the methodological rigour of CA and its focus on
structure and sequence. (E.g. Butler and Weatherall, 2006; Fitzgerald
and Housley 2002; Goodman and Speer, 2007; Housley, 2002; Housley and
Fitzgerald 2009a, 2009b; Author & Author, date; Stokoe, 2003a, 2009).
In his illustration ‘The Baby Cried. The mommy picked it up’, Sacks
(1992), demonstrates that membership categories are inference-rich - we
mundanely hear the Baby as this Mommy’s baby. Sacks’ now seminal
example is very apt given our focus on motherhood, so we stay with it to
elaborate further. The inferential pairing of this Baby andthis Mommy is an example of a Standardised Relational Pair (SRP)
which, in this context, exists within a Membership Categorisation Device
(MCD) of ‘The Family’ (Sacks, 1992). This mundane inferential work that
occurs as part of everyday sense-making practices is explained by Sacks
(1992) via the Hearer’s Maxim: “if two or more categories are used to
categorise two or more members of some population and those categories
can be heard as categories from the same collection, hear them that
way” (p. 221).