This seminal work explores how interaction structures and practices systematically shape and challenge social categories, highlighting their role and significance in social life. The book investigates such matters by providing a new framework for integrating conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.

Across its ten chapters, the book describes a conversation analytic approach to studying categories and categorization, charts the development and history of membership categorization analysis, and addresses core methodological challenges and practices associated with using this approach. After mapping out the new framework developed in the book, each chapter describes intersections between categorial phenomena and the domains that comprise the infrastructure of social interaction. The book concludes by exploring some applications, interventions, and impacts of understanding categories in ways examined across the preceding chapters, and by considering future avenues for excavating categorial practices in the ordinary, institutional, and technological settings of human social life.

With practical guidance on how these methods can be used in research, Categories in Social Interaction is an essential reading for social scientists with a general interest in categories of people and categorizing practices, and especially for practitioners and students of conversation analysis, membership categorization, ethnomethodology, and discursive psychology.

Book Information
ISBN 9780367637651
Author Kevin A. Whitehead
Format Paperback
Page Count 450
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd