Stephen Hester & Peter Eglin (eds.), Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis. Washington, DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis and University Press of America, 1997. Pp. viii, 193. Hb.

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, the late sociologist Harvey Sacks initially developed the concept of “membership categorization devices” as a means of analyzing how people identify, describe, and refer to one another. In his now canonical treatment of a child's story, “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up,” Sacks (1972) explored the possibilities for formal analyses of references to and descriptions of persons, as implemented in written texts and talk-in-interaction.