Identity and membership categorisation analysis

Membership Categorization Analysis has a history as long as Conversation Analysis (if not longer) and provides a toolkit for observing and describing ‘culture-in-action’. In this chapter we explore that toolkit: we provide an overview of what MCA is, what MCA does, and where MCA came from. We outline the distinction between categories, devices, predicates and collections and how these fit within the MCA enterprise. Drawing this together with an example analysis we demonstrate how a category comes into being—and how the ‘under-the-surface’ nature of categories can be analysed using MCA. Finally, we conclude with the state-of-the-art of MCA, questions about its future when compared to CA and review the (possible) future directions of MCA.