Category-bound activity
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Category-bound activity | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Jack B. Joyce (University of Oxford, UK) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9499-1471) & Jessica S. Robles (Loughborough University, UK) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2360-650X) |
| To cite: | Joyce, Jack B., & Robles, Jessica S. (2026). Category-bound activity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8WK6S |
Category-bound activities refer to actions or behaviours that are normatively associated with certain categories of persons.
Consider the example below, which features two siblings (Greg and Kelsey), both white university students (at different universities) in the northeastern United States. They are chatting about someone who recently won the lottery. Our focus is on how Greg negatively describes the lottery winner:
(1) (Robles, 2015) 01 Greg: so the lady that won she’s from Rhode Island she’s 02 fucking eighty-two. 03 Kelsey: ei::ghty two she’s go:ing to die:: ((in a wailing 04 tone)) 05 Greg: -> she won three hunnerd million and she’s black (.) so 06 -> you know she’s gunna buy (.) like (stupid) shit,
In line 01, Greg characterises the lottery winner using several conventional demographic categories: “lady” (gender), “eighty-two” (age), “from Rhode Island” (location). From these categorisations, Kelsey (line 03) orients to ‘age’ and associates being “fucking eighty-two” with the activity “going to die” as the relevant upshot—the commonsense logic being that someone who will die soon cannot properly make use of lottery winnings, and therefore the situation is lamentable (see Kelsey’s “wailing tone”, lines 03-04). Greg does not advance this upshot, but provides an alternative one of his own. Instead of orienting to any of the categories he had articulated, Greg, in line 05, uses “so” to associate the lottery winner’s racial category (“she’s black”) with his negatively assessed activity (“she’s gunna buy (.) like (stupid) shit”, line 06). Sacks’ (1992) work described category-bound activities for how and what they can tell us about members’ orientations to who-members-are and what-they’re-doing (Butler & Fitzgerald, 2010). Here, Greg asserts an activity on the basis of a category: ‘she’s black so she’s buying stupid shit’ and ‘she’s old so she’ll die soon’, and in doing so, his negative assessments display his prejudicial beliefs.
Binding categories and activities together can be achieved in at least two ways: first, by inferring a category from seeing an activity that is conventionally done by that category of person (Sacks’ ‘viewer’s maxim’, see below), or conversely, by asserting the activity because of a given category. Activities are not associated with categories in a decontextualised way, but rather they are context-dependent and locally occasioned in and through discourse by members (Hester & Eglin, 1997). To be clear: it is not the analyst’s job or authority to assert that activities and categories are connected without evidence that members themselves are connecting activities and categories (Schegloff, 1992; Stokoe, 2012).
The next example demonstrates how the link between categories and predicates/activities is locally occasioned. The example is taken from a research interview between an interviewer (IR) and Chinese international students studying in Japan (IE). The interviewee has described previous encounters they have had with landlords, and how they (IE) have been treated unfairly “due to being a foreigner”. Notice how the interviewee binds the activity of ‘mistreating a house’ to ‘foreigners’, which consequently means ‘foreigners’ have “bad credit”.
(2) (Zhang, 2022)
21 IR: ta jiushi- ta shi sh- hen- shuode hen gongkai,
was it- was it- ver- was it said very openly,
22 jiushuo bu zugei waiguoren, [hai shi °zen yang°?
that they won’t rent to foreigners, [or °what°?
23 IE: [dui, jiu zhijie shuo bu
[right, directly
24 zugei waiguoren, genni ↑geren qishi meiyou guanxi:=
said no foreigner, it’s not about you personally:=
25 IR: mm
mm
26 IE: =jiushi,(0.5) jiushi waiguoren zhege qunti jiushi
=just,(0.5) they just won’t rent to foreigner as a
27 buzu:=
group=
28 IR: mm
mm
29 IE: =jiushi yinwei: (.) zhiqian henduo waiguoren (.) dui
because: (.) many foreigners (.) treated house
30 fangzi buhao a, >jiushi< zai zufang fangmian
badly, that their credit are relatively bad with
31 xinyong bijiao cha, henduo fangyuan bu tigong
regard to renting, many rental houses are not offered
32 gei waiguoren.
to foreigners.
The example begins with the interviewer asking whether housing agents or landlords are explicit in not welcoming foreigners (lines 21-22). The interviewee confirms and explains that the discrimination is against foreigners in general and is not personal: “they just won’t rent to foreigners as a group” (lines 24, 26-27). The interviewee then offers an explanation: they bind “treated house badly” (lines 29-30) to “foreigners” (line 29) which results in “foreigners” having ‘bad credit with regard to renting’. (lines 30 and 31). This explanation relies on commonsense knowledge—that landlords would not want their houses mistreated, and mistreated houses could incur financial loss to landlords.
Consequently, tying “foreigners” to the activity of “treat[ing] the house badly” implies that they would be disfavoured as potential tenants. In drawing on this commonsense categorial knowledge, the interviewee does not endorse or provide any moral justification for the discrimination, but they do offer an account for why housing discrimination against foreigners is reasonable from a ‘landlord’ perspective. The category ‘foreigners’ does not stereotypically have the feature ‘treating rental homes badly’: this is locally occasioned by how the interviewee formulates their account.
Sacks’ description of category-bound activities featured the ‘viewer’s maxim’ whereby “if a member sees a category-bound activity being done, then, if one sees it being done by a member of a category to which the activity is bound then see it that way” (Sacks & Jefferson, 1995: 259). The viewer’s maxim can mean categories may be inferred through the description of an activity. The term ‘category-bound activity’ has undergone expansion to include moral and epistemic aspects of the rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, attributes and competencies as they are locally occasioned in interaction. The inclusion of these different features gets described as ‘category bound predicates’ (Hester & Eglin, 1997). While ‘predicates’ serves as a catch-all term for describing the relationship(s) between the category and category features, ‘category-bound activities’ specifically refers to how members treat features as being naturally related (i.e., taken-for-granted) to a category. Most, if not all, social action implicates the rights and responsibilities of an interlocutor and so action can be sensitive to the membership of certain categories. These are known as ‘category-sensitive actions’ (see Rossi & Stivers, 2021) which describe the affordances and constraints that membership categories create for members and non-members in and through their actions. Category-sensitive actions are unlike explicit categorisation and are typically invisible because interlocutors act in ways “consistent with their social status or role” (Rossi & Stivers, 2021: 70), and they may only come into view when interlocutors expose or transgress the boundaries of membership categories.
The example below demonstrates how participants can introduce and resist categories in the course of their interaction. It features a disagreement between a conservative political commentator (Tucker Carlson), and his guest, a political strategist (Monica Klein), on a political commentary TV show. They are discussing the character of a US politician The example features an interlocutor resisting an accusation by labelling their conduct as being bound to a different category. We begin with Carlson implying that Klein has portrayed herself as a spokesperson for “all women” (line 07) to which MK non-seriously thanks TC for mansplaining (line 10)
(3) (Joyce et al., 2021) 06 TC: [Well not every woman feels th]at way,=And 07 [you don’t speak for all women j]ust so you know. 08 MK: [↑OKAY but there is a thirty ] 09 (.) 10 ↓Oka[y thank ] you for [mansp ]laining that t(h)o me. 11 TC: [°Mo↓nica°] [°okay°] 12 (0.6) 13 TC: £hhum£ I’m not mansplaining, (0.4) I’m saying something 14 that’s obviously true.
Klein’s accusation of mansplaining (in line 10) describes Carlson’s conduct (lines 06-07) as patronising and occasions gender as relevant. The accusation targets how Carlson treats her as though she does not understand that she does not speak for all women. Carlson resists the accusation by decategorizing Klein’s accusation as not being a gendered activity: “I’m not mansplaining” (line 13). Carlson introduces a truth-telling category-bound activity, “saying something that’s obviously true” (lines 13-14). The upshot is that Carlson’s denial is grounded in his category as a ‘truth-telling’ political commentator, and not a gender-based category via the description of his activity.
Descriptions of category-bound activities and predicates are consequential for how categories and devices are applied. They shape how we do things in the world, make sense of the world, and resist sense-making by others. This follows Jayyusi’s (2014) work examining the moral dimension of category activities, insofar that activities often carry normative expectations such that members of a category are expected to engage in those activities, and deviations may be accountable. Associations treated as ‘natural’ and normative can, however, be prejudicial as Henderson and Tennant (2025) demonstrate. Their analysis reveals how a natural attitude to sex and gender can be rhetorically weaponized against transgender women.
Category-bound activities are one of the primary ‘keys’ (Stokoe, 2012) through which researchers do Membership Categorisation Analysis to explicate ‘culture-in-action’ (Hester & Eglin, 1997). Such work has explored orientations to discrimination and how negatively assessed activities get bounded to categories (Zhang, 2022) and consequently, how those activities are challenged (Robles, 2015); how incongruities between category and category-bound activities achieve humour (Okazawa, 2021); how parents build associations between activities like ‘crying’ and categories like ‘naughty’ to instruct children about valued behaviour (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2017); and how members may resist normative connections between categories and activities (e.g. ‘women’ and ‘housework’ (Robles & Kurylo, 2017); ‘Man’ and ‘mansplaining’ (Joyce et al., 2021); ‘Caucasian’ and ‘violent actions’ (Whitehead, 2012); ‘Romany’ and ‘criminality’ (Leudar & Nekvapil, 2000). The technical sophistication of MCA to explicate culture-in-action affords a closer inspection of these more subtle differences in the relationships between categories and category features which members can, and do, orient to (see Reynolds & Fitzgerald, 2015 for further discussion). Empirically tracking how activities are bound to categories across sequences and describing, as grounded in evidence of members’ moment-by-moment conduct, affords an enhanced analysis of how society works in situ (Gardner, 2012). Analysing discourse through categorisation practices, including how activities are bound by interlocutors to categories, can spotlight issues of morality and culture.
Additional Related Entries:
- Complaint
- Compliment
- Context
- Deontics
- Epistemics
- Identity
- Membership Categorization Device
- Participation
- Participation Framework
- Professional Vision
Cited References:
Butler, C. W., & Fitzgerald, R. (2010). Membership-in-action: Operative identities in a family meal. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(9), 2462-2474.
Gardner, R. (2012). Enriching CA through MCA? Stokoe’s MCA keys. Discourse Studies, 14(3), 313-319.
Henderson, E., & Tennant, E. (2025). Sex, Gender, and Bodies: Transmisogyny and Garfinkel’s Status Degradation Ceremony. Symbolic Interaction.
Hester, S., & Eglin, P. (1997). Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis. University Press of America.
Jayyusi, L. (2014). Categorization and the Moral Order (Routledge Revivals) . Routledge.
Joyce, J. B., Humă, B., Ristimäki, H.-L., Almeida, F. F. d., & Doehring, A. (2021). Speaking out against everyday sexism: Gender and epistemics in accusations of “mansplaining”. Feminism & Psychology, 31(4), 502-529.
Leudar, I., & Nekvapil, J. (2000). Presentations of Romanies in the Czech media: On category work in television debates. Discourse & Society, 11(4), 487-513.
Nguyen, H. T., & Nguyen, M. T. T. (2017). “Am I a good boy?”: Explicit membership categorization in parent–child interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 121, 25-39.
Okazawa, R. (2021). Resisting categorization in interaction: Membership categorization analysis of sitcom humor. Journal of Pragmatics, 186, 33-44.
Psathas, G. (1999). Studying the organization in action: Membership categorization and interaction analysis. Human Studies, 22(2-4), 139-162.
Reynolds, E., & Fitzgerald, R. (2015). Challenging Normativity: re-appraising category, bound, tied and predicated features. In R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (Eds.), Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis (pp. 99-122). Sage.
Robles, J. S. (2015). Extreme case (re) formulation as a practice for making hearably racist talk repairable. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(4), 390-409.
Robles, J. S., & Kurylo, A. (2017). ‘Let’s have the men clean up’: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities. Discourse Studies, 19(6), 673-693.
Rossi, G., & Stivers, T. (2021). Category-Sensitive Actions in Interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 84(1), 48-74.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation: Volume I. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Sacks, H., & Jefferson, G. (1995). Lectures on conversation (Vol. 1). Wiley Online Library.
Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In G. Jefferson (Ed.), Sacks H, Lectures on Conversation, vols I and II (pp. ix-Ixii). Blackwell.
Stokoe, E. (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies, 14(3), 277-303.
Whitehead, K. A. (2012). Racial categories as resources and constraints in everyday interactions: Implications for racialism and non-racialism in post-apartheid South Africa. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(7), 1248-1265.
Zhang, T. (2022). Accounting for discrimination through categorization work: An examination of the target-of-discrimination group members’ practices. Discourse & Society, 33(2), 264-286.
Additional References:
