A tutorial on membership categorization

After setting Sacks' work on membership categorization in its historical and analytical context, and suggesting some ways of reading the original texts, I sketch the major components of membership categorization devices (MCDs) - collections of categories and rules of application, and then the categories themselves and their features. These discussions lead to some consequences for research practice - both for social science generally and for conversation-analytic practice in particular, and to an initial treatment of some problems that arise in advancing this line of conversation-analytic research. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.