On complainability

Two common components of social problems are their grounding in the differential categorization of people and the treatment of some forms of conduct as complainable. This article begins by introducing some ways in which the categorization of people and the complainability of conduct are problematic-both in the conduct of ordinary interaction and in social scientific analysis of ordinary interaction. It then addresses this problematicity by examining how ordinary conduct in interaction can display participants' tacit orientation to the relevance of unspoken categories and to the complainability of one's own or others' conduct. It concludes by inviting attention to recent work on well-recognized topics of inquiry in the social problems literature, and encourages the advancement of such work by combining new analytic resources with longstanding social problems themes and topics.