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Approach – A handful of studies in ethnomethodology have targeted the conflicts of young members of society (Butler, 2008; Church, 2009; Danby & Baker, 1998a; Maynard, 1985a; Theobald & Danby, 2012, in press). Two occasionally overlapping strands of inquiry may be identified in this research: studies with an interest in charting the local organization of dispute exchanges and those seeking to highlight the socializing aspects of dispute procedures.

Purpose – This chapter examines a single feature of everyday exchanges taking place in a correctional facility for male youth. It investigates the ways through which certain membership category collections (such as ‘gender’ or ‘stage-of-life’) are drawn upon to instigate (Goodwin, M. H. (1982). ‘Instigating’: Storytelling as a social process. American Ethnologist, 9, 799–819.) adversarial exchanges.

Methodology – In so doing, this chapter draws on the two chief strands of ethnomethodological inquiry: sequential analysis of talk as well as membership categorization analysis.

Research implications – The analysis not only allows for a deeper understanding of commonplace discourse practices in a confined correctional facility for young people, but more importantly, of the methods through which inmates draw on local, situational as well as commonsense resources to proverbially ‘rock the boat’, that is, to change the order of ongoing events.

Social implications – In this way, this chapter offers insight into the mundane life of a group of young people in forced care.

Purpose – This chapter examines an episode of pretend play amongst a group of young girls in an elementary school in Australia, highlighting how they interact within the membership categorization device ‘family’ to manage their social and power relationships.

Approach – Using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, an episode of video-recorded interaction that occurs amongst a group of four young girls is analyzed.

Findings – As disputes arise amongst the girls, the mother category is produced as authoritative through authoritative actions by the girl in the category of mother, and displays of subordination on the part of the other children, in the categories of sister, dog and cat.

Value of paper – Examining play as a social practice provides insight into the social worlds of children. The analysis shows how the children draw upon and co-construct family-style relationships in a pretend play context, in ways that enable them to build and organize peer interaction. Authority is highlighted as a joint accomplishment that is part of the social and moral order continuously being negotiated by the children. The authority of the mother category is produced and oriented to as a means of managing the disputes within the pretend frame of play.

In our chapter we describe the analysis of categorisations as an important part of narrative criminology. Categorisations of people (as offenders, victims, witnesses, etc.) are a central component of the communicative construction and processing of crime. Categories are associated with assumptions about actions and personal characteristics. Therefore, categorisations play a prominent role in the question of whether and how someone should be dealt with or punished. Narratives essentially consist of categorisations as well as the representation of a temporal course of interactions and actions. Analysing categorisations can therefore provide decisive insights for narrative criminology. With the research method of ‘Membership Categorisation Analysis’, categorisations can be reconstructed in detail. We describe this potential by reconstructing how the defendant ‘Dave’ categorised himself in the context of his main trial and how he was categorised by others in order to justify a judgement against him. Our analysis shows that categorisations, which are socially impactful and often controversial, must be established by particular narrative manoeuvres.

Purpose – This chapter explicates the categorical resources and practices used in some disputes involving two children.

Methodology – The data on which the study is based consists of a transcript of an audio recording of the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction during a family meal. This data is analyzed using the approach of membership categorization analysis (MCA).

Findings – We show that it is neither the category collection “children” nor the category collection “siblings” that is relevant for the organization of these disputes but rather a number of asymmetrical standardized relational pairs, such as “rule-enforcer” and “offender” or “offender” and “victim.” It is these pairs of categories that are demonstrably relevant for the members, providing for and making intelligible their disputes. We then consider the question of the demonstrably relevant “wider context” of the disputes to which the disputants are actually oriented. This wider context is an omnirelevant oppositional social relationship between the children. We demonstrate that the disputes reflexively constitute the character of their oppositional relationship and show how these are instantiations of an omnirelevant category collection, namely, “parties to an oppositional relationship.”

Value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the corpus of ethnomethodological studies on children's culture in action and more particularly on the categorical organization of children's (and others’) disputes. It also contributes to MCA more generally in respect to its focus on the issues of omnirelevance and the “occasionality” of category collections.

The popularity of research into categories has grown in recent decades and shows no sign of abating. This introductory article takes stock of the research into two facets of categorization, addressing it both as a cognitive and a social process. We advocate a rebalance toward the social process of categorization, paying more heed to the entity to be categorized, the actors involved, their acts, and the context and timing, which informs these activities. We summarize the contributions to the volume in relation to these dimensions and briefly discuss avenues for future research.

Uncertainty-identity theory serves as our guiding theoretical framework to explore subjective uncertainty, especially uncertainty about self and identity, and the ways in which communication within groups provides valuable social identity information to group members as a means to manage subjective uncertainty.

We review and synthesize research in communication science and social identity theory, specifically uncertainty-identity theory, to compare diverse understandings of uncertainty and the identity-shaping function of communication within groups.

Uncertainty inherent in dyadic interactions has received extensive attention in communication science. However, the identity-defining function of communication that flows within and between groups as a means to resolving uncertainty about subjectively important matters has received little attention in both social psychology and communication science.

We explore how communication that flows from in-group sources (e.g., leaders) serves to shape a shared reality and identity for group members while providing a framework for self-definition. We propose an agenda for future research that would benefit from an articulation of the importance of communication in the shaping and management of identity-uncertainty.

Uncertainty arousing rhetoric by influential in-group sources, such as leaders and the media can have serious implications for intergroup relations, as uncertain individuals seek distinctive and tight-knit groups and autocratic leaders under conditions of heightened uncertainty. The role that communication plays in shaping clear and distinct identities as a panacea for identity-uncertainty has implications for the intragroup normative structure of the group and for intergroup relations.

Purpose – This chapter demonstrates the social organization practices evident in early childhood disputes in order to promote a greater understanding of the role of non-verbal, embodied actions within the dispute process. In doing so, this chapter offers insight into children's co-construction of disputes and has practical implications for early childhood teachers.

Methodology – Ethnomethodology (EM), conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) are applied to the current study of children's disputes in order to offer insight into the sequences of social organization processes evident in children's disagreements.

Findings – This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the everyday disputes which four-year-old children engage in during their morning playtime at a primary school in Wales, UK. It reveals the children's use of physical gestures to support their verbal actions in order to maximize intersubjectivity between the participants. This joint understanding was necessary during the social organization process.

Practical implications – Managing children's physical disputes within an educational context is recognized as a very difficult aspect of a teacher's routine as the timing and level of intervention are so subjective (Bateman, 2011a). This chapter offers insight into the organization of physical disputes between young children, and so enables teachers to make an informed decision in their practice.

Purpose – Disputes provide a way for children to negotiate how they stand in relationship to one another in the local peer group interaction (Goodwin, 1990, 2006). This study follows the everyday peer disputes and classroom negotiations of a peer group of 8-year-old to 12-year-old Turkish–English speaking (and Meskhetian Turkish–English–Russian speaking) children attending a Turkish Saturday School in the United States, where a monolingual Turkish norm is projected by the teachers, to see how these institutional language norms are used as a resource for the peers to conduct their everyday interactions.

Methodology/approach – This study combines methods of ethnography (data are drawn from a year-long ethnography which followed children's everyday language practices in two school settings) and talk-in-interaction, specifically Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks, 1972, 1992).

Findings – Children draw upon the monolingual school norm of using Turkish only, and speaking Turkish correctly, by way of positioning themselves moment-to-moment during disputes with one another. Through repeated appeals to their teachers to relax the Turkish-only rule, they also collaboratively index “speaking English” as a positive category-bound activity (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Evaldsson, 2007), influencing the local moral order of the peer group.

Social implications/originality/value of chapter – The study provides a view of how children living in a transnational society orient to wider societal structures and “build the phenomenal and social worlds they inhabit” (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012) as part of their everyday disputes and negotiations with one another.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine an extended gossip dispute event, in which a peer group of 11-year-old girls take action against a girl who has reported about school bullying to the teacher by examining how the accused girls construct their own sociopolitical order away from the adults.

Approach – The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork within a Swedish multiethnic school setting combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of children's language practices.

Findings – It is found that the school's bullying intervention practice sets the stage for a trajectory of a gossip dispute event in which the accused girls work out their own version of the telling as snitching, reallocate blame, and project the future consequences for the girl being accountable for the telling. A moral order emerges via the organization of social actions, alignments, occasion-specific identities, and pejorative person descriptors, rendering the event of telling the teacher a disastrous move for the targeted girl. The micro-politics of the extended gossip dispute is pervasive in terms of how the accused girls strengthen social alignments of power, depict the transgressor by categorizing her as insane, and remedy the norm breaches through justifying their own actions.

Social implications – The success with which the girls here manage to turn the school's bullying intervention practice into a system of retaliation emphasizes the need for highlighting the micro-politics, of children's everyday practices away from adults.

In this chapter the author discusses some insights lost in a lost ethnomethodological study of parkour. The author introduces parkour, before critically engaging with some of the existing theoretical treatments of the practice. The author then considers some of the materials drawn on by those existing studies in reconsidering what is getting done in ‘parkour talk’. In further outlining what was lost, the author considers some of the aspects of the study that would have positioned parkour in terms of its engaging ordinariness. The chapter concludes with a summary of these avenues of inquiry and closes with a plea for the continued recognition of basic social inquiry and ethnography.