Categorization and the Moral Order (Routledge Revivals)

Lena Jayyusi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317745303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and standards of rationality.

Chapter 1

Membership categorizations

TYPE CATEGORIZATIONS

In introducing this first section I shall raise some matters which will be dealt with in detail in later sections. I will begin to show some of the ways certain sorts of membership categorizations work and through that to mark out some of the differences between various kinds of categorizations. For this initial task, I have chosen to consider ‘type’ categorizations since this is also one way of showing that membership categorizations do not fall into fixed sets but may be constructed in various contingent ways, some of these ways being the situated construction of ‘types’. Further, this enables us to make the distinction between membership categories and membership categorizations’, the latter term refers to the work of members in categorizing other members or using ‘characterizations’ of them, whereas the former refers to the already culturally available category-concepts that members may, and routinely do, use in categorizational work and the accomplishment of various practical tasks. The use of such category-concepts, however, does not exhaust the use of categorizations and the conduct of members’ categorizational work.

Examples of category-concepts are: doctor; mother; poet; vandal; saint; murderer; child. Examples of other categorizations might be: a nice man; a nervous person; a pretty girl; an intelligent woman; a dangerous driver; a hippy type, etc. Note that these are all Adjectives-plus-a-Category. Often the sense of the categorization depends criterially (as in ‘dangerous driver’) on both parts of the categorization. The former are organized in such a way that they can be seen (and treated) as relating to other concepts as devices or as categories within a device (in Sacks’s sense) for various practical purposes. The latter kind work, at best, as umbrella categorizations, subsuming various sorts of particulars and descriptions. The distinction between the two, important as it is, is not however meant to be taken as a rigid one. Let us now turn to our initial investigation.

The data extracts I shall first use in this section (1) come from a telephone conversation which turns on the discussion of a specific problem – the use of a certain place (the Planet playground) by a certain group of people (Hell’s Angels and dropouts) and their activities there. The conversation gets initiated by A, who is seeking information on the problem from R (a policeman). In the process of giving information and the ensuing discussion of the ‘problem’, R provides some detailed characterization of the persons concerned. This characterization involves projected actions that these people may perform, assessments of their characters, talk about their habits, codes, etc., and throughout the talk R refers to ‘they’, ‘these types’, ‘Hell’s Angels’, ‘dropouts’, etc., sometimes apparently interchangeably. It is to this that we shall direct our attention.

The first place at which R introduces some reference to the people concerned is in utterance 4 (see Appendix 3):

3 A:	Ah, erm … my name’s Anderson and I’m chairman of the Trust and I’m really just trying to find out what’s happening.
4 R:	Well, there’s not much happening yet as far as I know…. The only thing we know is that the place is being used by er all these er dropouts and er Hell’s Angels and they’re prepared to have a battle royal complete with er weapons and goodness knows what with a load of skinheads.

There is a possibly noticeable source of equivocality here – is the place being used by individual dropouts and persons belonging to the group designated as Hell’s Angels, both lots joined in their intention to fight the skinheads? Or is ‘dropout’ being used as some alternative and elaborative characterization of the persons using that place, who are members of the Hell’s Angels? ‘Dropout’, we notice, is an individual designator, and ‘Hell’s Angel’ designates an individual as a member of a self-organized group. There is a further difference that we can note here: ‘dropout’ delivers the character or property (criterial feature) of the category in the category name, ‘Hell’s Angel’ does not. We may note further that the character of the utterance part ‘all these er dropouts and er Hell’s Angels’ is that of a (short) list of categories. One answer to the above questions may then be obtained by examining the nature and work of categorial lists and the tie between individual designators and group designators in such lists. We shall return to this presently.

The next point in the conversation at which the persons concerned are mentioned specifically is in utterance 25 in reply to a question from A.

25 A:	Of er of er of what … who were the people who were arrested do you know I mean er …
26 R:	Ooh, I couldn’t say offhand, I think these were about seven in all…
27 A:	Yeah, were there some skinheads or …
28 R:	No, no, not skinheads, these are Hell’s Angels types.

One thing one may notice here is that although R could not specify the particular individuals that were arrested, he could specify a category incumbency for them. That is to say, while he cannot say who they were, he could say what they were (although for some purposes specifying a what for a person works in or as specifying a who). But again it is not clear whether the actual persons referred to are actual members of the Hell’s Angels group, (2) or whether they could be members by virtue of their being the types of person that make up Hell’s Angels recruits, or yet again whether they are simply like the Hell’s Angels (perhaps copy or emulate them). R’s utterance does not provide that the uncertainty of these persons’ membership in the group is an issue that needs resolution. He then proceeds to elaborate on and characterize the Hell’s Angels type:

28 R:	No, no, not skinheads, these are Hell’s Angels types.
29 A:	I see, er, do you get a lot of bother from skinheads as well?
30 R:	Not particularly.
31 A:	Yeah.
32 R:	Er the Hell’s Angels types are the people who er don’t stop at home … they sleep out, they sleep rough, they’re a dirty, scruffy idle shower, they live off social security er plus er thieving er things here and there.

Here we have the characterization of a type constructed or formulated by reference to a group, the Hell’s Angels. But the characterization itself is not of the particular group and its members, but of a kind of person and a mode of existence that could, in fact, fit a variety of persons or incumbents of other membership categories – dropouts, tramps, vagrants – irrespective of any group membership.

This set of habits and mode of existence are not the prerogative of the Hell’s Angels or any organized group. However, they are talked of by R as pertaining to the Hell’s Angels type, as though all such persons with the above habits and way of life constituted a unitary type and moreover one that could be recognizably seen as the type constitutive of the Hell’s Angels group. The description of the type – for that is what we get – proceeds through the production of a list of traits and practices. But it is interesting that in producing this description of the Hell’s Angels type, R is also producing a description of what the skinheads are not. This is achieved by virtue of the contrastive work done in utterances 28 to 32.

Given that the description of the Hell’s Angels type is produced in the form of a list, the question may arise: Does the category ‘skinhead’ not take any of the list items (each and every one of them is excluded) or not take some of them, i.e. does it not take the list as a whole, as a collection? (3) Is it a finite or open-ended list? In the construction of a list (characterizing the Hell’s Angels explicitly and the skinheads implicitly) lies the possibility of generating a disagreement (e.g. ‘but the skinheads also live off social security’), thence an argument, then the assignation or elaboration of precedence to some list items over others. We will deal more fully with list constructions in Chapter 3.

In the last data extract R formulates a ‘type’ category with reference to a specific self-organized group, the Hell’s Angels. Later on in the same conversation he formulates a ‘type’ category through the use of an individual rather than a group designator.

86 R:	I mean to say that the object of it is a children’s playground, isn’t it, initially?
87 A:	Yeah.
88 R:	Well, all it’s becoming is just a doss house for people who are a dropout variety.

I take it, commonsensically, that the idea of a ‘dropout variety’ here works in the same way as ‘dropout type’, that is, through designating a class of person by reference to the descriptor ‘dropout’.

To reiterate very briefly: we have now located three classes of membership categories: self-organized groups (with proper names), individual descriptor designators (like ‘dropout’), and type categorizations. Of the latter we have those that are organized by reference to an organized group and those that are organized by reference to a property or descriptor. This listing of categories, of course, is not meant to be exhaustive nor are the items to be seen as totally and determinately distinct from each other and from other categorizations with respect to all their features, i.e. they do not fall into rigid classes. We shall see later that categorizations may be treatable as falling into different classes with regard to different features, and that they are hugely complex phenomena which function differently in different language (and interactional) games. But for now let us proceed with these preliminary observations.

The use of a ‘type’ construction as a categorization is interesting and has some interactionally noticeable consequences. In a sequence following his characterization of the Hell’s Angels type, R uses it to make a guarded prediction:

50 R:	I don’t think your windows would last very long.
51 A:	Oh … you sound very pessimistic.
52 R:	Well (coughs)knowing these types and dealing with them er … oné can’t look at it any other way.

R is presumably predicting that the windows talked of as about to be put up at the Planet playground could be broken or even taken out by some of these ‘Hell’s Angels types’ sleeping out there. For A such a prediction is an expression of pessimism on i?’s part, which is justified by R on the grounds of his knowledge of and dealings with those types. But notice that in characterizing the Hell’s Angels Type through a listing of items that are ‘typical’ of the incumbents of such a category, R had not included violence or window breaking or vandalism in that list. How then is it possible to predict that probably the windows won’t last on the basis of knowing these ‘types’? yl’s charge of pessimism displays and achieves the following: that there are alternative possibilities expectable, some of which are undesirable and others not necessarily so. Because a predicted consequence of an action is at least a possibility, but not a certainty, the projected action is thus not constitutive of that ‘type’. In other words, the projected action is a possibility embedded in the features of that categorization. The projected action is provided for by the guarded prediction of a consequence – this projection is then tied to, and provided for, as having been generated by a knowledge of, and familiarity with, a ‘type’ of person. It is not knowledge of specific persons that generates this projection, but knowledge of and dealings with ‘these types’, albeit that this ‘type’ categorization may be generated in the first place on the basis of particular persons’ behaviour. It is not, however, what is specific to each but what is perceivedly common to all that is the focus of such projections, typifications and inferences. It is the features of a perceived class of persons that is relevant and thus displayed as relevant, not the features of various ‘individuals’. In this way, the prediction provided by R is accountably guarded – it is neither of a specific temporally located action, nor, importantly, of a specific person, but of a consequence, a projected outcome that may be produced in one way or another, by one person or another from a collection of persons with common characteristics – a ‘type’. That this ‘type’ is constructed with reference to a self-organized group (‘the Hell’s Angels type’), however, makes its use also implicative for projections to, inferences about and judgments of that group itself.

What R is doing here, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Membership Categorizations
• 2 The Social Organization of Categorial Incumbency
• 3 Lists, Categorizations and Descriptions
• 4 Category-Occasioned Transformations
• 5 Category-Generated Problems and Some Solutions
• 6 Ways of Describing
• 7 The Inferential Environment of Hierarchies and Contrasts
• 8 Rationality, Practice and Morality
• Appendix 1 - Harvey Sacks on Categorization: An Overview
• Appendix 2 - Scarman Tribunal Data
• Appendix 3 - Hell's Angels Data
• Appendix 4 - Social Enquiry Reports Data
• Appendix 5
• Appendix 6 Group Therapy Data
• Notes
• Subject Index
• Name Index