Doing being a social member: Membership categorization practices as an indicator of interactional competence

Interactional competence (IC) involves speakers’ ability to make social actions recognisable to one another while taking into account “individual identities, our social role relationships, and memberships in our social groups and communities” (Hall & Pekarek Doehler, 2011, p. 1). Existing IC research, however, has foregrounded the sequential features of interaction while paying less attention to the category membership resources speakers draw on (Dai, 2021; Davey, 2022, Roever & Dai, 2021). This study aims to use membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explicate the category resources speakers employ in/for interaction.
The dataset comes from 22 participants with a mixture of L1 and L2 Chinese speakers. All 22 participants were audio-recorded when they undertook a role-play task in Chinese where they needed to assume the role of an employee and complain to their manager about unfair practices at work. Audio recordings were transcribed in the CA fashion and analysed through the MCA analytic procedure (Schegloff, 2007; Stokoe, 2012). Embracing an approach that views members’ social identities as interactionally co-constructed and contingently accomplished on a moment-by-moment basis, we organise our analysis around three focal questions. Firstly, we ask how our participants use membership categorisation practices as a resource for producing conduct that is recognisable as ‘doing complaining’. Secondly, we explore the role of these practices in resisting an interlocutor’s category-resonant criticism, and finally, we investigate the methods by which the participants make their own membership of multiple and alternative social categories relevant to a conversation as a persuasive strategy. The findings reveal that the interactional work the participants’ do to position themselves (and others) as members of certain social categories is fundamental to their ability to produce accountable and recognisable social conduct. We argue that membership categorisation practices are very much a constituent part of IC and deserve more attention in future work in IC/CA- SLA.