Chapter 7

Ethnomethodology and
Conversation Analysis
Paul ten Have
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Ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis The Emergence of the

(CA) are the somewhat confusing names of two Ethnomethodological Program
related research traditions that were developed in
To summarize a rather complex net of influences and
the 1960s in the United States by Harold Garfinkel
inspirations, it can be said that Harold Garfinkel’s
and by Harvey Sacks (with his coworkers Emanuel
initiative started with his critical confrontation with
Schegloff and Gail Jefferson), respectively. The
the theories of his dissertation supervisor, Talcott
contexts for their initiatives were the theoretical
Parsons at Harvard, from a phenomenological per-
and methodological debates in sociology that were
spective informed by the work of Schutz, Gurwitsch,
current at the time. Since then, EM and CA have
and Husserl (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984b; Rawls
become more or less established paradigms that
in Garfinkel, 2002). When he was involved with a
have attracted researchers from a range of disci-
study of jury deliberations and listened to the tapes
plines around the world. As a first characterization,
of those discussions, he was struck by the carefulness
one can note their interest in the detailed ways in
of the jury members’ commonsense reasoning: their
which members of society collaboratively consti-
serious “lay methodology.” So, in line with anthropo-
tute the situations in which they find themselves
logical disciplines like ethnomedicine and ethnobot-
and the (inter)actions that take place in those situ-
any, he coined the term ethnomethodology for the
ations. The general sociological issue of social
study of the methods that ordinary members of soci-
order is reconsidered as a local achievement of
ety use and take for granted. As a professor in sociol-
members in situations, and the research objective
ogy at the University of California, Los Angeles, he
is to explicate how this is done in an accountable
undertook a series of empirical studies to further
way. CA can be seen as a specialized form of EM,
develop EM as a research program. Some of these
originally focusing on verbal interaction and later
studies used a procedure of breaching commonsense
also considering nonvocal aspects. It has developed
background expectancies as demonstrations of their
a rather specific, relatively conventionalized
importance in everyday sense making. It turned out
research style using audio or video recordings and
that such breaches were often experienced as upset-
detailed transcripts as basic data. Other forms of
ting and that they led to instant efforts to normalize
EM use a much wider range of data types, such as
the situation (Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 35–75).
ethnographic observations, while the approach is
These background expectancies are part of an
closely fitted to the chosen topic and the properties
immense collection of taken-for-granted, “seen but
of the research site.

The author thanks Paul Camic, Harrie Mazeland, and Jonathan Potter for their remarks on earlier versions of this chapter.

DOI: 10.1037/13620-007
APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology: Vol. 2. Research Designs, H. Cooper (Editor-in-Chief)
103
Copyright © 2012 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
 Paul ten Have
unnoticed,” and silently presupposed capacities and
understandings that can be taken as foundational for
both ordinary and specialized forms of social life.
Imagine trying to make a dish by following a recipe
from a cookbook without understanding what the
terms used meant, how to handle a knife to cut the
vegetables, how to boil water, and so on. It is this
level of presupposed, ordinarily unnoticed but
essential capacities and understandings that is of
interest to ethnomethodologists. Of course, they do
not limit their attention to things like following a
recipe. They have, indeed, studied this level of
unnoticed phenomena for a very wide range of
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activities.
A critical point in all this is that the level of con-
crete capacities and understandings is not only
ignored in instructions such as recipes but also in
all sorts of plans; reports; and scientific analyses of
various sorts, including, of course, sociology. In
that discipline, social life is generally investigated in
terms of pregiven concepts or preelaborated theo-
ries, on the basis of data gathered in terms of pre-
given categories and methods. In fact, Talcott
Parsons was a champion of this approach of first
elaborating an extensive, rationally organized cate-
gory system, before doing any empirical work. In
contrast to this external top-down approach, Gar-
finkel maintained that members of society should
not be treated as “dopes” whose task it was to act
according to some theories but rather as actually
capable of “doing social life,” which can be investi-
gated “from within actual settings” (Garfinkel,
1967, p. 68).
To explicate the specifics of his approach, Garfin-
kel developed a complex writing style, which tends
to be rather incomprehensible to the uninitiated,
and which, in combination with the breaching pro-
cedures, led quite often to strongly negative reac-
tions from other sociologists. I discuss a key excerpt
from the preface to Studies in Ethnomethodology
(Garfinkel, 1967) to present Garfinkel’s general
ideas and to familiarize readers with his style and
basic concepts.
Ethnomethodological studies analyze
everyday activities as members’ meth-
ods for making those same activities
104
visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-
practical-purposes, i.e., “accountable,” as
organizations of commonplace everyday
activities. The reflexivity of that phe-
nomenon is a singular feature of practi-
cal actions, of practical circumstances,
of common sense knowledge of social
structures, and of practical sociological
reasoning. By permitting us to locate and
examine their occurrence the reflexiv-
ity of that phenomenon establishes their
study. (Garfinkel, 1967, vii)
The first sentence tells us that EM studies focus
on the fact that members in their ordinary actions
in various ways make the sense and purpose of
those actions recognizable for other members.
Accountability refers to the moral obligation among
members to produce their actions in ways that are
recognizably reasonable in the situation in which
they are done. By using reflexivity, Garfinkel
stresses the self-explicating and self-referencing
aspect of practical actions. What is made clear in
the doing of an action is its local and situated mean-
ing, what anthropologists might characterize as
emic in contrast to etic. The frequent use of words
like everyday, practical, and common sense further
stresses the EM focus on the achieved ordinariness
of actions. It is the local sense displays rather than
some theorized general sense of actions that is of
interest to ethnomethodologists. The last sentence
in the excerpt formulates the methodological basis
of EM studies. To conduct EM studies, the eth-
nomethodologist has to immerse himself or herself
in the situation of interest, mentally if not physi-
cally. One has to acquire “membership knowledge”
to become what Garfinkel has elsewhere called
“vulgarly competent” in the setting (Garfinkel &
Wieder, 1992).
In later work, Garfinkel elaborated the eth-
nomethodological program in various ways, but
most often in terms of the contrast between EM and
the established sociological approach characterized
as constructive or formal analysis. The general theme
of these elaborations is that in EM studies the phe-
nomena that established approaches study in terms
of predefined concepts of social order are respecified

as members’ methods for creating a locally account-
able order. In their search for analytic generalities,
mainstream sociologists ignore or gloss over the spe-
cific, locally required concrete details of actions, which
are the phenomena of interest for ethnomethodolo-
gists (cf. Garfinkel, 2002).
Ethnomethodology’s Methods
As the phenomena of interest for an ethnomethodol-
ogist occur on a level of seen but unnoticed or used
but taken for granted, a first practical problem for
EM is how to make those phenomena noticeable.
Garfinkel’s own efforts, as reported in his Studies in
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Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), were quite
strongly oriented to this problem of noticeability, or
rather as an effort to demonstrate the existence and
relevance of phenomena of this type. His so-called
breaching experiments were part of a pedagogy, a
strategy to convince his students and colleagues that
he was after something relevant, not just for sociol-
ogy but for everyday life. By breaching expectancies,
or having them breached by his students, such as
asking for the meaning of ordinary expressions, he
did two things. He made noticeable their relevance
and moral quality in the production of everyday sit-
uations, and he provoked extra sense-making activi-
ties to repair the experienced disturbances. The
people exposed to the breaches showed they were
puzzled and shocked, but they immediately made
efforts to normalize the situation, by taking it as a
joke or finding some other motive or explanation for
the breach. In addition to these provocative inter-
ventions, Garfinkel also studied what might be
called natural breaches, such as the efforts by a bio-
logical male to pass as a natural female.
Later ethnomethodologists turned to other
means to study the details of situated practices, most
often intense ethnography supplemented with
audiovisual recordings of in situ activities (cf. Chap-
ter 10 of this volume). This serves two purposes. On
the one hand, it allows researchers to acquire a cer-
tain measure of membership knowledge by immers-
ing themselves in the social life of the setting under
study. In this way, they gain access to relevant local
understandings and even some competence to act as
a member. And on the other hand, the ethnographic
fieldwork (and especially the audiovisual recordings)
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
gives them access to the fine details of the verbal and
visible activities in ordinary settings of the specific
form of life.
In their Invitation to Ethnomethodology, Francis
and Hester (2004) formulated the process of EM
research in the following summary way:
Doing ethnomethodology involves tak-
ing three methodological steps: 1. Notice
something that is observably-the-case
about some talk, activity or setting. 2.
Pose the question “How is it that this
observable feature has been produced
such that it is recognizable for what it
is?” 3. Consider, analyse and describe
the methods used in the production and
recognition of the observable feature.
(pp. 25–26)
And they added,
In other words, then, ethnomethodol-
ogy starts out with what might be called
the “common-sense appearance of the
social world” and then seeks to describe
how they will have been produced “from
within” such that they do indeed have
the appearances they have. (p. 26)
Some Examples of Ethnomethodological
Study
Scanning any list of ethnomethodological studies,
one may be struck by the enormous variety of top-
ics, or rather of settings and activity types studied.
There are, for instance, studies of the ways in which
both staff and inmates used a so-called convict code
to explain situations in a halfway house for former
drug users (Wieder, 1974), of laboratory practices
focusing on the identification of artifacts (Lynch,
1985), of the art of piano improvization (Sudnow,
1978), of the interactions of users with a complex
copy machine (Suchman, 1987, 2007), or of the rea-
soning practices of Tibetan monks (Liberman,
2004).
These examples can be invoked to illustrate
several of the methodological aspects of EM
research. Wieder (1974) has done intensive eth-
nography, which Lynch (1985) and Liberman
105
 Paul ten Have
(2004) have also used, together with recordings.
Sudnow (1978) has studied his own actions. Wie-
der, in his report, referred to a tradition of ethnog-
raphy in which a local subculture, such as the
convict code, is invoked to explain the actions of a
local gang of people. In contrast to this tradition,
he described the ways in which such a subculture
is actually used by its members to account for the
situation in which they have to act as they do, as a
“folk sociology.” Here access was mainly gained by
his experience in the setting, by seeing and hearing
the inmates and staff members telling the code,
and also in accounting for their actions in dealing
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with him.
In the study by Suchman (1987, 2007), a special
setup was created in which two subjects were asked
to carry out some tasks at the copier, with one hav-
ing to read out the instructions and the displays,
while the other had to handle the practical actions at
the machine. In this way, she gained access to the
users’ situated reasoning, which she could confront
with the preplanned reasoning implemented in the
machine, as part of an artificial intelligence project.
In her analysis she contrasted the plans imple-
mented in the machine with the observed situated
actions. She stressed the inability of such plans to
foresee the local circumstances and ad hoc practical
reasonings that guide the actual actions of the users
at the machine in situ.
In whatever way access to the phenomena of
interest is acquired, the researcher will have to
produce a record in one way or another, as
ethnographic notes, audio or visual recordings, or
transcriptions thereof, as an aid to the process of
noticing in the sense of the quote from Francis and
Hester (2004). These records constitute the material
the researcher works on, fixing what has happened,
in a way objectifying these happenings to help make
them “anthropologically strange” rather than just to
be taken for granted (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 9). Almost
always, EM research reports contain quotes, longer
fragments or pictures from such records, inviting
the readers to check what is reported with the data
as rendered in such quotes and excerpts. So record-
ings serve a double purpose: as research materials
to explore and as demonstrations to support the
arguments.
106
The studies by Lynch (1985, 1993), Sudnow
(1978), and Liberman (2004) illustrated the fact
that to do an ethnomethodological study of some
specialized activity, the researcher has to have or
acquire a sufficient level of competence in doing
that activity (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992; Lynch,
1993, pp. 265–308). This is a special case of the
more general, noted requirement that an eth-
nomethodologist has to have the relevant member-
ship knowledge to understand, in the sense used
earlier, members’ practical activities (ten Have,
2002). So Lynch had to have some competence in
reading images produced by the electronic micro-
scope, Sudnow had to be able to play the piano, and
Liberman had to learn the Tibetan language as well
as acquire a basic understanding of Tibetan Bud-
dhist philosophy. The practical issue, of course, is
how far the researcher should go in this matter.
A persistent theme in both the programmatic
statements of EM as well as most if not all eth-
nomethodological studies is the discrepancy
between, on the one hand, general statements and
ideas about practical activities, like plans, instruc-
tions, protocols, and formal accounts, and on the
other, the activities to which they refer in their
actual, particular, and methodic detail. This theme
has surfaced in the discussions of Wieder’s and
Suchman’s studies, but is also discernable in the oth-
ers mentioned. As Heap (1990, pp. 42–43) has
noted, ethnomethodological studies can bring differ-
ent kinds of “news”: In a “critical news approach,”
the researcher claims that things are not as they
appear or are presented, whereas in a “positive news
approach,” the message is that something is orga-
nized in a particular way, which is of interest in
itself. I return to these issues in a later section on
applied studies.
A Major Offshoot: Conversation
Analysis
Garfinkel’s (1967) explorations quite soon became a
source of inspiration for a number of other sociolo-
gists of younger generations. A prominent one was
Sacks, who came to focus on spontaneous talk, that
is, conversation. Both Sacks and his close colleague
Schegloff had studied with Goffman, who was

already famous for his studies of interaction,
although in a different framework than the one Sacks
came to develop. At first, Sacks explored various
aspects of verbal interaction, including the use of
categorization of persons, in what later became
known as membership categorization analysis (MCA;
see the section A Minor Offshoot), but gradually he
concentrated on the actual organization of talking
together, in collaboration with Schegloff and later
Jefferson. This became what is now known as CA.
Since their publication of a paper on the organization
of turn-taking in 1974, CA became a recognizable
paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, a research tradition
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with its own approach to data and analysis, with a
prominent exemplar, and a growing set of people
working along the lines set out by the originators.
The relations between EM and CA can be charac-
terized as ambivalent (cf. Clayman & Maynard,
1995). Like EM, CA also studies the ways in which
members of society organize their dealings with each
other with an eye on the local circumstances in which
they find themselves and with a stress on the local
achievement of a social order. But whereas EM tended
more and more to stress the local specificity of these
methods, CA would often formulate those in more
general terms, as is clearly the case in the paper on
turn-taking. Furthermore, whereas ethnomethodolo-
gists have studied many aspects of an immense variety
of situations, CA concentrated, at least originally, on
the organization of talking together in itself, whatever
the situation. Later, many conversation analysts
turned to studying how the specifics of talk related to
aspects of the situation in which it occurred, quite
often an institutional setting. Although the expression
CA is well established, at the initiative of Schegloff
(1987), CA’s object is now mostly termed talk-in-
interaction. And although CA originally was con-
ducted almost exclusively on the basis of audio
recordings, video is now in general use. In a way, this
seems to have brought EM and CA closer together
again, as current studies of multimodal activities often
combine inspirations from both EM and CA, as I
illustrate later in this chapter.
The specificity of CA’s analytic perspective can
be characterized in terms of a restricted set of orga-
nizations, including most prominently those of turn-
taking and sequence. The basic idea of turn-taking
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
organization is that a turn-at-talking consists of one
or more units, such as sentences or single words like
yes, called turn-constructional units (TCUs). When
one such unit comes to a possible end, the turn
might go to another participant; this moment is
called a transition-relevance place (TRP). Then the
current speaker may select another to take over, or
another may self-select to speak, or the current
speaker may continue, either immediately or a bit
later (see Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974, for
details and illustrations).
The organization of sequences, more or less
coherent sets of subsequent turns, is rather more
complicated, as can be seen in a recent book-length
overview by Schegloff (2007b). The core idea is that
a sequence can minimally consist of a pair of turns,
one acting as an initiative such as a question, to be
followed immediately by a response such as an
answer. The technical term for such a two-part
sequence is adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973,
pp. 295–296), and other examples besides question–
answer are invitation–acceptance/decline, greeting–
greeting, and so forth. In sequences consisting of
more than two parts, the core of such sequences
quite often consists of one basic adjacency pair to
which other parts are added in a sequence expansion.
The first speaker may, for instance, react to the sec-
ond part with a third-turn response, such as a thanks
or an evaluation of the response. The core sequence
may also be prepared in some way by a so-called
presequence, such as, “May I ask you a question?”
Another possibility is that the response to the first
part of the pair is delayed, for instance, by an
inquiry like “Now or tomorrow?” which starts an
inserted sequence. And, of course, the core sequence
may be followed up in many ways by postexpansions.
A few more technical terms deserve to be expli-
cated, if only to show the kinds of complexities of
sequences considered in CA. First-pair parts like
invitations, requests, proposals, or accusations have
possible second-pair parts that can be divided into
two alternate types, such as acceptance or declina-
tion. The ways in which responses of these two
types are designed tend to differ: Some are relatively
short and produced promptly, whereas others
may be much more elaborated, delayed in various
ways, and accounted for in often a rather complex
107
 Paul ten Have
manner. The first type has been called a preferred
response and the latter dispreferred. Accepting an
invitation tends to be done using the first, preferred
format, whereas a declination will be done in the
second, dispreferred way. This is one example of
what more generally is called preference organiza-
tion, which can be observed in many other sequen-
tial environments as well. It should be stressed that
preference here does not refer to any psychological
entity, such as the willingness or not to accept an
invitation, but just to the conventional formatting of
turns. It has been suggested that these various forms
of preference have to do with an underlying very
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general preference for progressivity, that is, to get on
or to move forward in any interactive activity (Sche-
gloff, 1979; Stivers & Robinson, 2006).
Insertion sequences are quite often initiated to
clarify the meaning and purpose of a first-pair part.
In that case it can also be called a repair sequence.
Repair can be initiated any time a speaker decides to
do something about a preceding utterance, the so-
called trouble source, which is in some way problem-
atic. And, of course, a repair can be initiated and
done by the speaker of that trouble source, which is
called self-initiated self-repair. That is in fact the pre-
ferred way of doing repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, &
Sacks, 1977), compared with other-initiated self-
repair or other-repair. Here also, the preference for
progressivity can be seen at work; self-repair, espe-
cially when done quickly, is the least disturbing to
the flow of the conversation of these alternatives.
Whereas the original concepts of CA, like the
ones noted thus far, have been mainly developed on
the basis of audio recordings, it has become clear by
analyzing videos that visual impressions also may
impact heavily on the social organization of face-to-
face interactions. Goodwin (1981), who initiated the
use of video for CA study, has shown, for instance,
that speakers may adapt their utterances-in-course
in response to visual displays of attention, agree-
ment, disagreement, puzzlement, and so forth.
Doing CA: Recordings and Transcriptions
EM tends to use two kinds of data-gathering meth-
ods: intensive ethnography or recordings. For CA
the use of recordings is absolutely required, whereas
ethnography may be used as an adjunct way of gath-
108
ering background data. It is only through the obser-
vation of the details of interaction that CA can be
convincingly done. As in EM generally, CA prefers
naturally occurring situations, that is, situations in
which the impact of the researcher is minimal or
absent. This, of course, is an important contrast with
other types of social and behavioral sciences, but it
fits EM’s and CA’s situationalist interests and their
generally observational approach.
The most important aspect of working with
recordings is that it allows repeated inspection, lis-
tening, or viewing, as the case may be. The results of
this observational process are laid down in a tran-
script, in which the words spoken are rendered in a
way that suggests how this was done, partly with a
specialized use of typographical symbols. Jefferson
has developed a set of conventions for this job,
which is now in general use (cf. Jefferson, 2004).
The example in Extract 7.1 may illustrate some of
the complexities involved.
Extract 7.1
Coworkers on the Phone
(Coworkers Maggie and Sorrell went to a wedding reception
where Maggie had some sort of momentary blackout
and felt ill. Next morning she phones Sorrell at work to
say that she will not be coming to work, is going to the
doctor)
1  Maggie: .hh because I (.) you know I told Mother
what”d ha:ppened yesterday
2  there at the party,
3  Sorrell: [° Yeah.°]
4  Maggie: [ a:: ] n d uh, .hhhhh (0.2) uh you know she
asked me if it was
5  because I’d had too much to dri:nk and I
said no=
6  Sorrell: =[No :::::.]
7  Maggie: =[because at the t]i:me I’d only ha:d,h you
know that drink “n
8  a ha:lf when we were going through the
receiving line.
9  Sorrell: Ri:ght.
Note. From “Is ‘No’ an Acknowledgment Token?
Comparing American and British Uses of (+)/(−)
Tokens,” by G. Jefferson, 2002, Journal of Prag-
matics, 34, p. 1346. Copyright 2002 by Elsevier.
Reprinted with permission.

The extract is introduced, within double brack-
ets, with a description of the interactional context,
to assist the reader in understanding the episode. In
the actual transcript a number of special symbols are
used to render the specific, hearable details of the
speech production. Underlining indicates stress;
square brackets ([]) are used to indicate those parts
that were spoken in overlap; when one utterance
follows another very quickly, this is indicated by an
equal sign (=); and a marked prolongation of a
sound is indicated by the colons (:). Punctuation
marks are used to indicate intonation: a question
mark indicates a rising tone, a comma indicates a
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nonfinal flat tone, and a dot indicates a downward
falling tone. The dot-preceded .hhh, finally, renders
an inbreath. In interaction the shaping of an utter-
ance and the timing of one in relation to others is
essential, therefore such details have to be noted as
exactly as possible.
CA as a Data-Driven Approach
It has often been noted that CA uses a data-driven
approach. This means that at first the researcher
takes an attitude that has been characterized as
unmotivated looking, that is, without a prespecified
problem or question in mind. This does not deny the
fact that one has a broadly focused interest in CA in
the how of interactional organization. Furthermore,
now that there is a well-defined and elaborate tradi-
tion, the CA is structured by an extensive conceptual
apparatus, which would be silly to ignore (see the
section A Major Offshoot). So although much is
already known about the organization of interactive
talk, the interest in much current CA work is still to
discover previously unnoticed phenomena. At the
same time, one would also want to extend and refine
what is known or to apply CA to new substantive
areas. The news that CA can offer to existing
non-CA knowledge is often that the latter is too sim-
ple in the sense that it ignores or glosses over the
actual details of interactive talk or that it starts from
and is limited by current cultural, mostly individual-
istic and mentalistic, preconceptions. Like EM more
generally, it demonstrates in detail that persons act
in more intersubjectively responsible ways than is
recognized in most other approaches in the human
sciences (Button, 1991).
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
In a typical CA approach (see ten Have, 2007, for
a more extensive treatment), the researcher starts
with inspecting some recordings or transcripts look-
ing for episodes that seem somehow interesting,
maybe puzzling or especially apt. That episode
should be analyzed in depth using CA’s conceptual
repertoire. As argued elsewhere (ten Have, 2007),
such an analysis essentially takes two steps, which I
call understanding and the analysis proper. Listening
to the recording and reading the transcript, the ana-
lyst first tries to understand what the interactants
are doing organizationally when they speak as they
do. They may, for instance, be requesting informa-
tion, offering to tell a story, changing the topic, and
so forth. Such understandings will be based, at first,
on the researcher’s own membership knowledge, as,
one might say, a cultural colleague of the speakers.
Second, however, the analyst will check the sequen-
tial context and especially the uptake of the utter-
ances in question in subsequent talk, immediately
following or later in the conversation, for instance,
by granting a request. Understanding the actions,
although not the purpose of the research, is a neces-
sary requirement for the next step, the analysis
proper, which is to formulate the procedures used to
accomplish the actions as understood. Because CA’s
interest is organizational and procedural, the ulti-
mate object of CA research is what Schegloff (1992)
has called the procedural infrastructure of interaction,
and, in particular, the practices of talking in conver-
sation. This means that conversational practices are
not analyzed in terms of individual properties or
institutional expectations, but as situated collabora-
tive accomplishments.
Such an analysis results in an analytic formula-
tion of a device, a typical sequence, or whatever may
be reported as such in a single-case study. Most of
the time, however, the researcher will go on to
inspect other cases, which may be relevantly com-
pared with the first one. This may lead to a confir-
mation, a reformulation, a specification, or a
differentiation into types. The researcher may for-
mulate conditions for, and effects of, the device or
sequence, in general, its functions. This more
extended type of research is often called a collection
study. The idea is that the analysis of a first case can
be used as a starting point for a more systematic
109
 Paul ten Have
exploration of an emerging analytic theme. The
researcher searches an available data set of newly
collected data for instances that seem to be similar
to the candidate phenomenon, the first formulation
of the theme as well as data that seem to point in a
different direction, the so-called deviant case analy-
sis. In short, the researcher builds a collection of rel-
evant cases in search of patterns that elucidate some
procedural issues. This may seem to suggest a kind
of principled independence of a single research proj-
ect from existing knowledge, but this is not the case
for all of CA reports. An investigation may take off
from an issue internal to the CA tradition, or even
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from some problem or idea external to it, but all the
same each and every piece of data should be first
analyzed in its own terms.
This stress on analyzing each instance in its own
terms is, of course, at odds with a general preference
for quantification, which is dominant in the social
sciences at large. Whether quantification makes
sense in CA has been debated by some of its major
practitioners, notably Schegloff (1993) and Heritage
(1999). The general upshot seems to a need for cau-
tion and a limitation of sensible quantification to
some of the most easily differentiable aspects, such
as the choice of a word in an identical position or a
clearly defined (yes–no) outcome (cf. examples in
Heritage, 1999, and an experiment reported in Heri-
tage, Robinson, Elliott, Beckett, & Wilkes, 2007; see
also the discussions in Chapter 8 of this volume
contrasting discursive psychology with mainstream
methods).
Later Developments in CA
A particular aspect of the development of CA is that
during the first 15 years of its existence, its basic
approach and its core concepts had been developed
by a very small number of people, mainly Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). So everything com-
ing after that could be seen as extensions, additions,
or applications, in one or another direction. The
CA as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s might be
characterized as CA-in-general, or pure CA, in the
sense that it took as its core task to study talk-in-
interaction as such, without taking into account its
particular setting or interactional genre. In their
turn-taking paper, Sacks et al. had already hinted at
110
the possibility to compare conversation to other
kinds of speech-exchange systems (1974, pp. 729–731).
Some years later, CA researchers began to take up
the implied challenge and started to study interac-
tional talk in a variety of settings, such as law courts,
medical consultations, new interviews, and many
others. Such studies can be characterized as applied
CA and I will discuss some examples in a later sec-
tion. But at the same time, pure CA continued to be
elaborated, by the originators, like Schegloff and
Jefferson, and by others who started doing CA later,
many of whom had a background in functional or
interactional linguistics (cf. Ford, Fox, & Thomp-
son, 2002; Ochs, Schegloff, & Thompson, 1996).
One of the interests that this strand of CA has added
to the earlier ones is the issue of linguistic resources
that speakers have at their disposal as members of a
speech community. By comparing findings on the
basis of the study of English-speaking interactants
with data on conversations in Finnish or Japanese, it
became clear that the devices actually used partly
depend on what particular linguistic systems allow
or facilitate (cf. Hayashi, 2005; Sidnell, 2009; Sor-
jonen, 2001; Tanaka, 1999). The English system, for
instance, facilitates the early projection of the action
an utterance will be doing, whereas in Japanese the
verbs that embody the action tend to be produced in
sentence final positions. So Japanese speakers can
still change the action in their talk at a relatively late
moment, but they may also at times use an early
placeholder word if they need to inform their recipi-
ents on what they are up to (Hayashi, 2005).
A Minor Offshoot: Membership
Categorization Analysis
As noted, apart from the approach that later became
known as CA, Sacks also for some time worked on a
rather different enterprise that is currently called
MCA. He noted that a large part of the knowledge
that people use and rely on in their interactions is
organized in terms of categories of people, either in
general terms (as in children) or in reference to a
particular person (as in my husband). These insights
and their elaborate explication was at first part of his
doctoral research on calls to a suicide prevention
center (cf. Sacks, 1972a; also a number of lectures in

Sacks, 1992) in which callers explained their life sit-
uation and their feeling that they had “no one to
turn to.” What Sacks noted, among other things,
was that people use person-categories as part of sets
of categories, which he called membership categori-
zation devices (MCDs; Sacks, 1972a, 1972b). For
instance, within the MCD sex, people use two basic
categories, female and male, whereas the MCD age
does not have a fixed number of categories because
their use depends on situational considerations.
Sometimes two categories suffice, old and young, but
often more subtle differentiations are called for.
Categories are not just named or implied, they
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
also carry a number of different associated proper-
ties, later called category predicates, like the one that
Sacks used a lot: category-bound activities. So, for
instance, he noted that the activity crying may be
considered bound to the category baby, and the
activity picking up (a child) is typical of the category
mother (Sacks, 1972b). Other kinds of predicates
might involve properties like rights and responsibili-
ties, specialized knowledge, and competencies.
Sacks (1972a) also made an effort to explicate “rules
of application,” such as an economy rule (one cate-
gory is often sufficient) and a consistency rule (once
a category from a specific MCD is used, other cate-
gories from that device tend to be used also).
Although many different categories may be correct,
there are most often only a few that are also relevant
in the situation at hand.
It is remarkable, as can be seen by reading Sacks’s
(1992) Lectures on Conversation in chronological
order, that his interest in these matters became less
prominent after about 1967, being more strongly
focused on issues of turn-taking and sequence. He
did, however, publish some of these mid-1960s
explorations of categorization much later (Sacks,
1972a, 1972b), so apparently he did not disavow
them. In his introduction to the first volume of
Sacks’s (1992) Lectures, Schegloff commented on
this shift as mainly a methodological one. Although
the work on membership categorization tended to
stress the recognizability of expressions such as cat-
egory terms, for any member of the culture, Sacks
later sought to substantiate such claims in terms of
the demonstrable understanding by the participants,
as visible in their uptake.
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
Although MCA more or less disappeared from
the CA enterprise, it was later taken up again by
more ethnomethodologically inclined authors,
including Hester and Eglin (1997), Jayyusi (1984),
and Watson (1997). In the introduction to a volume
collecting some of these later MCA studies, Hester
and Eglin (1997, pp. 11–22) commented on an
ambiguity in Sacks’s observations on membership
categorization. Some of his formulations suggest a
decontextualized model of membership categories
and collections of categories as preexisting any occa-
sion of use, whereas at other times, he stresses the
occasionality of any actual usage. Hester and Eglin
(1997, p. 21) stressed that for EM “membership cat-
egorization is an activity carried out in particular
local circumstances.” It should be seen as “in situ
achievements of members’ practical actions and
practical reasoning.” In recent years MCA continues
to be used and debated (cf. Carlin, 2010; Schegloff,
2007a, 2007c).
Currently, MCA is often used to analyze written
texts (Watson, 2009), but the underlying theme of
MCA, namely, the social organization of knowledge,
emerges regularly in CA proper, for instance, in a
series of papers by Heritage (1984a) on the use
of Oh as a marker of a change of knowledge of
the speaker and more recently on what he has called
epistemics, or more particularly epistemic rights and
epistemic authority (Heritage, 2005; Heritage &
Raymond, 2005; Raymond & Heritage, 2006). As he
wrote, “Interactants not only keep score on who
knows what, they also keep rather close watch over
the relevant rights that each may have to know par-
ticular facts” (Heritage, 2005, p. 196), and that they
do can be shown in the details of their actions and
reactions, when analyzed in sequential terms. In my
view, then, terms like EM, CA, and MCA denote
variants of one big enterprise to study the local
organization of human action or even of human
sociality.
Applied Studies
As used in this section, the notion of application can
refer both to projects in which the insights and
methods of EM and CA are applied to specific sub-
stantive themes or areas and ones in which EM and
111
 Paul ten Have
CA insights are used to criticize or educate specific
practices, although the first is much more frequent
than the second. The basic idea is that the detailed
attention that EM and CA give to everyday practices
can be used to extend or correct available, often
quantitative, knowledge about such practices. Estab-
lished knowledge about some practice is often too
general to cover the details of such practices in the
situations in which they occur. Therefore such
knowledge, as available in theories, plans, or
reports, is quite often not able to effectively predict
or understand the relative success or failure of prac-
tical projects. This theme was already discernable in
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
Suchman’s work (1987, 2007), as the instructions
provided by an “intelligent” copier were misunder-
stood by the users, while the machine also misun-
derstood some of the users’ actions, together leading
to various type of practical troubles.
In the past 3 decades an increasing number of
studies in EM and CA have been of an applied char-
acter. For reasons of space only a few themes can be
developed at some length, and only a small number
of topical areas are mentioned in this chapter. Most
applied CA studies deal with interactions between
institutional agents and their clients of some sort,
such as patients, defendants, interviewees, and so
on. In line with the remarks by Sacks et al. (1974)
about the comparison of speech-exchange systems,
these studies quite often (especially in the 1980s)
used a comparison between the institutional interac-
tion studied with informal conversation as an
implicit or explicit frame of reference. Early studies
of doctor–patient interaction, for instance, noted the
restrictions on turn-taking opportunities and turn-
type selection to which patients seemed to be sub-
jected (cf. Frankel, 1984, 1990; West, 1984). They
also made it clear that such encounters tended to be
organized in a restricted number of phases, such as
history taking, examination, diagnosis, and treat-
ment. What was discernable then, and confirmed
later (cf. Beach, 2001; Heritage & Maynard, 2006;
Stivers, 2007), was that the speaking opportunities
for patients depend very much on the phase of the
encounter. One can note a shift, in these later stud-
ies, from a somewhat moral noting of restrictions to
a more diversified description of the uses by patients
of their speaking opportunities, and the ways in
112
which physicians do react to (or anticipate) patients’
moves. In other words, whereas at first it was the
asymmetry that was noted, it was later seen that the
asymmetry-prone context of medical interaction
also allowed for half-hidden negotiations, especially
about treatment options. Application in the second,
practical sense also seems to be on the rise in recent
years, as CA-based insights and studies are used
in medical education and professional training
(Maynard & Heritage, 2005; Stein, Frankel, &
Krupat, 2005).
When CA emerged in the 1960s, some psycho-
therapists were already recording their sessions with
patients. Sacks, for instance, used some recordings,
in his case of group therapy with teenagers, to
explore conversation (cf. Sacks, 1992). That these
interactions were not just conversations but rather
therapy sessions was largely ignored in his com-
ments. Later, the tendency was to use data from
ordinary interactions. It was only since about the
turn of the century that CA researchers turned to
psychotherapy as a topic for the application of CA.
Since then, a substantial number of papers and a
book (Peräkylä, Antaki, Vehviläinen, & Leudar,
2008) have been published. Of course, therapists
use quite a varied set of the verbal practices that, for
them, constitute therapy. The challenge for CA is to
explicate these practices in greater detail than has
been done before and to point out and describe fea-
tures of interaction that are part of psychotherapy
but that psychotherapeutic theories have not recog-
nized or discussed (Peräkylä et al., 2008). A major
difference between CA research and previous stud-
ies of psychotherapy lies in CA’s stress on sequence
organization: how one utterance relates to previous
and subsequent utterances in detail.
A major characteristic of psychotherapy ses-
sions, in contrast to physician–patient encounters,
is their lack of an overall structural organization
in phases. Therefore, CA studies in this field tend
to focus on local sequential relations, for instance,
the ways in which a therapist’s comments relate to
previous utterances by the patient, or the ways in
which a patient reacts to such a recipient action.
In psychotherapy, recipient actions are among the
major means at the therapist’s disposal to influ-
ence the patient is a more or less subtle manner.

Peräkylä et al. (2008) distinguished different types
of such actions. A therapist may (a) propose a differ-
ent, probably more focused term for one used by the
patient, (b) extend a patient’s sentence as a display
of understanding, (c) reformulate what was just
said, or (d) offer a different interpretation than the
one suggested by the patient. In so doing, the thera-
pists may be seen as “stretching the boundaries of
ownership of knowledge” (Peräkylä et al., 2008,
pp. 192–193), suggesting that they know the patient
better than the individual. Such reworkings are
mostly selective and thus reshape what was said by
the other party. Therapists’ questioning initiatives
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
and patients’ responses to therapist sayings are also
discussed. CA studies of psychotherapy offer a
detailed sociological account of therapeutic pro-
cesses rather than a psychological one. CA fore-
grounds the collaborative and negotiative character
of such interactions. What therapists do is a special-
ized use of quite ordinary conversational means.
From the mid-1990s onward, there have been
quite a number of CA-based studies of interaction in
which at least one of the participants is communica-
tively impaired in one way or another. In Goodwin’s
edited book Conversation and Brain Damage (2003),
he collected work by the major contributors to this
area, focusing on aphasia. The core message that is
stressed in all of these contributions is that whatever
communicative success is achieved in the encoun-
ters under study has to be seen as a collaborative
achievement. It depends on the use of quite ordinary
conversational methods, adapted to the particulari-
ties of the impairment in the case at hand, in which
both the aphasics and their interlocutors have to be
creative. In this way, the book’s essays have a
polemical subtheme in relation to conventional psy-
cholinguistic and neurological approaches, which
are oriented to individual failings rather than collec-
tive communicative successes.
A number of contributions deal explicitly with
the contrast between ordinary, real-life interactions
with an aphasic and formal tests. In the latter type of
situations, an aphasic may be asked, for instance, to
tell a story on the basis of a set of cartoon drawings,
or to answer standardized questions, at the request
of a tester who has only a professional interest in the
performance displayed in those tellings or answers.
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
This situation is contrasted with naturally occurring
situations in which an aphasic wants to tell the story
of a personal experience to a close relative, for
instance, or participate in the arrangement of eating
out with a family group. In such situations it is the
achievement of shared understanding that matters
and not the objective assessment of the linguistic
quality of an individual performance.
The concept of aphasia covers a range of impair-
ments, and the patients whose speech is exemplified
and analyzed in the various chapters suffer from a
variety of types of linguistic insufficiencies, includ-
ing quite prominently the inability to find the right
word in time. In such cases, the speakers often use
general terms instead of a more specific ones, requir-
ing a more specific interpretation or (implicit or
explicit) guess made on the basis of shared knowl-
edge or situational cues. This also accounts for the
fact that mutual understanding is best achieved in
active collaboration with intimates.
Although these three types of applied studies
mostly applied CA concepts and methods and based
their findings in most cases just on audio or video
recordings, a different type of applied studies
emerged in the late 1980s that, in addition to video
recordings, also used ethnographic fieldwork. I have
mentioned the early work of Suchman (1987) on
users’ work on an advanced copier, which she car-
ried out as part of a research job in an industrial
firm. She continued her studies there focusing on
specialized work activities involving complex tech-
nological support devices like computers and vari-
ous communication technologies. Later, other
researchers were able to start similar projects, so
now one can speak of a tradition of “workplace
studies.” Apart from Suchman, important contribu-
tions have been made by Button, Heath, and Whalen
(cf. collections edited by Button, 1993; Heath &
Luff, 2000; Luff, Hindmarsh, & Heath, 2000). Heath
has led a particularly successful Work, Interaction
and Technology Research Group at King’s College
in London, which has studied a wide range of set-
tings, including control rooms for the London
Underground system, museums, and art galleries as
well as journalists working in a news agency.
In these studies, the use of video is crucial
because the activities often take place in a group
113
 Paul ten Have
setting involving team members and the extensive
use of various technological artifacts. Analyzing
such activities requires, on the one hand, visual
access to the local environment to study bodily
actions and nonvocal exchanges in situ, and, on the
other, a deeper, locally specialized understanding
of the activities under study than is generally used
for agent–client interactions. Some participant
observation—as well as studying relevant docu-
ments and interviewing experts—is used to acquire
the necessary background to really understand what
is going on. To mention one example, Nevile
(2004), from Australia, collected the core data for
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
his studies of talk-in-interaction in the airline cock-
pit by video-recording the activities of flight crews
on scheduled flights by commercial airlines. But
before he even approached the airlines to ask for
their cooperation, he prepared his research by
extensively reading whatever he could find about
the operation of commercial airlines, training and
operations manuals, official accident reports, and so
on. He also watched available information videos
showing pilots at work, visited conferences, and
talked to research psychologists working with flight
crews and accident investigators.
In such workplace studies, the concepts, findings,
and methods of CA are applied as part of a wider
undertaking that is broadly inspired by EM. I men-
tion a few general insights that can be gained from
these studies. First, such specialized (team)work
requires an experience-based practical knowledge
that goes far beyond what can be acquired through
formal instruction in a nonwork setting. Second,
effective teamwork not only requires the individual
worker’s understanding of the task at hand but also
an understanding at a glance of what others are
doing. A lot of actual coordination of activities
occurs in an implicit fashion, often by seeing in
peripheral vision or by overhearing talk and adapting
one’s own activities accordingly. So, for instance, the
worker in a London Underground control room who
is tasked with making announcements to the travel-
ing public knows from observing and overhearing
his colleagues at work on some crisis situation what
to announce, to whom, and when without getting a
request to do so (see Heath & Luff, 2000). Third,
formal accounts of work activities cannot make this
114
hidden work and the competencies involved in it vis-
ible to outsiders, including the overseeing manage-
ment (cf. Whalen & Vinkhuyzen, 2000).
To illustrate how CA can figure in this more
encompassing endeavor, let me refer shortly to some
of Nevile’s (2004) findings when studying airline
cockpits. In the first part of his book, he analyzed the
use of personal pronouns: I, you, and we. Some of
these uses are officially prescribed in the relevant
manuals, and others are voluntary and impromptu,
chosen on the spot. They function, in any case, as
designators of local and momentary cockpit identi-
ties, with associated tasks and responsibilities. In the
second part of the book, Nevile, by discussing a range
of concrete examples, examined how pilots coordi-
nate their talk and nontalk activities as they perform
the routine tasks necessary to fly their plane. Such
coordination is essential to maintain a shared under-
standing of where they are in the flight and what has
to be done then and there, as pilots have to perform
their tasks with split-second precision and strictly in
sequence, one after the other. In doing this work, talk
is just one of the resources that participants use and
orient to; others include gaze direction, gesture, and
placement and movement of parts of the body, such
as head, arms, hands, legs, and eyebrows. In the third
and final part of his book, Nevile widened his per-
spective on talk in the cockpit to investigate how it is
coordinated with talk to participants outside the cock-
pit, such as air traffic controllers and cabin crew
members. Again, the issue is that the two pilots have
to attain and demonstrate a shared understanding of
the local consequences of the outside talk, which they
can do by internal talk or nonvocal but visible activi-
ties. Investigation of such fine-tuned activities
requires finely detailed transcriptions of talk with
descriptions of the associated activities.
To give an impression of how this is done, I
quote one of Nevile’s examples in Extract 7.2, which
in the original text is accompanied by a picture of
the pointing finger that is mentioned.
The arrows indicate the moment in the talk at
which the nonvocal activities start or stop. Work-
place studies are a rather demanding kind of study,
but they are also extremely rewarding and necessary
because they reflect the subtle but too often ignored
complexity of specialized work.

Extract 7.2
In the Cockpit
C = Captain
PNF = Pilot not flying
FO = First officer
PF = Pilot flying
1 (50.3)
2 C/PNF: one thousand to altitude.
↑————-↑
2a C/PNF: ((moves right hand up from lap, then left
to right, at chest height, with index finger
extended))
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
↑———↑
2b C/PNF: ((holds right hand still, just to
the right of own chest, index
finger points to FO/PF’s side of
main instrument panel))
↑ plary sketch of the different stages of a research
2c C/PNF: ((moves right hand
down and left, back to
right leg))
3 (3.2) = (0 > 1.4 > 2.4 > 3.2))
↑———↑
4 ((sound of altitude alert buzzer))
5 FO/PF >alert (.) for level (.) two fi::ve zero
6 (27.5)
Note. From Beyond the Black Box: Talk-in-Interaction
in the Airline Cockpit (p. 131), by M. Nevile, 2004,
Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Copyright 2004 by
Maurice Nevile. Reprinted with permission.
There are many other types of applied studies
using EM, CA, or MCA. In all these it has been
proven that it is useful to explicate the ways in
which (inter)action and communication depend on
the local application of infrastructural practices. The
stress on restrictions that are operative in institu-
tional settings, which was stressed in early applied
CA, can now be broadened in saying that task-
oriented interactions basically depend on general
interactional capacities, which in the setting at hand
get a specialized application.
Conclusion
Within the limits of the space available, I have
offered a summary characterization of EM and its
offshoots CA and MCA. Contrary to most of the
human sciences and Western culture at large, EM
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
does not take off from the individual and his or her
mind. Instead, ethnomethodologists observe human
action as inherently social and situated. Therefore
they largely abstain from precategorized and
researcher-provoked ways of collecting data but
rather use intense ethnography and audio or video
recordings. In so doing, they can reveal news about
human life that was previously unavailable. Quite
often this can lead to what has been called a respeci-
fication of previously developed concepts in the
human sciences, including sociology and psychol-
ogy, as members’ situated practices (Button, 1991;
Garfinkel, 2002). This kind of work as applied to
psychological concepts has been taken up by discur-
sive psychology, which is discussed in Chapter 8 of
this volume. That chapter also provides an exem-
project, including an analysis of some interactional
episodes that clearly demonstrate the impact of
sequentiality in human interaction.
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