This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach.

This article examines current debates about gender equality, work-life balance and flexible working. We contrast policymakers' and organizational discourses of flexible working and work-life balance with managers' and employees' talk about these issues within their organizations. We show how, despite the increasingly gender-neutral language of the official discourses, in the data studied participants consistently reformulate the debates around gendered explanations and assumptions. For example, a 'generic female parent' is constructed in relation to work-life balance and flexible working yet participants routinely maintain that gender makes no difference within their organization. We consider the effects of these accounts; specifically the effect on those who take up flexible working, and the perceived backlash against policies viewed as favouring women or parents. We argue that the location of work-life balance and flexibility debates within a gender-neutral context can in practice result in maintaining or encouraging gendered practices within organizations. Implications of this for organizations, for policymakers and for feminist researchers are discussed.

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In this article, we critically evaluate a conversation analytic approach to the study of the links between gender and language from a feminist perspective. In so doing, we engage in the recent series of exchanges about conversation analysis (CA) and other strands of discourse analysis that have been published in Discourse & Society. We consider talk from two sets of discourse data, focusing on participants' orientation to gender categories as they crop up in the interactions. We suggest that a CA approach produces a rich understanding of the links between discourse and gender. However, we are critical of several, often unexamined aspects and conundrums of conversation analytic methodology. First, we consider the extent to which the `analytic stances' of feminism and conversation analysis are compatible. Second, we question whether, as Schegloff (1997) suggests, it is fruitful to rely on descriptions of and orientations to gender solely in participants' terms, as well as problematizing the notion of `orienting to gender' itself. Finally, while we propose CA is a useful tool for making claims about the relevance of gender in conversational interaction, and that such claims are grounded in speakers' orientations, we suggest that culture and common-sense knowledge, of both members and analysts, are largely unacknowledged and unexplicated resources in CA.

We examine the location, design and uptake of reported racial insults and abuse across two interactional sites: telephone calls to UK neighbourhood mediation centres and police interviews with suspects in neighbourhood crimes. In the mediation data, talk about ethnicity and racism was formulated almost exclusively in `reported speech', as a listed complain-able item about neighbours rather than as the reason for the dispute. In the police data, suspects reported racial insults as counter-complaints against other parties, and police officers quoted insults reported in witness testimony as part of their interrogation. We found systematic, oriented-to practices for constructing and reporting racial insults, involving pairing national or ethnic identity categories with another word (for example, `Paki bastard', `gypsy twat', `bitch Somali'). Although speakers often `edited' insults (`nigger this', `white that'), they nevertheless maintained two-word formulations, indexing the swear-word and stating just the ethnic or national category. Speakers further oriented to the `two-wordedness' of racial insults in their carefully managed use of one-word formulations. Insults regularly contained locative phrases (for example, `fuck off back to your own country') and generalizing devices (for example, `and stuff '). Finally, we found a continuum of response types, from explicit second assessments done in ordinary talk, to minimal but aligned acknowledgements in mediation calls, to no affiliative response in police interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the impact and relevance of racism in everyday life, as well as providing insights into the sorts of daily conflicts that occur between neighbours, as these are recounted in two institutional settings.