Particularization, place-relevant categories and moral order: Kindergarten as a “local organizational ensemble”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26485/PS/2025/74.3/7Keywords:
grammatical analysis, membership categorization, moral order, parent-child interaction, particularizationAbstract
Our hearings of a corpus of audio-recordings provided us, as members, with cultural resources with which to approach these for doing ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis. We began to recognize ordinary, social order properties that we suggest are features of “«parent»-«child» interaction”. Furthermore, these properties provide us with access to a “moral” order – commentaries upon accountable, expectable workings of Kindergarten (childcare centre or nursery). In the recordings a father asks his son about his activities at Kindergarten. The child’s accounts demonstrate Kindergarten is populated with members of a cohort who the father, through talk, seeks to regularize as ratified individuals. The moral order exhibited within these data is not exclusively formulated by the father: a very young child demonstrates competence in expressing his orientation to the “noticeable absence” of accountable actions. We comment on the “grammar” of categorization practices within the field of “«parent»-«child» interaction”.
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