Jason Turowetz and the Second Santa Barbara School by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 Jason Turowetz and the Second Santa Barbara School: Moral Order, Accountability, and the Renewal of Sociological EMCA

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D

Prefatory Note: The Santa Barbara Schools of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

Sociology, Moral Order, and the Problem of Consequence

The First Santa Barbara School refers to the distinctive tradition of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) that developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara from the mid-1970s through the 1990s, shaped decisively by the leadership of Don H. Zimmerman. Trained under Harold Garfinkel at UCLA, Zimmerman brought ethnomethodology to UCSB at a moment when conversation analysis—pioneered by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson—was crystallizing into a rigorous analytic program. What emerged at Santa Barbara was not a derivative branch of UCLA-style CA, but a distinctive sociological formation: one that treated EM/CA as a theory of social life, not merely a method for analyzing talk.

EM/CA as sociology, not technique

The defining commitment of the First Santa Barbara School was its insistence that EM/CA constitutes genuine sociology. This position cut against two tendencies that were already visible elsewhere in the field: first, the reduction of conversation analysis to a self-contained technical specialization concerned primarily with the internal organization of talk; and second, the relegation of ethnomethodology to a radical epistemological critique with limited empirical payoff. At Santa Barbara, EM/CA was mobilized as a way of addressing foundational sociological questions—how social order is produced, how institutions operate in real time, and how social categories such as gender, race, and deviance are made consequential in everyday interaction.

This orientation was sustained by a dense interactionist milieu that included figures influenced by symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, and the sociology of deviance. Rather than treating these traditions as competitors to ethnomethodology, the Santa Barbara School treated them as problems to be respecified. Concepts such as identity, role, stigma, authority, and normativity were not discarded; they were reworked as interactional accomplishments, observable in the sequential organization of action.

Categories, institutions, and the rejection of reification

The Santa Barbara School is perhaps best known for demonstrating how seemingly “macro” phenomena are constituted through mundane practices. Candace West and Zimmerman’s Doing Gender (1987) remains emblematic: gender is shown not as a role, trait, or internalized identity, but as an ongoing practical accomplishment embedded in ordinary interaction. Similarly, Zimmerman’s studies of emergency call-taking revealed how institutional authority, expertise, and accountability are produced moment by moment through the disciplined management of talk.

The same sensibility animates the work of Douglas Maynard, whose analyses of bad-news delivery and diagnostic communication traced how institutional knowledge and moral responsibility are delicately managed through sequential practices. Deirdre Boden’s work on meetings and organizational talk showed how decision-making and collective action are interactionally assembled. Steve Clayman’s analyses of news interviews revealed how neutrality, adversarialism, and public accountability are achieved in broadcast interaction. Across these projects, the Santa Barbara School developed a distinctive analytic posture: anti-reification without anti-institutionalism. Institutions were neither treated as external structures nor dissolved into pure interaction; they were examined as procedurally consequential orders sustained through members’ methods.

A sociology of consequences

What further distinguished the First Santa Barbara School was its sustained concern with consequence. Interaction was not treated as a closed aesthetic object, but as a site where real outcomes are produced: diagnoses are delivered, blame is assigned, credibility is granted or withdrawn, access to resources is shaped. This concern placed Santa Barbara EM/CA in a productive tension with strands of conversation analysis that emphasized analytic purity at the expense of sociological reach. At UCSB, the question was never simply how sequences work, but what they do—for persons, for institutions, and for social categories.

The Second Santa Barbara School: moral order and accountability

The Second Santa Barbara School refers to the contemporary renewal of this tradition, now centered in UCSB’s Department of Sociology and anchored by Geoffrey Raymond, Kevin Whitehead, Waverly Duck, and Jason Turowetz. This second generation does not represent a rupture with the first, but a thematic intensification—especially around morality, accountability, and inequality.

Where earlier Santa Barbara work demonstrated that categories and institutions are interactionally produced, contemporary work asks more pointedly how interaction organizes evaluation: how people are judged, sanctioned, excused, praised, or rendered suspect. The Second Santa Barbara School foregrounds moral order not as a normative overlay, but as an endogenous feature of interaction itself. Participants display moral stances, assess one another’s conduct, and manage responsibility through practices such as formulation, questioning, repair, agreement, and resistance.

Accountability, inequality, and social consequence

A defining feature of the Second Santa Barbara School is its explicit engagement with inequality. Building on the legacy of Doing Gender, contemporary Santa Barbara scholars examine how race, class, disability, and institutional vulnerability are interactionally accomplished and made consequential. This work responds directly to critiques that conversation analysis had become politically quietist or insufficiently attentive to power. Rather than importing critical theory as an external frame, Santa Barbara EM/CA demonstrates how inequality is procedurally enacted, locally, in ways that accumulate into durable institutional outcomes.

At the same time, the school resists the temptation to collapse EM/CA into advocacy sociology. Its analyses retain sequential rigor, insisting that claims about power, marginalization, or injustice must be grounded in demonstrable interactional practices. The result is a form of critical interactionism: empirically disciplined, theoretically ambitious, and oriented toward public consequence.

Theoretical breadth and applied seriousness

The Second Santa Barbara School is also distinguished by its openness to theoretical dialogue. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy (Mead, Dewey), ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin), and classical sociological theory, Santa Barbara scholars position EM/CA within sociology’s broader intellectual heritage. EM/CA is not treated as a self-sufficient paradigm, but as a powerful respecification of enduring sociological problems.

Empirically, much of this work is grounded in consequential applied domains: medical consultations, autism clinics, courtrooms, police encounters, emergency services, and other institutional sites where interactional practices have life-altering consequences. These settings are not chosen incidentally; they are treated as critical laboratories for understanding how moral order and institutional authority are enacted in real time.

Continuity and renewal

The continuity between the First and Second Santa Barbara Schools lies in a shared conviction: EM/CA is not merely about describing interaction, but about revealing the constitutive practices through which social reality is ongoingly produced. The renewal lies in the second school’s intensified focus on moral accountability, inequality, and consequence—issues that resonate powerfully with contemporary sociological debates.

If the First Santa Barbara School demonstrated that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis could be sociology, the Second Santa Barbara School demonstrates that they can remain so—without sacrificing analytic rigor, and without retreating from the moral and political questions that make sociology matter.

Introduction: A School Renewed

The emergence of a second Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) is not merely a matter of generational succession. It represents a renewed insistence that EM/CA is not simply an analytic technique for describing interactional machinery, but a theory of social life with moral, institutional, and political stakes. Within this renewal, Jason Turowetz occupies a distinctive and indispensable position. His collaborative work with Douglas Maynard—particularly the foundational chapter "Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life" (2010) and the handbook chapter "Language Use and Social Interaction" (2013)—crystallizes what makes the second Santa Barbara School recognizably Santa Barbaran: an unwavering commitment to sequential rigor paired with an equally unwavering concern for accountability, judgment, and the moral organization of everyday life.

From Analytic Machinery to Moral Life

Turowetz's importance begins with the problem-space he treats as legitimate for EM/CA. Where much contemporary conversation analysis has drifted toward ever finer descriptions of turn design, stance, or epistemics—sometimes at the cost of sociological consequence—Turowetz consistently asks how actions become morally intelligible. His analyses examine how people evaluate one another, assign responsibility, display competence or incompetence, and render conduct accountable in situ.

This approach emerges directly from the foundational insight that Turowetz and Maynard articulate: "A situation has intrinsic moral significance through the concerted actions by which its character is established, negotiated, and elaborated" (Turowetz & Maynard, 2010, p. 503). Crucially, these are not imported moral frameworks. They are members' moral methods, made visible through the very same sequential practices that CA has always treated as foundational.

The distinction between "morality in interaction" and "the morality of interaction" proves analytically generative. As Turowetz and Maynard explain: "Morality in interaction is to be distinguished from the morality of interaction, which concerns the rights and obligations accorded people by dint of their membership in the interaction order of society" (2010, p. 504). This distinction—between surface moral claims and the deep "protomorality" that undergirds them—provides a framework for understanding how mundane sequential practices achieve moral work.

Locating Morality in Practice, Not Cognition

A defining feature of Turowetz's approach is its sustained critique of cognitivism. Rather than locating morality in people's heads, Turowetz and Maynard argue that EM/CA "treat moral reasoning as a property of the embodied interactional practices by which members of society engage" (2010, p. 503). This move draws on the pragmatist tradition (Mead, Dewey) and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Anscombe) to propose "an agnostic stance on the existence of a 'mind' that has thoughts, moral or otherwise, and proposes to treat cognition as a phase or component of action, instead of its precursor" (2010, pp. 503–504).

This anti-cognitivist stance is extended in the 2013 handbook chapter, where Turowetz and Maynard critique what they call the "conduit metaphor"—the commonsensical notion that "through speech, one person conveys information by inserting it into words and sending them along a communicative channel" (Maynard & Turowetz, 2013, p. 251). Against this picture-book view of language, they advocate for understanding language as "a medium of organized social activity, in which words are 'performatives' (Austin, 1962) or 'deeds' (Wittgenstein, 1958)" (2013, p. 251). Language does not merely describe the world; it constitutes it through practice.

The Deep Structure of Moral Order

Turowetz's contribution is not derivative of the Zimmerman–Maynard–West lineage; it extends this lineage by showing how morality operates not only in moments of explicit sanction or blame, but in mundane sequences where assessments, formulations, and categorizations quietly sort persons and actions into gradients of worth, reasonableness, and legitimacy.

Drawing on Garfinkel's study of Agnes, Turowetz and Maynard illuminate how the "natural attitude" carries deep moral entitlements: "Agnes's efforts to 'pass' for female do much more than illustrate the contingent nature of gender identity. They also train a lens on the deep sense of moral entitlement that permeates the natural attitude" (2010, p. 505). Agnes "feels entitled both to an operation and to be treated by others as a woman," but this entitlement requires constant interactional work—a procedural achievement rather than a passive possession.

This analysis of Agnes exemplifies Turowetz's broader approach: rules and norms are not external forces that determine behavior but "resources that they can use to fashion moral claims by ascribing motives to themselves and one another" (2010, p. 506). Following Wittgenstein and building on Weider's study of the convict code, Turowetz shows that "an orientation to rules does not cause behavior. Instead, rules provide members with resources that they can use to fashion moral claims" (2010, p. 506).

Accountability Without Reification

One of the defining tensions in EM/CA since Garfinkel has been how to speak about accountability without smuggling in reified notions of norms, roles, or structures. Turowetz's work demonstrates how to do precisely this. He shows that accountability is procedurally produced, moment by moment, through practices such as questioning, reformulation, agreement, resistance, and repair.

The analysis of blame negotiation exemplifies this approach. Turowetz and Maynard demonstrate that "the allocation of blame is a thoroughly collaborative achievement. It involves ascribing responsibility for an event, or series of events, to a particular person or group. The work of ascription is tightly interwoven with that of description" (2010, p. 511). This insight—that description and ascription are mutually constitutive—captures the procedural character of moral accountability.

The basic blame sequence unfolds through recognizable practices: "In the first, someone announces an 'unhappy incident.' The announcement routinely assumes the form of a stark, unelaborated 'object-action' story fragment, such as 'the car is broken'" (2010, p. 511). Recipients then transform this from "object-action" to "subject-action-object," thereby attributing blame. By showing how moral categories emerge through sequential organization rather than existing prior to interaction, Turowetz resists both of the field's recurring temptations: the temptation to psychologize moral judgment, and the temptation to explain it away as an epiphenomenon of "structure."

Bridging Sequence and Consequence

A persistent critique of conversation analysis—often voiced by sociologists sympathetic to EM but impatient with its restraint—is that it stops at description and shies away from consequence. Turowetz's work quietly dismantles that critique. Without abandoning sequence, he traces how interactional judgments accumulate into institutional outcomes: who is treated as credible, whose account is accepted, whose conduct is sanctioned, and whose voice is marginalized.

This bridge-building is especially evident in the treatment of institutional settings. In medical contexts, Turowetz and Maynard show how "patients ordinarily do not participate in the diagnostic process" and how "the passive attitude and demeanor patients typically display when receiving a diagnosis has been interpreted as reflecting the asymmetric structure of the doctor-patient relationship" (2010, p. 516). Yet this asymmetry is not merely structural—it is interactionally achieved through specific practices of questioning, formulation, and response.

The analysis of legal settings further demonstrates this approach. In plea bargaining, "the meaning of a defendant attribute like age, sex, or race has no intrinsic moral significance. Instead, its moral sense is determined by the way it is fitted to descriptions used to justify, excuse, rationalize, impeach, or otherwise construe and constitute conduct" (2010, p. 519). Moral categories do not pre-exist interaction; they are constituted through the practical work of participants. The bridge from micro-sequence to macro-consequence is not asserted; it is shown, step by step.

The Mapping Problem and Social Action

A central theoretical concern running through Turowetz's work is what he and Maynard call "the mapping problem": "How are we to know what the illocutionary force (action) of an utterance is?" (2013, p. 255). This is not a trivial question. Since "the 'same' utterance can perform a variety of different speech acts" (2013, p. 254), the investigator cannot simply read action off grammatical form.

Turowetz and Maynard identify two main solutions to this mapping problem: "one being the rule-based approach of Austin, Searle, Grice and others, and the other being the practice-based approach of Wittgenstein" (2013, p. 256). Their work clearly aligns with the practice-based approach, treating sequential organization and participant orientations as the primary resources for understanding how utterances achieve their force as actions.

The methodological implications are significant. Rather than invoking rules to explain conduct, Turowetz argues that "rules should instead be treated as topics and features of the activities they are said to organize" (2013, p. 263). This approach "extricates rules from their traditional conceptual status in social theory": "It is not that behavior is unconstrained, disorderly, or arbitrary, but that rules, if they are operative at all, figure as part of actors' own practices of reasoning and ways of organizing a social setting" (2013, p. 263).

Reflexivity and Social Structure

Turowetz's most sophisticated contribution concerns the relationship between language, action, and social structure. He distinguishes between a "macrodirectional approach" that sees social structure as conditioning language use, and a "dialectical approach" in which there are "reflexive relations between language use and social structure" (2013, p. 267). The latter position views the interaction order as "primordial in the sense of underlying, preceding, being organized independently of any social structural context in which talk occurs" (2013, p. 270), while nonetheless being sensitive to historical and cultural variation.

This reflexive approach has profound implications for understanding categories like race and gender. Rather than treating these as independent variables that condition speech patterns, Turowetz's approach examines "how social categories are realized in concrete interactions, and with what consequences" (2013, p. 271). As he notes regarding gender: "In line with path-breaking studies by Garfinkel (1967) and West and Zimmerman (1987), this line of research understands gender as an ongoing accomplishment, rather than a socio-structural attribute that people simply possess" (2013, p. 271).

A Sociological Temperament

Equally important is Turowetz's intellectual temperament. His work exemplifies a mode of EM/CA that is neither doctrinaire nor defensive. He does not treat EM/CA as a fragile orthodoxy that must be protected from sociological questions. Instead, he treats it as "a robust analytic engine, capable of bearing weight" (as the original essay aptly put it).

This robustness is evident in the programmatic claim that conversation analysis aims "to rebuild sociology as a natural observational science" in three senses: "(1) it is possible to formally describe social actions and activities, because (2) these actions and activities are methodical occurrences, and (3) the methods by which a single action or activity is composed are generalizable to and reproducible in other situations" (2013, pp. 263–264). This is not a retreat from sociology but an attempt to place it on firmer empirical ground.

The concluding observation in the 2013 chapter crystallizes this stance: "Language is a primary medium of social behavior and, as such, deserves center stage in the panoply of social psychological topics... This is, we have argued, not so much because language is a vehicle of communication; rather, it is a resource for action and activity" (2013, p. 272). By centering language-in-use as constitutive of social reality rather than merely descriptive of it, Turowetz positions EM/CA as fundamentally sociological.

Conclusion: Why Turowetz Matters

Jason Turowetz matters to the second Santa Barbara School because he exemplifies what the school is trying to be. He shows how EM/CA can remain faithful to its founding commitments while speaking directly to enduring sociological concerns about morality, accountability, and institutional life. The collaborative work with Maynard demonstrates that "morality, in the form of issues surrounding responsibility, comes to the fore in discourse when bad news, rejection of invitations, and other everyday actions are underway. The pragmatic features of moral reasoning, then, are deeply woven into the fabric of ordinary activities, rather than being independent or outside of them" (2010, p. 512).

Within the contemporary UCSB constellation—alongside Raymond, Whitehead, and Duck—Turowetz helps ensure that the second Santa Barbara School does not collapse into either methodological purism or topical eclecticism. His work shows how one can pursue pressing moral and institutional questions without loosening analytic standards. That balance is rare, and it is precisely what gives the school its coherence.

If the first Santa Barbara School demonstrated that EM/CA could be sociology, the second—through figures like Turowetz—demonstrates that it still can be. As he and Maynard conclude: "Such investigation documents the orderliness and organization that inhere in language as participants use it in their everyday social and social psychological contexts" (2013, p. 273). This is the promise of the second Santa Barbara School: rigorous empirical investigation of the moral order in action.

Selected Publications by Jason Turowetz

Books

Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2022). Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis. University of Chicago Press.

• Award for Outstanding Recent Contribution in Social Psychology, ASA Section on Social Psychology, 2024
• The Melvin Pollner Prize in Ethnomethodology, ASA Section on EMCA, 2024
• Best Book Award (Honorable Mention), International Society for Conversation Analysis, 2023

Hollander, M., & Turowetz, J. (2023). Morality in the Making of Sense and Self: Stanley Milgram's 'Obedience' Experiments and the New Science of Morality. Oxford University Press.

Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Turowetz, J., Wiscons, L., & Maynard, D. W. (2023). Disorder or difference? How clinician-patient interaction and patient age shape the process and meaning of autism diagnosis. Sociology of Health & Illness.

Turowetz, J. (2022). Interaction order and the labeling of disorder: How parents mobilize personal knowledge in the clinic to resist medicalization of their children's behavior. Social Science & Medicine.

Turowetz, J., & Rawls, A. W. (2020). The development of Garfinkel's 'trust' argument from 1947 to 1967: Demonstrating how inequality disrupts sense and self-making. Journal of Classical Sociology, 21(1), 3–37.

Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2019). Doing abstraction: Autism spectrum disorder and the sociology of diagnosis. Sociological Theory, 37(1), 89–116.

Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2017). Doing diagnosis: Autism, interaction order, and the use of narrative in clinical talk. Social Psychology Quarterly, 80(3), 254–275.

Turowetz, J. (2015). Citing conduct, individualizing symptoms: Accomplishing autism diagnosis in clinical case conferences. Social Science & Medicine, 142, 214–222.

• Best Graduate Student Paper, ASA Section on EMCA, 2015

Turowetz, J. (2015). The interactional production of a clinical fact in a case of autism. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), 57–78.

• Hacker-Mullins Graduate Student Paper Award (Honorable Mention), ASA Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology, 2015

Selected Book Chapters

Turowetz, J., Hollander, M., & Maynard, D. W. (2016). Ethnomethodology and social phenomenology. In S. Abrutyn (Ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory (pp. 387–410). Springer.

Turowetz, J., & Rawls, A. W. (2021). Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the varieties of interactionism. In N. Ruiz-Junco & D. Vom Lehn (Eds.), Handbook of Interactionism. Routledge.

Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2022). Commonsense knowledge, disability, and atypical interaction: The case of autism. In D. Maynard & J. Heritage (Eds.), Harold Garfinkel: Praxis, Social Order, and the Ethnomethodology Movement. Oxford University Press.

References

Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2013). Language use and social interaction. In J. DeLamater & A. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 251–279). Springer.

Turowetz, J. J., & Maynard, D. W. (2010). Morality in the social interactional and discursive world of everyday life. In S. Hitlin & S. Vaisey (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 503–526). Springer.