THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Structure-in-Action, Moral Order, and the Interactional Accomplishment of Power

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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ABSTRACT

This essay is an intellectual genealogy written from inside a tradition rather than about it. It examines the emergence, development, and ongoing transformation of what has come to be known as the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), tracing its evolution from the mid-1960s to the present day. For over half a century, the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara has constituted a distinctive site for the elaboration of ethnomethodological inquiry—one that combined rigorous empirical analysis with sustained attention to institutions, inequality, and moral accountability.

Under the intellectual leadership of Don H. Zimmerman, Thomas P. Wilson, and Harvey Molotch, and through the work of multiple generations of faculty and graduate students, the Santa Barbara tradition developed an approach to social inquiry that was unusually ethnographic, unusually reflexive, and unusually willing to confront the realities of power without abandoning the methodological commitments of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Where other centers emphasized analytic purity or technical formalism, Santa Barbara cultivated an orientation toward structure-in-action: the idea that social structure exists only insofar as it is produced, recognized, and contested in situated interaction.

This essay traces the genealogy of the Santa Barbara School from its roots in the foundational work of Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff, through its distinctive elaboration at UCSB, to its contemporary manifestation in what may be called the Second Santa Barbara School. Six interlocking themes are identified as defining this tradition: (1) structure-in-action; (2) the respecification of social psychology; (3) workplace and institutional talk; (4) organizational reasoning; (5) moral economy and accountability; and (6) power and inequality as interactional accomplishments.

The essay also situates the author’s own work—spanning ethnomethodology, critical interactionism, and street-level autoethnography—as an internal development of the Santa Barbara lineage. Drawing on unconventional publication venues such as Doing Modernity, the paper argues that EM/CA has always advanced through hybrid, experimental, and institutionally marginal forms of scholarship. The Santa Barbara School is thus presented not as a closed chapter in disciplinary history, but as a living, contested, and morally engaged tradition.

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PART I: HISTORICAL AND INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

The Emergence of Ethnomethodology: From Parsons to Garfinkel

To understand the Santa Barbara School, one must first grasp the conceptual rupture that made it possible. Ethnomethodology did not emerge as a refinement of mid-twentieth-century sociology, but as a frontal challenge to its most basic assumptions about social order. Developed by Harold Garfinkel in the early 1950s and institutionalized through his teaching and writing at UCLA, ethnomethodology rejected the idea that social order could be explained by the internalization of norms, values, or roles. Instead, Garfinkel insisted that order is an ongoing, practical accomplishment—achieved moment by moment through the ordinary methods by which members make sense of one another and their circumstances.

Garfinkel’s training under Talcott Parsons at Harvard gave him intimate knowledge of structural-functionalist reasoning, but it was his encounter with the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz that provided the decisive alternative. Schutz’s emphasis on the taken-for-granted structures of the lifeworld, and on the interpretive work through which actors sustain a shared sense of reality, resonated deeply with Garfinkel’s dissatisfaction with abstract sociological explanation. Where Parsons sought order in normative systems hovering above action, Garfinkel sought it in the mundane practices through which people render actions intelligible, accountable, and recognizable as what they are.

Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) crystallized this orientation in a series of empirical demonstrations that continue to unsettle readers decades later. The now-canonical dictum from the opening chapter—“the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings account-able”—marked a decisive shift in sociological reasoning. Order was no longer something to be inferred from behavior; it was something to be discovered in behavior, in the reflexive organization of action itself.

This reconceptualization had profound implications. Social facts were no longer treated as external constraints but as accomplishments. Deviance was no longer a property of persons but a consequence of interactional judgments. Knowledge was no longer lodged in cognitive interiors but displayed, repaired, and negotiated in public practice. These implications would be taken up, extended, and contested by Garfinkel’s students and collaborators—and nowhere more persistently than at Santa Barbara.

Harvey Sacks and the Birth of Conversation Analysis

If Garfinkel provided ethnomethodology with its philosophical and methodological spine, Harvey Sacks provided it with analytic machinery. Trained at Berkeley and intellectually forged in Garfinkel’s UCLA seminars, Sacks approached ordinary conversation with a seriousness that bordered on audacity. Where most sociologists treated talk as transparent medium or illustrative example, Sacks treated it as a structured, rule-governed domain worthy of formal analysis.

Working initially with recordings from a suicide prevention hotline, Sacks discovered that even the most intimate, emotionally charged exchanges were organized through systematic practices: turn-taking, sequence organization, repair, categorization. These were not imposed structures; they were methods used by participants themselves to coordinate action, display understanding, and manage accountability.

The collaboration between Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson culminated in the 1974 article “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” This paper did more than describe conversational order; it demonstrated that interactional organization could be analyzed with a rigor comparable to that of formal linguistics or logic—without abandoning sensitivity to context, contingency, and meaning.

Schegloff’s subsequent work at UCLA refined conversation analysis into a disciplined analytic practice, emphasizing the autonomy of sequential organization and insisting that analysts discover relevance within the talk itself rather than importing sociological categories from outside. This methodological stance—often described as “pure” conversation analysis—would become both a resource and a point of tension for the Santa Barbara School.

The Intellectual Climate of the 1960s and 1970s

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis emerged during a period of intense disciplinary upheaval. Structural-functionalism was losing its grip on American sociology, challenged by civil rights activism, feminist critique, antiwar protest, and a growing dissatisfaction with abstract systems theory. Quantitative methods, while increasingly sophisticated, were criticized for their distance from lived experience and their tendency to reify categories they purported to explain.

Within this ferment, ethnomethodology occupied an uneasy position. It rejected functionalist explanation, but it also refused the moral rhetoric and political shorthand that characterized some critical traditions. Its insistence on technical rigor, its unfamiliar vocabulary, and its apparent indifference to macro-structural explanation made it an easy target. Lewis Coser’s famous dismissal of ethnomethodology as “a method in search of a substance” captured a broader skepticism: what, critics asked, could such microscopic analysis possibly tell us about power, inequality, or social change?

It was precisely this question that the Santa Barbara School would take up—slowly, empirically, and without abandoning ethnomethodological discipline.

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PART II: THE FIRST SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL (1965–2000)

Don H. Zimmerman and the Ethos of Structure-in-Action

Don H. Zimmerman arrived at UCSB in 1965, bringing with him Garfinkel’s methodological radicalism and an unusually grounded sociological sensibility. Over the next six decades, Zimmerman would become the quiet center of gravity around which the Santa Barbara School cohered. His influence was exerted less through grand theoretical statements than through pedagogy, collaboration, and an uncompromising commitment to empirical seriousness.

Zimmerman’s approach to teaching and research was organized around a simple but demanding principle: stay with the data. Weekly data sessions—where faculty and graduate students gathered to listen repeatedly to recordings, examine transcripts, and argue carefully about what was happening—became the primary site of intellectual formation. These sessions cultivated a distinctive sensibility: patience, humility before the material, and a refusal to leap ahead of what the interaction could sustain.

Zimmerman’s early collaboration with Melvin Pollner, particularly “The Everyday World as Phenomenon,” demonstrated how ethnomethodology could address foundational questions about reality without resorting to abstraction. His studies of welfare office recordkeeping revealed that bureaucracy is not a machine that applies rules, but an interactional accomplishment sustained through talk, documents, and practical judgment. Forms were shown to be moral objects: devices through which responsibility, memory, and legitimacy are managed.

The collaboration with Candace West that produced “Doing Gender” marked a turning point not only for gender studies but for ethnomethodology itself. By demonstrating that gender is a routine, accountable accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction, West and Zimmerman provided a template for analyzing identity as something people do rather than something they have. This insight would reverberate across Santa Barbara work on race, class, professionalism, and deviance.

Zimmerman’s later studies of emergency calls made explicit what had long been implicit in Santa Barbara work: institutions operate through interaction. Authority, urgency, responsibility, and legitimacy are not properties of organizations; they are achieved through sequences of talk under conditions of uncertainty and risk. These studies, extended by Marilyn and Jack Whalen into technologically mediated work, exemplified the Santa Barbara commitment to studying power where it actually happens.

Equally important was Zimmerman’s moral presence. He modeled a form of scholarly masculinity grounded in listening, collaboration, and respect. His egalitarian commitments were not only theorized in print but enacted in classrooms, offices, and marriages. For many students, Zimmerman exemplified what it meant to take social interaction seriously—not only as an object of study, but as a way of being in the world.

PART III: DISTINCTIVE THEMES OF THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL

An Interactional Sociology with Moral and Political Teeth

What ultimately distinguished the Santa Barbara School from other centers of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis was not a single theory, method, or domain of application, but a cluster of sensibilities—a way of seeing social life that took interaction seriously without shrinking it, that refused both structural determinism and analytic minimalism. Over time, six interlocking themes came to organize this sensibility. These themes did not emerge as a formal program; they crystallized through practice, pedagogy, and cumulative inquiry.

1. Structure-in-Action

At the conceptual center of the Santa Barbara School lies a distinctive understanding of social structure. Against sociological traditions that treat structure as an abstract system operating above or behind action, Santa Barbara scholars insisted that structure exists only insofar as it is accomplished in interaction. This was not a denial of structure, but a relocation of it.

Thomas P. Wilson’s work provided the theoretical grammar for this move. His distinction between normative and interpretive paradigms clarified what ethnomethodology rejected: the idea that action could be explained by invoking internalized norms or rule systems. In the interpretive paradigm, action is not caused by structure; rather, structure is produced, recognized, and stabilized through recurring practices. Wilson did not abandon the problem of structure; he respecified it.

Zimmerman’s empirical work gave this theoretical insight its concrete form. Whether studying welfare offices, emergency calls, or institutional paperwork, Zimmerman showed that structure appears in the moment-by-moment organization of interaction: in how turns are taken, how categories are invoked, how responsibility is allocated, and how accounts are rendered plausible. Structure is not background; it is something participants orient to, invoke, and reproduce.

This orientation shaped Santa Barbara research across domains. Maynard’s analyses of plea bargaining demonstrated that legal outcomes emerge through negotiation rather than mechanical rule application. Boden’s studies of meetings showed that organizational hierarchy and authority are sustained through sequential practices. Clayman’s work on press conferences revealed how institutional roles are enacted and contested through questioning formats. In each case, structure is visible not as an external force, but as a practical achievement.

2. Respecifying Social Psychology: From Minds to Moments

One of the Santa Barbara School’s most consequential contributions was its respecification of social psychology. Rather than rejecting psychological phenomena, Santa Barbara scholars relocated them. Intention, emotion, identity, understanding, and motive were no longer treated as hidden mental states inferred by analysts; they were examined as publicly displayed, interactionally managed, and morally assessed accomplishments.

The “Doing Gender” argument exemplified this shift. Gender was not conceptualized as a role, identity, or trait residing inside individuals, but as an ongoing interactional accomplishment subject to accountability. This insight opened the door to parallel analyses of race, class, professionalism, deviance, and competence.

Pamela Fishman’s work on “interactional shitwork” revealed how conversational labor—asking questions, sustaining topics, repairing breakdowns—is unevenly distributed, producing gender inequality through mundane practices. Spencer Cahill’s studies of stigma and public interaction demonstrated how selves are constituted through recognition and denial, through glances, silences, and spatial arrangements. Fenstermaker and West’s “doing difference” argument extended this logic across multiple axes of inequality.

My own work extends this respecification explicitly. In From Minds to Moments, The Moral Economy of Interaction, and The Wilson–Zimmerman Approach to Social Structure, I argue that social psychology must be rebuilt on interactional foundations if it is to avoid moral and analytic mystification. Rather than asking what people “really think” or “really feel,” I track how accountability, reasonableness, and competence are produced and evaluated in real time. Psychological states are not denied; they are respecified as interactional phenomena embedded in moral orders.

3. Workplace and Institutional Talk

The Santa Barbara School distinguished itself through sustained, cumulative attention to workplace and institutional interaction. Institutions were not treated as static organizations or formal rule systems, but as interactional machines—sites where talk, documents, bodies, and technologies are coordinated to produce consequential outcomes.

Zimmerman’s emergency call studies remain exemplary. They show how urgency, authority, and responsibility are not given by institutional position alone, but accomplished through carefully organized sequences of talk. Callers must display the legitimacy of their requests; dispatchers must manage uncertainty while maintaining institutional neutrality; responders must translate talk into action.

Maynard’s courtroom work, Clayman’s media studies, Boden’s organizational analyses, and the Whalens’ research on technologically mediated work all extend this insight. Across domains, institutions function not despite interaction but through it. Decisions are made, categories applied, and power exercised in the fine grain of interaction.

My own workplace studies—ranging from paramedic-nurse interaction to psychiatric interviews and street-level service encounters—extend this tradition while sharpening its critical edge. I show how professional authority is negotiated, how institutional accounts colonize lived experience, and how interaction becomes a site where structural violence is rendered mundane.

4. Organizational Reasoning

Closely linked to the study of institutions was a sustained concern with organizational reasoning: the practical logic through which organizations classify cases, manage accountability, and produce authoritative accounts. Drawing on Cicourel, Pollner, and Dorothy Smith, Santa Barbara scholars treated records, forms, and files not as neutral containers of information, but as interactional artifacts.

Organizational rationality, in this view, is not purely instrumental. It is moral, situational, and repair-oriented. Ambiguities are smoothed over; inconsistencies are normalized; responsibility is distributed in ways that protect institutional legitimacy. The appearance of rationality is itself an achievement.

My work on news discourse, institutional texts, and outreach documentation makes this point with particular force. In essays such as Seeing Like an Outreach Worker and Workplace Studies and Critical Interactionism, I show how organizations transform human suffering into administrable categories—and how those categories, once stabilized, shape what can be seen, said, and done.

5. Moral Economy and Accountability

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Santa Barbara School is its insistence that interaction order is moral order. Every interaction involves judgments about competence, credibility, deservingness, and blame. These judgments are rarely explicit, yet they shape participation, recognition, and exclusion.

Accountability—central to Garfinkel’s original formulation—was deepened in Santa Barbara work. Accountability is not merely the capacity to give an account; it is the ongoing evaluation of persons and actions against locally operative moral expectations. West and Fenstermaker showed how gender accountability operates in mundane interaction. Molotch demonstrated how public narratives encode moral judgments. Boden traced how organizational time and authority are moralized.

My concept of the Moral Economy of Interaction synthesizes these insights into a coherent analytic framework. It shows how interaction distributes dignity and blame, how some accounts are treated as credible while others are dismissed, and how inequality is reproduced without overt domination. This work gives Santa Barbara’s moral intuitions conceptual clarity.

6. Power and Inequality as Interactional Accomplishment

From early on, the Santa Barbara School resisted the temptation to treat power as something that exists only at the macro level. Power, in this tradition, is not merely structural or ideological; it is interactional. It happens in turn-taking, categorization, interruption, silence, and repair.

Gender domination, racial inequality, professional authority, and institutional exclusion were analyzed as sequential accomplishments. Molotch’s insistence on relevance pushed microsociology toward public issues, while feminist scholars demonstrated how domination is reproduced through ordinary practices.

The Second Santa Barbara School radicalizes this theme, but it is already present in the first. My own work on homelessness and street outreach makes this explicit: inequality is enacted in who receives civil inattention, who is moved along, who is rendered a “non-person.” Power is accomplished not through spectacular violence alone, but through the steady withdrawal of recognition.

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PART IV: THE SECOND SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL (2000–PRESENT)

From Structure to Inequality-in-Action

The Second Santa Barbara School emerges not as a rupture, but as a sharpening. Where the first generation demonstrated that structure is interactional, the second asks how violence, inequality, and exclusion are interactionally produced in contemporary institutional life.

With the retirement of Zimmerman and Wilson and the departure of Molotch, a new cohort of scholars took up the Santa Barbara sensibility and applied it to urgent problems: race, policing, diagnosis, and state power. What distinguishes this generation is not a loss of analytic rigor, but an intensification of moral focus.

Work by Geoffrey Raymond on epistemics shows how authority and knowledge are managed through subtle interactional asymmetries. Kevin Whitehead’s research demonstrates how race is invoked, suppressed, and made consequential in interaction—often precisely through its apparent absence. Waverly Duck’s work connects interactional expectations to historical patterns of racial domination, showing how “tacit racism” operates through ordinary moral assumptions. Jason Turowetz’s studies of diagnosis reveal how selves are institutionally produced through interactional processes that appear neutral but carry profound consequences.

These scholars do not abandon conversation analysis; they extend it. They show that the interaction order is not a refuge from politics, but one of its primary sites.

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PART V: CRITICAL INTERACTIONISM AND MY PLACE IN THE GENEALOGY

My work belongs inside this story, not at its margins. Through Doing Modernity and my 2025 EMCA essays, I have taken up the Santa Barbara inheritance and pushed it in directions that institutional sociology often avoids.

Critical Interactionism names what has been implicit in the Santa Barbara tradition all along: that interaction is where domination is reproduced—and where it can sometimes be disrupted. My Layered Moral Economy of Oppression framework synthesizes structure-in-action, moral accountability, and inequality-in-practice into a single analytic lens. My street outreach autoethnographies—Stonewall, Seeing Like an Outreach Worker, Maladjustment as Insight—bring ethnomethodology back to the street, to bodies, atmospheres, and lives rendered disposable.

That this work appears in a blog rather than a conventional journal is not a deviation from EM/CA history, but a continuation of it. Ethnomethodology has always advanced through unconventional venues: mimeographed lectures, unpublished transcripts, hybrid texts. What matters is not venue, but analytic seriousness and fidelity to lived interaction.

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CLOSING (NOT A CONCLUSION)

The Santa Barbara School is not a closed chapter. It is a way of working that insists on staying close to interaction while refusing moral neutrality. It teaches us that structure is something people do, that power lives in the details, and that injustice is often accomplished politely.

What remains unfinished—necessarily so—is the task of bringing this way of seeing into contact with suffering that cannot be fully repaired by analysis. The street, the clinic, the courtroom, the newsroom: these are not metaphors. They are where interaction becomes fate.

And that is where this tradition still belongs. 

Alumni of the First Santa Barbara School include:

Candace West

Douglas Maynard

Richard Hilbert

Deirdre Boden

Steve Clayman

Tim Halkowski

Wayne Martin Mellinger

Robin Lloyd

C. Lee Harringon

Lynda J. Ames

Dwight Fee

Joan Weston

Mardi Kidwell

Sarah E. Jones

THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY & CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Expanded Annotated Bibliography (January 2026)

I. FOUNDATIONAL ETHNOMETHODOLOGY & CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Garfinkel, Harold.

1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

The foundational statement of ethnomethodology, establishing accountability, reflexivity, indexicality, and the documentary method of interpretation.

Garfinkel, Harold.

2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Clarifies ethnomethodology as a Durkheimian program focused on social facts as ongoing accomplishments.

Sacks, Harvey.

1992. Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.

The analytic foundation of conversation analysis.

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson.

1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.

The canonical turn-taking model, foundational for all subsequent EM/CA work.

II. THE FIRST SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL (1965–2000)

Zimmerman & Wilson: Structure-in-Action

Wilson, Thomas P.

1970. “Normative and Interpretive Paradigms in Sociology.” In Understanding Everyday Life, edited by Jack D. Douglas, 57–79. Chicago: Aldine.

The theoretical backbone of the Santa Barbara School.

Wilson, Thomas P., and Don H. Zimmerman.

1979/80. “Ethnomethodology, Sociology and Theory.” Human Studies 2: 52–88.

Wilson, Thomas P.

1991. “Social Structure and the Sequential Organization of Interaction.” In Talk and Social Structure, edited by Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, 239–258. Cambridge: Polity.

A definitive statement of structure-in-action.

Zimmerman: Institutional Interaction & Accountability

Zimmerman, Don H.

1992. “The Interactional Organization of Calls for Emergency Assistance.” In Talk at Work, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 418–469. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zimmerman, Don H., and Mel Pollner.

1970. “The Everyday World as Phenomenon.” In Understanding Everyday Life, edited by Jack D. Douglas. Chicago: Aldine.

Zimmerman, Don H.

1998. “Identity, Context and Interaction.” In Identities in Talk, edited by C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe, 87–106. London: Sage.

Feminist Ethnomethodology

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman.

1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1: 125–151.

One of the most cited sociology articles ever; gender as an interactional accomplishment.

West, Candace.

1984. Routine Complications: Troubles with Talk Between Doctors and Patients. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker.

1995. “Doing Difference.” Gender & Society 9: 8–37.

Fenstermaker, Sarah, and Candace West.

2002. Doing Gender, Doing Difference. New York: Routledge.

Fishman, Pamela.

1977. “Interactional Shitwork.” Social Problems 25: 397–406.

Workplace, Law, Media, and Organization

Maynard, Douglas W.

1984. Inside Plea Bargaining. New York: Plenum.

Maynard, Douglas W., and Thomas P. Wilson.

1980. “On the Reification of Social Structure.” In Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 1, edited by Scott G. McNall, 287–322. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Boden, Deirdre.

1994. The Business of Talk. Cambridge: Polity.

Boden, Deirdre, and Don H. Zimmerman, eds.

1991. Talk and Social Structure. Cambridge: Polity.

Boden, Deirdre, and Harvey Molotch.

1994. “The Compulsion of Proximity.” In NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, edited by Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, 257–286. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Molotch, Harvey, and Marilyn Lester.

1974. “News as Purposive Behavior.” American Sociological Review 39: 101–112.

Molotch, Harvey, and Deirdre Boden.

1985. “Talking Social Structure.” American Sociological Review 50: 273–288.

Molotch, Harvey, and Mitch Duneier.

1999. “Talking City Trouble.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 1263–1295.

Counterculture, Phenomenology, and Early Ethnography

Wieder, D. Lawrence.

1974. Language and Social Reality. The Hague: Mouton.

Zimmerman, Don H., and D. Lawrence Wieder.

1977. “You Can’t Help But Get Stoned.” Social Problems 25(2): 198–207.

Wieder, D. Lawrence, and Don H. Zimmerman.

1976. “Becoming a Freak.” Youth & Society 7(3): 311–344.

Sudnow, David.

1967. Passing On. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

III. THE SECOND SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL (2000–PRESENT)

Clayman: Media, Politics, and Institutional Interaction

Clayman, Steven E.

1992. “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality.” In Talk at Work, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 163–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clayman, Steven E.

1993. “Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response.” American Sociological Review 58: 110–130.

Clayman, Steven E., and Ann Reisner.

1998. “Gatekeeping in Action.” American Sociological Review 63: 178–199.

Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage.

2002. The News Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clayman, Steven E., et al.

2006. “Historical Trends in Questioning Presidents.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36: 561–583.

Heritage, John, and Steven E. Clayman.

2010. Talk in Action. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage.

2021. “Conversation Analysis and the Study of Sociohistorical Change.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 54(2): 225–240.

Lerner: Turn-Taking, Grammar, and Collaborative Action

Lerner, Gene H.

1991. “On the Syntax of Sentences-in-Progress.” Language in Society 20: 441–458.

Lerner, Gene H.

1996. “On the ‘Semi-Permeable’ Character of Grammatical Units.” In Interaction and Grammar, edited by E. Ochs et al., 238–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lerner, Gene H.

2003. “Selecting Next Speaker.” Language in Society 32(2): 177–201.

Lerner, Gene H., ed.

2004. Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lerner, Gene H., Don H. Zimmerman, and Mardi Kidwell.

2011. “Formal Structures of Practical Tasks.” In Embodied Interaction, edited by J. Streeck et al., 58–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lerner, Gene H., Geoffrey Raymond, and John Heritage, eds.

2017. Enabling Human Conduct. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Whitehead, Kevin A., and Gene H. Lerner.

2009. “When Are Persons ‘White’?” Discourse & Society 20(5): 613–641.

Whitehead, Kevin A., and Gene H. Lerner.

2022. “When Simple Self-Reference Is Too Simple.” Language in Society 51(3): 403–426.

Raymond, Zimmerman, Jones: Epistemics, Authority, Gesture

Raymond, Geoffrey, and Don H. Zimmerman.

2007. “Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 40: 33–61.

Raymond, Geoffrey, and Don H. Zimmerman.

2016. “Closing Matters.” Discourse Studies 18(6): 716–736.

Raymond, Geoffrey, L. Jungleib, Don H. Zimmerman, and N. Jones.

2022. “Rules and Policeable Matters.” In The Ethnomethodology Program, edited by J. Heritage and D. Maynard, 162–187. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Sarah E., and Don H. Zimmerman.

2003. “A Child’s Point and the Achievement of Intentionality.” Gesture 3(2): 155–185.

Examines how children’s pointing emerges as an interactional achievement.

Halkowski: Medical Interaction & Epistemics

Halkowski, Timothy.

1990. “‘Role’ as an Interactional Device.” Social Problems 37(4): 564–577.

Halkowski, Timothy.

2006. “Realizing the Illness.” In Communication in Medical Care, edited by J. Heritage and D. Maynard, 86–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halkowski, Timothy, and Virginia Teas Gill.

2010. “Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology.” In Sage Handbook on Qualitative Health Research. London: Sage.

Maynard, Douglas W., Steven Clayman, Timothy Halkowski, and Mardi Kidwell.

2010. “Toward an Interdisciplinary Field.” In The Social History of Language and Social Interaction Research, edited by W. Leeds-Hurwitz, 313–333. New York: Hampton Press.

Kidwell: Gaze, Embodiment, and Police Interaction

Kidwell, Mardi.

2005. “Gaze as Social Control.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(4): 417–449.

Kidwell, Mardi.

2006. “‘Calm Down!’” Discourse Studies 8(6): 745–770.

Kidwell, Mardi, and Don H. Zimmerman.

2007. “Joint Attention as Action.” Journal of Pragmatics 39(3): 592–611.

Kidwell, Mardi.

2009. “What Happened?” Research on Language and Social Interaction 42(1): 20–41.

Kidwell, Mardi.

2018. “Early Alignment in Police Traffic Stops.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 51(3): 292–312.

Whalen & Whalen: Emergency Calls, Workplace Studies, Technology

Whalen, Jack, Don H. Zimmerman, and Marilyn R. Whalen.

1988. “When Words Fail.” Social Problems 35(4): 335–362.

Classic analysis of a fatal 911 call.

Whalen, Marilyn R., and Don H. Zimmerman.

1990. “Describing Trouble.” Language in Society 19: 465–492.

Whalen, Jack, and Geoffrey Raymond.

1991. “Conversation Analysis.” In Encyclopedia of Sociology. New York: Macmillan.

Whalen, Jack, and Eric Vinkhuyzen.

2000. “Expert Systems in (Inter)action.” In Workplace Studies, edited by P. Luff et al., 92–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Szymanski, Margaret H., and Jack Whalen, eds.

2011. Making Work Visible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Race, Categorization, Inequality

Whitehead, Kevin A., Elizabeth Stokoe, and Geoffrey Raymond.

2024. Categories in Social Interaction. London: Routledge.

Tam, Catherine L., Kevin A. Whitehead, and Geoffrey Raymond.

2024. “Inequality in Action.” In Critical Conversation Analysis. London: Routledge.

Duck, Waverly.

2015. No Way Out. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rawls, Anne Warfield, and Waverly Duck.

2020. Tacit Racism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maynard, Douglas W., and Jason Turowetz.

2024. Autistic Intelligence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

IV. WAYNE MARTIN MELLINGER: CRITICAL INTERACTIONISM

Dissertation and Early Publications

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

1990. Negotiated Orders: The Social Organization of Paramedic Calls for Emergency Field Orders. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

1994. “Negotiated Orders: The Negotiation of Directives in Paramedic-Nurse Interaction.” Symbolic Interaction 17(2): 165–185.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

1995. “Talk, Power and Professionals.” In Therapeutic and Everyday Discourse as Behavior Change, edited by J. Siegfried. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Doing Modernity Blog Essays (2025)

Santa Barbara School History & Foundations

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “The Wilson-Zimmerman Approach to Social Structure: Architects of the Santa Barbara School.” Doing Modernity, 24 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “On Maynard and Wilson’s ‘On the Reification of Social Structure’ (1980).” Doing Modernity, 21 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “On Maynard and Zimmerman’s ‘Topical Talk, Ritual and the Social Organization of Relationships.’” Doing Modernity, 5 November.

Studies of Individual Scholars

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “When the Doctor is a ‘Lady’: Candace West, the Santa Barbara School, and the Micro-Politics of Gender.” Doing Modernity, 31 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Timothy Halkowski and the Mirandum of Ordinary Medical Life.” Doing Modernity, 24 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Jason Turowetz and the Second Santa Barbara School.” Doing Modernity, 23 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Interaction Order at the Margins: Robin James Smith’s Sociology of Homeless Outreach.” Doing Modernity, 22 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Democracy Under Threat: Steven Clayman’s Interactional Analysis.” Doing Modernity, 17 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Douglas W. Maynard and the Moral Architecture of Institutional Life.” Doing Modernity, 7 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Talking City Trouble: Urban Micro-Ethnography and the Moral Order of Public Space.” Doing Modernity, 6 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “On Marilyn Whalen and Jack Whalen’s ‘Studying Workscapes.’” Doing Modernity, 5 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Organizations Are Talking: Deirdre Boden and the Sequential Constitution of Institutional Order.” Doing Modernity, 3 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch, ‘The Compulsion of Proximity.’” Doing Modernity, 3 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Harvey Molotch and the Foundations of Critical Interactionism.” Doing Modernity, 3 July.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “George Herbert Mead and the Making of Symbolic Interactionism (Revised).” Doing Modernity, 21 May.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “The Many Interaction Orders: Goffman, Rawls, Smith.” Doing Modernity, 21 May.

Critical Interactionism: Theoretical Development

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “The Insurrection of the Next Turn: Sequential Organization and the Praxis of Liberation.” Doing Modernity, 30 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “What Do We Owe One Another Once We See Asymmetries Being Done.” Doing Modernity, 20 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Beyond Asymmetries-in-Action: Critical Interactionism, Moral Economy, and the Unequal Distribution of Consequences.” Doing Modernity, 20 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression: Completing the Santa Barbara School’s Unfinished Revolution.” Doing Modernity, 20 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “The Moral Economy of Interaction.” Doing Modernity, 10 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Building a New Astronomy Without a Telescope: Why Critical Interactionism Cannot Ignore EM/CA.” Doing Modernity, 26 September.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “How to Read People: A Critical Interactionist Guide.” Doing Modernity, 20 September.

Applied EM/CA & Professional Practice

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Seeing Like an Outreach Worker: Professional Vision and the Politics of Homelessness.” Doing Modernity, 28 December.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Workplace Studies and Critical Interactionism.” Doing Modernity, 15 November.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis in Social Work.” Doing Modernity, 23 October.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “EM/CA at Xerox PARC.” Doing Modernity, 14 October.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis in Human–Computer Interaction.” Doing Modernity, 4 October.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “An Autoethnography of Human-AI Interaction: Towards an Ethnomethodology of Artificial Accountability.” Doing Modernity, 4 October.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “First Encounter at the Stone Wall: A Flash Autoethnography of Street Outreach.” Doing Modernity, 26 September.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Interactionist Studies of Work (Revised).” Doing Modernity, 3 July.

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

2025. “Embodied Ecstasies: The Sacred Choreography of Party and Play.” Doing Modernity, 23 November.

Forthcoming (2026)

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

Forthcoming 2026. “From Minds to Moments: How Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Reconceived Sociological Social Psychology.” 

Mellinger, Wayne Martin.

Forthcoming 2026. “Reading the News: An Ethnomethodological Approach.”