MELLINGER'S ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ARTICLES ON THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL

Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

An Annotated Bibliography 

on the Santa Barbara School of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Independent Scholar | Santa Barbara, California

Compiled February 2026 (Ongoing Project)

Introduction: Documenting an Invisible College

The University of California, Santa Barbara has been, since the mid-1960s, one of the world's most significant centers for the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA). Yet despite its remarkable productivity—generating some of the most-cited scholarship in sociology, including West and Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" (1987), arguably the most cited article in the discipline—the Santa Barbara School has never received systematic documentation as a coherent intellectual tradition. This annotated bibliography is part of an ongoing effort to remedy that absence.

The Santa Barbara School of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) refers to a distinctive intellectual tradition that emerged from the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara beginning in the late 1960s and extending to the present. For years it was recognized as a third major current within EMCA scholarship, distinct from the UCLA School originallhy associated with Harold Garfinkel and Emanuel Schegloff and the Boston-Manchester School associated with George Psathas and Jeff Coulter (Boston) and Wes Sharrock, John Hughes and Bob Anderson (Manchester, England). Where the UCLA School emphasizes ethnomethodology's radical empiricism and the Boston-Manchester School emphasized the philosophical connections to Wittgenstein the Santa Barbara School insists on the social embeddedness of interaction and its moral and political dimensions.

The institutional origins of this school trace to Don H. Zimmerman, who joined the UCSB faculty in 1965 after training under Harold Garfinkel at UCLA. Over the following decades, Zimmerman trained generations of graduate students in rigorous empirical studies of talk, interaction, and social organization—hosting intensive weekly data sessions that became legendary in the field. Alongside Zimmerman, Thomas P. Wilson provided philosophical depth, Harvey Molotch supplied critical urgency, and a remarkable cohort of graduate students—including Douglas Maynard, Steven Clayman, Candace West, Deirdre Boden, Jack Whalen, and Timothy Halkowski—extended the tradition in complementary directions. In recent years, a second generation of Santa Barbara scholars—including Geoffrey Raymond, Gene Lerner, Kevin Whitehead, Waverly Duck, and Jason Turowetz—has revitalized the legacy while forging new paths especially in the study of race, policing, and interactional inequality.

Six features distinguish the Santa Barbara School from related traditions: (1) ethnographic integration—embedding detailed CA in ethnographic accounts of institutional life; (2) structure-in-action—treating social structure as accomplished in and through sequential interaction rather than prior to it; (3) attention to the moral order as an interactional achievement; (4) a critical orientation toward power and inequality largely absent from Schegloff's analytically restrained CA; (5) genuine engagement with Goffman and symbolic interactionism as fellow travelers rather than competitors; and (6) broad sociological engagement with mainstream topics including gender, race, professional authority, and political discourse.

The essays collected in this annotated bibliography represent my systematic effort to document this tradition through the research platform Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism (doingmodernity.blogspot.com). The project began in earnest in late 2024 and is ongoing. Essays profile key figures, analyze landmark texts, and develop the theoretical framework I call Critical Interactionism—a synthesis of ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and critical social theory that treats interaction as a site where power, morality, and social structure are simultaneously enacted and contested. Central to this framework is the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression (LMEO), which argues that oppression operates through six interconnected layers, all reproduced and contested through the sequential organization of everyday talk.

This bibliography is organized thematically rather than strictly chronologically, with sections covering: (I) overviews and theoretical frameworks; (II) founders and first-generation figures; (III) institutional sites and applied work; (IV) the Second Santa Barbara School; and (V) Critical Interactionism and normative questions. Each section includes a brief orienting note. Planned future essays will extend documentation to additional figures including Mardi Kidwell, additional themes including membership categorization analysis, and further applied domains. This is, emphatically, a work in progress.

—Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., Santa Barbara, February 2026

I. Overviews and Theoretical Frameworks

These essays provide the broadest orientation to the Santa Barbara School as an intellectual tradition, situating it within the larger landscape of EM/CA and sociology. They are the best starting point for readers new to the project.

The Santa Barbara School of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. January 10, 2026.

This foundational overview essay introduces the Santa Barbara School as a distinctive third current within EM/CA scholarship, distinguishing it from the UCLA and Boston-Manchester Schools. It identifies the six defining features of the tradition—ethnographic integration, structure-in-action, moral order, critical orientation, Goffman engagement, and broad sociological relevance—and traces the school's development from Zimmerman's 1965 arrival at UCSB through the contemporary second generation. The essay provides the conceptual architecture for the entire series, and is best read as a companion piece to the Wikipedia-style entry on the school's institutional history and key contributors. It establishes the interpretive framework that subsequent essays apply to individual figures and texts.

From Minds to Moments: How Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Reconceived Sociological Social Psychology. January 15, 2026.

This essay traces the paradigm shift from cognitive and attitudinal models of social psychology to the interactional and sequential approach pioneered by the Santa Barbara School. It argues that the shift is not merely methodological but ontological: rather than treating mental states as the causes of behavior, EM/CA locates sociality in the observable sequential organization of talk-in-interaction. The essay situates the Santa Barbara tradition within the broader history of sociological social psychology, including Mead, Goffman, and symbolic interactionism, and demonstrates how the UCSB approach offers a more empirically tractable and theoretically sophisticated account of human sociality. This is essential reading for sociologists and social psychologists unfamiliar with EM/CA's disciplinary stakes.

How UCSB Became a World Center for Studying Race, Policing, and Everyday Interaction. January 28, 2026.

This essay examines UCSB sociology's emergence as a leading global site for EM/CA research on race and institutional interaction, focusing particularly on the contributions of the second-generation Santa Barbara School. It traces the intellectual lineage from Zimmerman's foundational work through Geoffrey Raymond's and Kevin Whitehead's contemporary research on racial categorization in police-civilian encounters, courtroom proceedings, and medical interviews. The essay argues that this critical turn was built into the Santa Barbara DNA—particularly through Harvey Molotch's insistence that interactional detail must illuminate structural power—and that the second generation radicalized this orientation through explicit engagement with Black Studies and critical race theory.

The Moral Economy of Interaction. November 10, 2025.

This theoretically ambitious essay develops the concept of the "moral economy of interaction," extending E.P. Thompson's and James C. Scott's analyses of moral economy from markets to meanings and from peasant communities to everyday talk. Drawing on Mauss, Gouldner, Garfinkel, Sacks, and Goffman, it argues that every interaction constitutes a moral event in which recognition, accountability, and respect circulate according to norms participants experience as binding rather than merely conventional. The essay reframes morality not as an external constraint on interaction but as a situated practice—an ongoing accomplishment through which justice, solidarity, and decency are sustained or eroded in the micro-politics of everyday life. This is the theoretical cornerstone of Critical Interactionism.

The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression: Completing the Santa Barbara School's Unfinished Revolution. November 20, 2025.

This essay introduces the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression (LMEO)—the central analytical framework of Critical Interactionism—which argues that oppression operates through six interconnected layers, each with different mechanisms, temporalities, and subjective weights, all of which are reproduced and contested through interactional practices. The framework is positioned as completing the unfinished project of the Santa Barbara School: taking seriously both the sequential constitution of social order and the structural reproduction of domination. The essay engages critically with existing frameworks for theorizing intersectionality and structural inequality, arguing that they neglect the interactional level at which oppression is actually accomplished and potentially resisted.

The Wilson-Zimmerman Approach to Social Structure. November 24, 2025.

This essay reconstructs the theoretical framework jointly developed by Thomas P. Wilson and Don H. Zimmerman, which I identify as the Santa Barbara School's most significant contribution to sociological theory. Their central claim—that social structure exists nowhere but in the sequential organization of members' practices—inverts the standard sociological relationship between structure and action, treating structure not as a constraint prior to interaction but as an ongoing accomplishment within it. The essay traces the development of this position through their co-authored work and through Wilson's landmark 1991 chapter "Social Structure and the Sequential Organization of Interaction," demonstrating its continuing relevance for contemporary debates about structure and agency.

On Maynard and Wilson's "On the Reification of Social Structure" (1980). November 21, 2025.

A close reading of Maynard and Wilson's 1980 paper, which I treat as a foundational text for the Santa Barbara School's anti-reificationist theory of social structure. The essay demonstrates how Maynard and Wilson challenged the dominant structural-functionalist tendency to treat social structures as things existing independently of the practices through which they are produced and reproduced. The paper is located within the broader EM/CA critique of normative sociology, drawing on Wilson's earlier work on interpretive paradigms and anticipating subsequent developments in practice theory. I use the essay to connect mid-century EM/CA debates to contemporary concerns in social theory.

II. Founders and First-Generation Figures

These essays profile the scholars who built the Santa Barbara School from 1965 through approximately 2000, examining both their biographical trajectories and their substantive intellectual contributions.

Don H. Zimmerman: The Quiet Maverick of Ethnomethodology. November 16, 2025.

This brief essay introduces Don H. Zimmerman, documents his training under Garfinkel at UCLA, his move to UCSB in 1965, and his five-decade role as the school's central architect. It traces his trajectory from early bureaucratic sociology through his pioneering work on emergency dispatch calls, gender and interaction, and the co-edited volume Talk and Social Structure (1991). The essay characterizes Zimmerman's intellectual style as combining rigorous empiricism with strategic theoretical awareness—never flagging his departures from Garfinkel's most radical positions, but consistently extending EM/CA toward new institutional domains and sociological concerns. Essential for understanding the school's formative pedagogical culture.

Harvey Molotch and the Foundations of Critical Interactionism. July 3, 2025.

This essay positions Molotch as the "critical conscience" of the Santa Barbara School and the key transitional figure toward Critical Interactionism. It examines his trajectory from journalism through urban sociology and his sustained effort to push EM/CA toward macro-concerns, structural power, and political critique. The essay analyzes his major collaborative works—with Lester on news production, with Boden on Watergate, and with Duneier on urban public space—as demonstrations of how interactional detail can illuminate the operations of power. Mellinger argues that Molotch's insistence on answering the "so what?" question is the missing ethical dimension that Critical Interactionism must supply.

When the Doctor is a "Lady": Candace West, the Santa Barbara School, and the Micro-Politics of Gender. December 31, 2025.

This essay examines Candace West's foundational contributions to feminist conversation analysis, focusing on her path-breaking studies of doctor-patient interaction and her co-authored work with Zimmerman on "Doing Gender" (1987). It situates West within the Santa Barbara tradition while showing how her feminist commitments pushed the tradition toward questions largely avoided in mainstream CA: the distribution of interactional labor, the accomplishment of gender asymmetry in talk, and the reproduction of professional authority through conversational practice. The essay traces the reception and continuing influence of the "doing gender" framework, including West and Fenstermaker's subsequent extension to race and class in "Doing Difference" (1995).

Douglas W. Maynard and the Moral Architecture of Institutional Life. November 7, 2025.

This essay presents Maynard as the school's foremost "moral microsociologist"—the scholar who most systematically examined how moral work is accomplished through the sequential organization of institutional talk. It analyzes his landmark studies of plea bargaining and diagnosis delivery, focusing on his development of the perspective-display series, the evidential-interactional nexus, and the interactional substrate as analytic concepts that reveal what I call "the moral architecture of institutional life." The essay positions Maynard's work as the bridge between the Santa Barbara School's foundational commitments and Critical Interactionism's normative agenda, arguing that seeing asymmetry in action generates unavoidable moral obligations.

Democracy Under Threat: Steven Clayman's Interactional Analysis and the Crisis We Can No Longer Ignore. November 17, 2025.

This essay examines Clayman's career-long study of news interviews and political accountability, including his co-authored volume The News Interview (2002) with John Heritage. It demonstrates how Clayman's sequential analysis of adversarial questioning, evasion, and interruption illuminates the interactional machinery of democratic accountability—and, by extension, how the degradation of that machinery in contemporary media environments constitutes a crisis for democratic practice. I apply Critical Interactionism to argue that Clayman's resolutely descriptive project implicitly carries normative stakes that the tradition has been reluctant to articulate. This essay exemplifies how the Santa Barbara tradition can be mobilized for political critique.

Timothy Halkowski and the Mirandum of Ordinary Medical Life. December 24, 2025.

This essay examines Timothy Halkowski's contribution to the Santa Barbara tradition through his studies of medical interaction, introducing the concept of the "mirandum"—the wonder-worthy features of ordinary medical life that both patients and practitioners treat as requiring explanation or accounting. The essay situates Halkowski's work within the broader Santa Barbara interest in institutional interaction and medical sociology, while drawing out its distinctive contribution to understanding how patients negotiate symptom presentation and how clinicians accomplish diagnosis through sequential interactional work. It demonstrates how close attention to unremarkable moments of medical talk can reveal consequential patterns in care and accountability.

III. Institutional Sites and Applied Work

These essays examine the application of Santa Barbara EM/CA to specific institutional settings and social domains, including organizational life, workplace technology, legal institutions, and urban public space.

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

This essay examines Deirdre Boden's pioneering work on organizational talk, focusing on The Business of Talk (1994) and her co-edited volume Talk and Social Structure (1991). It demonstrates how Boden showed that organizations are not structures within which talk occurs but are themselves constituted through the sequential organization of talk—meetings, negotiations, phone calls, and corridor conversations are the social organization of the firm. The essay also examines Boden's unusual theoretical move of integrating CA with Giddens's structuration theory, a synthesis that I both credit and critique, arguing it points toward Critical Interactionism's more explicit engagement with power and domination.

On Boden and Molotch's The Compulsion of Proximity. November 4, 2025.

A close reading of Boden and Molotch's influential essay on the persistent human preference for co-present interaction despite the availability of remote communication technologies. The essay examines their argument that physical co-presence affords interactional affordances—real-time repair, embodied indexicality, and the full panoply of conversational machinery—that remote media systematically impoverish. I use the essay to reflect on the continuing relevance of face-to-face interaction for social organization, while extending Boden and Molotch's analysis toward questions of who has access to co-present interaction and who is structurally excluded from its benefits—a class and race dimension absent from the original.

On Marilyn Whalen and Jack Whalen's "Studying Workscapes". November 5, 2025.

A close reading of Whalen and Whalen et alia's methodological essay on studying workplace settings—"workscapes"—that combines ethnomethodological sensibility with ethnographic immersion in technologically complex environments. The essay examines how the Whalens developed an approach to CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) research that treated technology as embedded in and constituted by interactional practices rather than as a determinant of social behavior. I situate this work within the broader Santa Barbara tradition while noting its practical consequences for technology design, arguing that the Whalens demonstrated how EM/CA could generate usable knowledge about the social organization of work without compromising its analytic integrity.

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis at Xerox PARC: Remaking Technology Through the Social Order. October 14, 2025.

This essay examines the remarkable episode in which ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts—including Lucy Suchman, Marilyn Whalen, and Jack Whalen—worked at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 1990s, studying workplace interaction to redesign the technology of the office. The essay treats this as a crucial demonstration of the practical applicability of EM/CA research, showing how the tradition's commitment to studying actual practices in situ—rather than ideal models of task completion—generated insights about human-computer interaction that purely cognitive approaches missed. I use this episode to argue for the continuing relevance of the Santa Barbara tradition to technology studies, organizational sociology, and science and technology studies.

Jack Whalen and the Documentary Constitution of Organizational Reality. February 28, 2026.

The most recent essay in the series at time of compilation, this piece focuses on Jack Whalen's analysis of how documents—forms, records, databases—participate in the constitution of organizational reality. Drawing on ethnomethodological and workplace studies traditions, it examines how documents are not merely passive records of organizational action but active participants in the accomplishment of that action, structuring what gets noticed, recorded, and treated as consequential. I connect Whalen's insights to the broader Santa Barbara interest in the sequential constitution of institutional order, while extending the analysis toward questions of documentation, accountability, and the paper trails through which institutional power is exercised and contested.

On Maynard and Zimmerman's "Topical Talk, Ritual and the Social Organization of Relationships". November 5, 2025.

A close reading of this early collaborative paper by Maynard and Zimmerman, which examines how topical talk—conversation about particular subjects—serves ritual and relational functions beyond the transmission of information. The essay demonstrates how the paper anticipates subsequent developments in CA research on social interaction in non-institutional settings, and how it reflects the Santa Barbara School's engagement with Goffman's dramaturgical sociology alongside rigorous sequential analysis. I use the paper to explore how even "ordinary" conversation is institutionally organized and morally structured, anticipating the moral economy framework developed in later essays.

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

This essay examines Molotch and Duneier's study of interaction in urban public spaces—sidewalk vendors, street corners, and contested public territories—as a demonstration of Critical Interactionism applied to urban sociology. It shows how the micro-organization of talk and movement in public space reproduces and contests the racial and class order of the city, making visible the moral norms that structure who belongs where and under what conditions. I extend the analysis through his own street outreach experience in Santa Barbara, connecting the academic literature to the lived reality of homelessness, policing, and the interactional organization of urban exclusion.

IV. The Second Santa Barbara School

These essays document the revitalization of the Santa Barbara tradition by a second generation of UCSB-trained scholars, with particular attention to new directions in the study of race, policing, and interactional inequality.

Jason Turowetz and the Second Santa Barbara School. December 28, 2025.

This essay profiles Jason Turowetz as a representative figure of the Second Santa Barbara School—the generation of UCSB-trained scholars who have extended the tradition in new directions after 2000. It examines his collaborative work with Maynard on autism diagnosis and his theoretical engagement with the reflexive dimensions of EM/CA as a sociological practice. I argue that Turowetz exemplifies the second generation's characteristic achievement: maintaining the rigorous sequential analysis of the first generation while opening the tradition to greater theoretical reflexivity and critical engagement with race, disability, and structural inequality. The essay serves as an introduction to the broader landscape of contemporary Santa Barbara EMCA.

V. Critical Interactionism and Normative Questions

These essays press the ethical and political implications of the Santa Barbara tradition, asking what moral obligations follow from seeing asymmetries and inequalities enacted in everyday interaction.

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

This essay confronts directly the normative question that hangs over the Santa Barbara tradition: once we have documented, with sequential precision, how gender asymmetry or racial dominance or class privilege are accomplished through the fine-grained organization of everyday talk, what follows? The essay argues that analytic neutrality in the face of documented injustice is itself a moral stance—one that the Santa Barbara tradition, with its commitment to answering the "so what?" question, should refuse. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory alongside EM/CA, I develop a framework for what I call "ethically engaged interactionism," in which analytical rigor and moral commitment reinforce rather than undermine each other.

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

This essay extends the normative argument of "What Do We Owe One Another" by developing a theory of the unequal distribution of consequences—the asymmetric ways in which interactional patterns generate differential outcomes across social positions. It argues that Critical Interactionism must attend not only to asymmetries-in-action (how inequality is accomplished sequentially) but also to the material and structural consequences of those asymmetries, which accumulate across interactions, institutions, and lifetimes. The essay engages with the moral economy framework to show how norms of recognition and respect are systematically violated in ways that compound across the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression, generating the lived experience of marginalization and abandonment.

VI. Planned Future Essays

The following areas are under development. This project is explicitly ongoing, and the bibliography will be updated as new essays are completed.

Among the first-generation figures not yet profiled is Mardi Kidwell, whose work on embodied action, gaze, and children's interaction represents a significant strand of Santa Barbara EMCA. Planned essays will also examine Pamela Fishman's foundational feminist contribution ("Interactional Shitwork," 1977) in greater depth, and will profile the second-generation scholars Geoffrey Raymond, Gene Lerner, Kevin Whitehead, and Waverly Duck more systematically. Additional thematic essays are planned on membership categorization analysis, the Santa Barbara approach to gesture and embodiment, and the school's influence on CSCW and human-computer interaction research.

Theoretical essays in development include further elaboration of the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression framework, with applications to homelessness and the fentanyl crisis drawn from my street outreach work in Santa Barbara; and a systematic comparison of Critical Interactionism with kindred frameworks in critical discourse analysis, institutional ethnography, and postcolonial sociology.

Readers interested in following this project as it develops are invited to visit Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism at doingmodernity.blogspot.com.

This document was compiled by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., in February 2026. All entries are drawn from the research platform Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism. This is an evolving scholarly project; citation information and dates should be verified against the platform directly.