Accounting for discrimination through categorization work: An examination of the target-of-discrimination group members’ practices

Abstract

This paper examines members’ practices involved in accounting for discrimination against their own group in interaction. Applying membership categorization analysis to interviews conducted with Chinese international students in Japan, I show that membership categories and category-based knowledge constitute crucial resources for target-of-discrimination group members’ making discrimination intelligible and reasonable. Specifically, interviewee accounts for discrimination by bounding certain activities/traits to the membership category being discriminated against. Meanwhile, those activities/traits are displayed as sanctionable given the social relation the discriminating and the discriminated sides are embedded in. Consequently, discrimination becomes reasonable and understandable in its given context. Interviewer, drawing upon common-sense knowledge about social categories, regularly challenges interviewee’s account by problematizing the association between the proposed activities/traits and the membership category and by contending the proposed sanctionable nature of those activities/traits. Interviewee can either persist through such challenges by further categorization work or modify their original account of discrimination. As such, target-of-discrimination group members’ accounting for discrimination as reasonable and intelligible is collaboratively accomplished through participants’ categorization work in interaction.