‘It's Training Man’! Membership Categorization and the Institutional Moral Order of Basketball Training

Abstract

In this paper we examine how physical and verbal actions are constituted as morally accountable within an institutional context. Through the detailed examination of a video recording of the aftermath of an on-court altercation between players in a basketball training session, we explore how the members work to establish a locally organized institutional context for an action within which in situ moral reasoning practices are then brought to bear to make sense of the players' actions and render them as morally accountable or not. In examining the moral organization of institutional accountability in an instance of basketball training activity, the paper develops a further level of detail to understand the reflexive organization of membership categories and the institutional moral order.Bryn Evans is Lecturer in the School of Communication Studies at the Auckland University of Technology. His research focuses on the interactional and multimodal organization of social activities in different settings, including sports coaching and human-robot interaction.

Manipulation in Board Game Interactions: Being a Sporting Player

“…The management of being a sporting player, then, comes down to how and when one negotiates the acceptability of the action. This supports prior work that has found that players rely on the institutional context, or overarching activity, to negotiate the acceptability of game actions (Evans and Fitzgerald 2016).…”

“…Part of the purpose of examining these interactions is to discover what those contingencies are. Evans and Fitzgerald (2016) are the main contributors to understanding adult moral orientations during games (for children, see, e.g., Theobald and Danby 2019). Their study shows how members negotiate the acceptability of aggressive behavior during basketball practice.…”

“…The role of fairness and moral play has recently received more attention in EMCA literature (e.g., Evaldsson ; Evans and Fitzgerald ; Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig ). However, the majority of EMCA work on play focuses on children's interactions, and where play among adults is examined, it is usually not in the context of morality.…”

6 Rating and Reflecting: Displaying Rater Identities in Collegial L2 English Oral Assessment

“…This chapter has targeted how rater identity positionings in situated talk between professionals, frequently adopted through self-categorizations and accounts, enforce, justify or mitigate past assessment performances. Through a CA lens, we have demonstrated some ways in which raters' refl ection-in-action can be accessed in descriptions and accounts, partly accomplished through categorization practices (Evans & Fitzgerald, 2016;Hauser, 2011;Sacks, 1992), which can be examined sequentially (Stokoe, 2012). The two sequential contexts examined in moderation interactions between teachers-as-raters -in relation to non-present others and in disagreements about grades -revealed how identity positionings contribute to the establishment of lay/expert roles, and to the shared construction of severity as 'more professional' than leniency.…”

Coordinated action, communication, and creativity in basketball in superdiversity

“…In particular, it is guided by Garfinkel's idea that ordinary people are not sociological fools but knowledgeable agents who draw on common-sense knowledge to normatively build intersubjectivity and work cooperatively with others to accomplish everyday goal-oriented activities. Ethnomethodological studies which are relevant to our own work on basketball include Evans and Fitzgerald's (2016) video analysis of basketball coaching sessions, which examined how participants locally negotiate the context of 'training' to make players' actions accountable. Haddington, Mondada, and Neville's (2013) work on the dynamics of language, embodied conduct, and spatial and material orientation, in interaction in mobile situations involving both micro moves (see below) and the movement of people's whole bodies from one position or location to another ('co-ordinated mobility'), also offers guidance.…”