Culture-in-Action: A Membership Categorization Analysis of Doctor-Patient Interactions in New Zealand General Practice
type: CreativeWork
description: In the late 1980’s an enormous field of literature and professional mandates was developed, based on the premise that different cultural groups have different health values. This field has colloquially come to be known as Cultural Competence. However, problematically, the terms, outcomes and empirical standards of the field have never been sufficiently defined in a manner that does not “preimpose” categories of culture nor do most of the terms of the field address structural or historic inequalities. Essentially what is set forth in this dissertation is the idea that culture cannot be professionally mandated by “preimposed” categories or competencies but rather that culture is part of an identity practice that occurs in a bidirectional contextual manner for doctors and patients each time they come together to get the task of healthcare done. This is a study of talk-in-interaction, specifically, Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). MCA refers to the range of practices a speech community deploys to accomplish their everyday social interactions. At the heart of these interactions is the idea of membership and its relationships to the categories used to co-ordinate social life, make sense of experience and create real life empirical understandings of social behaviors and problems. MCA was the pioneering development of Harvey Sacks (1967). In the present work I sought to explore the ways in which doctors and patients in New Zealand General Practice used their everyday identities to get the work of healthcare done. The expected Standardized Relational Pairs of doctor and patient were demonstrated and the moral rights and obligations of being a patient and being a doctor were demonstrated by each part of this pair. Findings that were new and unique to the present study were the use of an Omnirelevant Device, healthcare, to both constrain and direct doctor/patient talk and the use of Interculturality by doctors and patients. That is, identities that co-exist and are di…
abstract: In the late 1980’s an enormous field of literature and professional mandates was developed, based on the premise that different cultural groups have different health values. This field has colloquially come to be known as Cultural Competence. However, problematically, the terms, outcomes and empirical standards of the field have never been sufficiently defined in a manner that does not “preimpose” categories of culture nor do most of the terms of the field address structural or historic inequalities. Essentially what is set forth in this dissertation is the idea that culture cannot be professionally mandated by “preimposed” categories or competencies but rather that culture is part of an identity practice that occurs in a bidirectional contextual manner for doctors and patients each time they come together to get the task of healthcare done. This is a study of talk-in-interaction, specifically, Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). MCA refers to the range of practices a speech community deploys to accomplish their everyday social interactions. At the heart of these interactions is the idea of membership and its relationships to the categories used to co-ordinate social life, make sense of experience and create real life empirical understandings of social behaviors and problems. MCA was the pioneering development of Harvey Sacks (1967). In the present work I sought to explore the ways in which doctors and patients in New Zealand General Practice used their everyday identities to get the work of healthcare done. The expected Standardized Relational Pairs of doctor and patient were demonstrated and the moral rights and obligations of being a patient and being a doctor were demonstrated by each part of this pair. Findings that were new and unique to the present study were the use of an Omnirelevant Device, healthcare, to both constrain and direct doctor/patient talk and the use of Interculturality by doctors and patients. That is, identities that co-exist and are di…
author: Polster, Justine
keywords: Social Work
date published: 2015-12-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:23:46Z
provider: Bryn Mawr University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Bryn Mawr University