‘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.

Keywords:

• Membership Categorization Analysis
• Conversation Analysis
• Moral Ordering
• Institutional Interaction
• Omnirelevance
• Sports Coaching

ORCID

Bryn Evans http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0399-7104

Richard Fitzgerald http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8508-4394

Notes

¹That is, the drill is comprised of a full-speed game with players’ options restricted by the reduction in the number of players on each team from the standard five to three.

²For a discussion on the use of ‘no’ as a discourse marker, and specifically as a means of managing hearers’ misunderstandings of a speaker's previous turn, see Lee-Goldman (2011).

³For the duration of the practice activity during which the altercation between Steve and Boris occurred, the players had been divided into different teams. The players wear reversible singlets to the practice sessions, one side black and the other red, allowing them to be grouped together into easily recognizable ‘colour teams’.