W Housley
Biographic Data
| ID | 15184 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Housley |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Housley |
| SIGNATURE | HOUSLEY W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1568-9093 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 501 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The conversational action test: Detecting the artificial sociality of artificial intelligence
Drawing on the “Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test”—a science fiction version of Turing’s famous thought experiment—we propose the Conversational Action Test (CAT): a new approach to evaluating conversational artificial intelligence (AI) voice agents. We compare social actions in a range of telephone service encounters where one party is an artificial conversational agent to a range of similar human-human calls. The CAT demonstrates a novel paradigm that …
Membership categorisation, sociological description and role prompt engineering with ChatGPT
Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) have become the latest disruptive digital technologies to breach the dividing lines between scientific endeavour and public consciousness. LLMs such as ChatGPT are platformed through commercial providers such as OpenAI, which provide a conduit through which interaction is realised, via a series of exchanges in the form of written natural language text called ‘prompt engine…
The Sage Handbook of Digital Society
Forecasting the governance of harmful social media communications: Findings from the digital wildfire policy Delphi
Social media exhibits the core characteristics of emergent technologies. It is disruptive of established ways of organising social relations, is evolving at an exponential pace and its effects, including the production of new ‘goods’ and ‘bads’, are highly uncertain. Interest in understanding these effects has intensified in the context of fears over so-called ‘digital wildfire’, a policy construct referring to rapid propagation of harmful commun…
Can humans simulate talking like other humans? Comparing simulated clients to real customers in service inquiries
How authentic are inquiry calls made by simulated clients, or ‘mystery shoppers’, to service organizations, when compared to real callers? We analysed 48 simulated and 63 real inquiry calls to different veterinary practices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The data were transcribed for conversation analysis, as well as coded for a variety of call categories including reason for the call, call outcome and turn design features. Analysis revealed …
QR in reflexive mode: The participatory turn and interpretive social science
Conversation analysis, publics, practitioners and citizen social science
During the course of this short article, I respond and connect with insights and issues raised by the Conversational Rollercoaster (CR) and its relationship with conversation analysis (CA) and the public science of talk. I constructively engage with the innovative thinking and practice associated with this initiative. Finally, I consider how this might enhance a potential drive to connect ethnomethodology (EM) and CA to additional public and coll…
Interaction and Transformation on Social Media: The Case of Twitter Campaigns
The increasing popularity of social media platforms creates new digital social networks in which individuals can interact and share information, news, and opinion. The use of these technologies appears to have the capacity to transform current social configurations and relations, not least within the public and civic spheres. Within the social sciences, much emphasis has been placed on conceptualizing social media's role in modern society and the…
National Identity, Categorisation and Debate
In this chapter 1 we examine the use, within the accomplished context of a radio news debate, of extended story turns that display various accounts of national identity in relation to a proposal for devolved democratic institutions within the United Kingdom. In this sense, they display a ‘world view’. These various positions are displayed through the use of various categories, inferences and connections in order to lend support to and promote pos…
Membership Categorisation Analysis. Technologies of social action
Qualitative methods and data in digital societies
Digitizing Sacks? Approaching social media as data
During the course of this article, we explore ethnomethodological principles in relation to approaching social media as data. More specifically, we consider the extent to which the work of Harvey Sacks and his rich intellectual legacy might inform this nascent field of empirical inquiry. This exploration is realised in the context of interdisciplinary research at the interface of social and computational science. Drawing from an extensive range o…
Interactionism and digital society
In this article we consider the extent to which interactionist ideas can inform the analysis of current socio-technical trends and practices that surround the emerging contours of digital society. We make reference to four field domains of inquiry that are relevant to this task and highlight how established interactionist insights can be carried forward and inform future studies in this developing area
Digital wildfires: Hyper-Connectivity, Havoc and a Global Ethos to Govern Social Media
The last 5--10 years have seen a massive rise in the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr etc. These platforms enable users to post and share their own content instantly, meaning that material can be seen by multiple others in a short period of time. The growing use of social media has been accompanied by concerns that these platforms enable the rapid and global spread of harmful content. A report by the World Ec…
Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis
Category predication work, discursive leadership and strategic sensemaking
Categorization is known to play an important role in organizations because categories ‘frame’ situations in particular ways, informing managerial sensemaking and enabling managerial intervention. In this article, we advance existing work by examining the role of categorization practices in discursive leadership during periods of strategic change. Drawing on data from an ethnographic action research study of a strategic change initiative in a mult…
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Tweeting the terror: Modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: Tension monitoring and social media networks
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Special issue: Introduction
Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Telling the Caqdas code: Membership categorization and the accomplishment of ‘coding rules’ in research team talk
During the course of this article we examine data gathered from two research meetings in which coding issues and data organization are being discussed in relation to the use of the software package Atlas.ti. The meetings were concerned with the organization and coding of semi-structured interviews carried out by three different groups as part of a wider collaborative research project. A number of papers have considered aspects of coding practice …
Mundane reason, membership categorization practices and the everyday ontology of space and place in interview talk
In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members' situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay.…
Innovation and Reduction in Contemporary Qualitative Methods: The Case of Conceptual Coupling, Activity-Type Pairs and Auto-Ethnography
During the course of this paper we mobilise an ideal typical framework that identifies three waves of reduction within contemporary qualitative inquiry as they relate to key aspects of the sociological tradition. The paper begins with a consideration of one of sociology's key questions; namely how is social organisation possible? The paper aims to demonstrate how this question moves from view as increased specialisation and differentiation in qua…
Interactionism
Membership categorization, culture and norms in action
In this article, we examine the extent to which membership categorization analysis (MCA) can inform an understanding of reasoning within the public domain where morality, policy and cultural politics are visible (Smith and Tatalovich, 2003). Through the examination of three examples, we demonstrate how specific types of category device(s) are a ubiquitous feature of accountable practice in the public domain where morality matters and public polic…
Identity, categorization and sequential organization: The sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in
Radio phone-in programmes have been the subject of a number of studies using the methodology of conversation analysis. Although this has been successful in making apparent the sequential organization of this type of interaction, little has been said about its categorial organization. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach, it is demonstrated in this article that interaction on public access radio can be seen to rely upon categorial and sequenti…
The reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis
This article briefly investigates the role that ethno-methodology has played in sociological analyses of language and interaction. The work of Harvey Sacks is investigated in relation to membership categorization and the analysis of talk-in-interaction. More specifically, the authors focus on how this strand of work has been developed in recent years and now represents a powerful apparatus for conducting sociological analyses of interaction in a …
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: Tension monitoring and social media networks
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Tweeting the terror: Modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Talkback, Community and the Public Sphere
This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the actual existing democratic public sphere in Australia. Drawing upon Anderson's (1987) notion of an imagined community and Warner's (2002) discussion of publics, the paper suggests that two different but entwined modes of address operate around the talkback audience. The first centres on the active creation of an imagined community brought into being and…
Categorization, Interaction, Policy, and Debate
During the course of this article the themes of public accountability, government policy, and interaction in media settings are examined. In particular, we examine empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates, and configurations as a means of accomplishing policy debate in participatory frameworks such as radio phone-ins and the accountable frames of political interviews. This paper res…
Category predication work, discursive leadership and strategic sensemaking
Categorization is known to play an important role in organizations because categories ‘frame’ situations in particular ways, informing managerial sensemaking and enabling managerial intervention. In this article, we advance existing work by examining the role of categorization practices in discursive leadership during periods of strategic change. Drawing on data from an ethnographic action research study of a strategic change initiative in a mult…
Membership Categorisation Analysis. Technologies of social action
Digitizing Sacks? Approaching social media as data
During the course of this article, we explore ethnomethodological principles in relation to approaching social media as data. More specifically, we consider the extent to which the work of Harvey Sacks and his rich intellectual legacy might inform this nascent field of empirical inquiry. This exploration is realised in the context of interdisciplinary research at the interface of social and computational science. Drawing from an extensive range o…
Categorisation, Narrative and Devolution in Wales
Within this paper we examine the use of extended story turns, within the accomplished context of a radio news debate, that display various accounts of national identity in relation to a proposal for devolved democratic institutions within the United Kingdom. In this sense, they display a 'world view'. These various positions are displayed through the use of various categories, inferences and connections in order to lend support to and promote pos…
Story, Narrative and Team Work
During the course of this paper I explore some dimensions of talk-in interaction within the context of social/care work team meetings. Furthermore, I contrast traditional approaches to analysing members stories by illustrating the situated dimension and characteristics of members stories within talk-in-interaction. In addition, I address some topics relating to the investigation of social/care team work and briefly consider the story as a mechani…
Mundane reason, membership categorization practices and the everyday ontology of space and place in interview talk
In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members' situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay.…
Role as an Interactional Device and Resource in Multidisciplinary Team Meetings
During the course of this paper the approaches of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis are used to investigate and explore team members talk within multidisciplinary social/care team meetings. The paper explores the situated character of role within team meetings and considers the various methods through which team member roles are accomplished, negotiated, contested and used as a resource in the everyday business of makin…
QR in reflexive mode: The participatory turn and interpretive social science
Telling the Caqdas code: Membership categorization and the accomplishment of ‘coding rules’ in research team talk
During the course of this article we examine data gathered from two research meetings in which coding issues and data organization are being discussed in relation to the use of the software package Atlas.ti. The meetings were concerned with the organization and coding of semi-structured interviews carried out by three different groups as part of a wider collaborative research project. A number of papers have considered aspects of coding practice …
Innovation and Reduction in Contemporary Qualitative Methods: The Case of Conceptual Coupling, Activity-Type Pairs and Auto-Ethnography
During the course of this paper we mobilise an ideal typical framework that identifies three waves of reduction within contemporary qualitative inquiry as they relate to key aspects of the sociological tradition. The paper begins with a consideration of one of sociology's key questions; namely how is social organisation possible? The paper aims to demonstrate how this question moves from view as increased specialisation and differentiation in qua…
Moral Discrepancy and Political Discourse: Accountability and the Allocation of Blame in a Political News Interview
During the course of this article we intend to explore some issues surrounding government policy and actions and the moral organisation of political discourse surrounding the recent enquiry into the BSE crisis and the publication of the Phillips Report in the UK. More specifically, we wish to develop the concept of moral discrepancy and it's use in politically accountable settings, in this case the political interview. The paper, through the use …
Moral Discrepancy and 'Fudging the Issue' in a Radio News Interview
During the course of this article I employ the reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis in order to explore the normative, categorial and sequential characteristics of talk within a radio news interview. Furthermore, I explore the categorial and sequential characteristics of a particular form of adjacency and other features of the talk concerning the topic of banning fox hunting. The article explores transcribed materials as a mea…
Special issue: Introduction
Navigation, Interaction and Bridge Team Work
During the course of this paper we explore the interaction of seafarers engaged in navigation on the bridge of a merchant ship. More specifically we examine how ‘bridge teams' utilise a range of practical conversational methods and devices in carrying out the days work within a context where temporal and spatial considerations are paramount. Utilising the principles of ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis we analyse transcribed ma…
Role as an Interactional Device and Resource in Multidisciplinary Team Meetings
During the course of this paper the approaches of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis are used to investigate and explore team members talk within multidisciplinary social/care team meetings. The paper explores the situated character of role within team meetings and considers the various methods through which team member roles are accomplished, negotiated, contested and used as a resource in the everyday business of makin…
Story, Narrative and Team Work
During the course of this paper I explore some dimensions of talk-in interaction within the context of social/care work team meetings. Furthermore, I contrast traditional approaches to analysing members stories by illustrating the situated dimension and characteristics of members stories within talk-in-interaction. In addition, I address some topics relating to the investigation of social/care team work and briefly consider the story as a mechani…
Categorisation, Narrative and Devolution in Wales
Within this paper we examine the use of extended story turns, within the accomplished context of a radio news debate, that display various accounts of national identity in relation to a proposal for devolved democratic institutions within the United Kingdom. In this sense, they display a 'world view'. These various positions are displayed through the use of various categories, inferences and connections in order to lend support to and promote pos…
Identity, categorization and sequential organization: The sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in
Radio phone-in programmes have been the subject of a number of studies using the methodology of conversation analysis. Although this has been successful in making apparent the sequential organization of this type of interaction, little has been said about its categorial organization. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach, it is demonstrated in this article that interaction on public access radio can be seen to rely upon categorial and sequenti…
The reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis
This article briefly investigates the role that ethno-methodology has played in sociological analyses of language and interaction. The work of Harvey Sacks is investigated in relation to membership categorization and the analysis of talk-in-interaction. More specifically, the authors focus on how this strand of work has been developed in recent years and now represents a powerful apparatus for conducting sociological analyses of interaction in a …
Moral Discrepancy and 'Fudging the Issue' in a Radio News Interview
During the course of this article I employ the reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis in order to explore the normative, categorial and sequential characteristics of talk within a radio news interview. Furthermore, I explore the categorial and sequential characteristics of a particular form of adjacency and other features of the talk concerning the topic of banning fox hunting. The article explores transcribed materials as a mea…
Interactionism
Interactionism: An Essay in Sociological Amnesia
This text provides an overview of interactionism in the United Kingdom. The authors argue that few sociologists in Britain have identified themselves solely with symbolic interactionism, even though many have engaged with interactionist ideas in their research and methodological work
Moral Discrepancy and Political Discourse: Accountability and the Allocation of Blame in a Political News Interview
During the course of this article we intend to explore some issues surrounding government policy and actions and the moral organisation of political discourse surrounding the recent enquiry into the BSE crisis and the publication of the Phillips Report in the UK. More specifically, we wish to develop the concept of moral discrepancy and it's use in politically accountable settings, in this case the political interview. The paper, through the use …
Navigation, Interaction and Bridge Team Work
During the course of this paper we explore the interaction of seafarers engaged in navigation on the bridge of a merchant ship. More specifically we examine how ‘bridge teams' utilise a range of practical conversational methods and devices in carrying out the days work within a context where temporal and spatial considerations are paramount. Utilising the principles of ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis we analyse transcribed ma…
Categorization, Interaction, Policy, and Debate
During the course of this article the themes of public accountability, government policy, and interaction in media settings are examined. In particular, we examine empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates, and configurations as a means of accomplishing policy debate in participatory frameworks such as radio phone-ins and the accountable frames of political interviews. This paper res…
Talkback, Community and the Public Sphere
This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the actual existing democratic public sphere in Australia. Drawing upon Anderson's (1987) notion of an imagined community and Warner's (2002) discussion of publics, the paper suggests that two different but entwined modes of address operate around the talkback audience. The first centres on the active creation of an imagined community brought into being and…
Motives and social organization: Sociological Amnesia, Psychological Description and the Analysis of Accounts
During the course of this article we explore the sociological tradition of analysing motives and accounts. In doing so we contrast this with more recent methodological developments that have analysed similar phenomena as part of a strategy of respecifying psychological theories of cognition. Through the use of analytic examples we demonstrate how accounts and the invocation of 'inner' or 'underlying' states must be understood not only in terms of…
Theorizing the Democratic Gaze: Visitors' Experiences of the New Welsh Assembly
This article, based on an interview study of public engagement with the new Welsh Assembly building - the Senedd - theorizes the limits and opportunities of 'political tourism', or visits to sites of political importance. To understand visitors' engagement with the assembly building, we explore how they account for their reasons to visit, and their perceptions and expectations of the new building and institution. We identify two principal types o…
Beyond the discursive: The case of social organization — a reply to Edwards, Hepburn and Potter
Membership categorization, culture and norms in action
In this article, we examine the extent to which membership categorization analysis (MCA) can inform an understanding of reasoning within the public domain where morality, policy and cultural politics are visible (Smith and Tatalovich, 2003). Through the examination of three examples, we demonstrate how specific types of category device(s) are a ubiquitous feature of accountable practice in the public domain where morality matters and public polic…
Interaction, discourse and the subject
Visions of Wales: Visual Artists and Cultural Futures
This article explores the narrative of prominent visual artists practising within post-devolution Wales. The article adopts a sociological approach and does not seek to engage with perspectives promoted by art history or cultural studies. It utilises exemplar narratives gathered from over 20 in-depth ethnographic interviews with established visual artists working in Wales and explores the manner through which practitioners display various configu…
Innovation and Reduction in Contemporary Qualitative Methods: The Case of Conceptual Coupling, Activity-Type Pairs and Auto-Ethnography
During the course of this paper we mobilise an ideal typical framework that identifies three waves of reduction within contemporary qualitative inquiry as they relate to key aspects of the sociological tradition. The paper begins with a consideration of one of sociology's key questions; namely how is social organisation possible? The paper aims to demonstrate how this question moves from view as increased specialisation and differentiation in qua…
Telling the Caqdas code: Membership categorization and the accomplishment of ‘coding rules’ in research team talk
During the course of this article we examine data gathered from two research meetings in which coding issues and data organization are being discussed in relation to the use of the software package Atlas.ti. The meetings were concerned with the organization and coding of semi-structured interviews carried out by three different groups as part of a wider collaborative research project. A number of papers have considered aspects of coding practice …
Mundane reason, membership categorization practices and the everyday ontology of space and place in interview talk
In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members' situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay.…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: Tension monitoring and social media networks
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Special issue: Introduction
Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Sociology (37 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Social science (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (13 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works)