| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 55

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Peter Eglin and Stephen Hester, The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2003)

I ADMIT that I began Eglin and Hester's book with some uncertainty. My initial concern was whether it was appropriate to apply an ethnomethodological approach to something that in Canadian society is treated with such reverence (as evidenced by the National Day of Mourning that is observed on 6 December of every year). Countering this uncertainty was my own experience in researching violence and my firm belief that such topics are necessary areas of study, if we are ever to understand why violence of such magnitude occurs.

In fact, in reading the book, I found myself quite impressed with the sensitivity the authors showed in exploring the Montreal massacre, and I think they were able to acknowledge the immense feeling associated with this event without compromising their analytical approach. In particular, I was pleased that they devoted an entire chapter to examining their own subjective responses to the events in question, noting that they were "not mere onlookers, nor just analysts," (126) and describing their own uncertainties about the appropriateness of their analysis. That being said, however, I did find several things wanting.

My chief concern with this book is that it lacks a structure through which the analysis can be framed. By this, I do not mean that there is no discussion of the theory and method of the analysis; rather, I found that the approach to describing the method was a bit haphazard. While I am familiar with ethnomethodology, I am certainly no expert in the field, and I would have appreciated a more general overview of the approach before they began their analysis of newspaper articles reporting and commenting on the Montreal Massacre. Instead, this information seemed to come in little pieces as they moved through the different aspects of their research.

Throughout the book, the authors promise that ethnomethodology will provide new insights into classical sociological issues such as crime and deviance, "respecifying the functions of crime as members' phenomena." (109) I think they ultimately fail to deliver on that promise. This is not to say that the work did not contain insights into crime and deviance. However, these were not brought together in some kind of coherent explanation, and this omission diminished their effect. Without this kind of framework, it didn't seem to me that membership categorization analysis really contributed something new and different to the exploration of violence in society. Rather, the conclusions reached seemed mundane and obvious, leaving unanswered the most important question in any research study: so what's the point? As a result, I finished the book still feeling unconvinced that membership categorization analysis can give us meaningful insight into violence.

A related problem I have with the book is my disagreement with their claims regarding social constructionism. At the beginning of the book they argue for ethnomethodology over social constructionism, but their description of social constructionism seems oversimplified. For example, at one point they state that "the social constructionist, on the premise that crime is a social construction, can argue that what are oriented to as 'facts'... are in actual fact ideological fictions." (7) While some social constructionist theories do take this as their premise, there are also a number of theories that take a much more moderate approach. In fact, I would argue that at times Eglin and Hester's approach could be viewed as social constructionism, though they call it by a different name.

While I recognize that there is considerable debate regarding what, exactly, each paradigm entails, I don't feel that they articulated their arguments well. Since I generally approach my research from a social constructionist viewpoint, I found their dismissal of it premature, and continue to believe that some exploration of discourse analysis would have enhanced, rather than inhibited, their analysis, as they later claim. For example, in their exploration of how media reports accounted for the events, they noted that stories about gun control arose. However, they chose not to explore these stories in much depth because, they claim, "we can find little of interest in relation to membership categorization analysis to say about the topic." ( 40) Since the "political story about gun control" (40) did, in fact, frequently arise in the media accounts they analysed, incorporating aspects of discourse analysis may have allowed them to expand this area.

Their treatment of what they at different times term "professional," "traditional," and "conventional" sociology is even more reductionist. First of all, the authors do not indicate just what kind of sociology they are talking about when they use these terms. Had this book been written in the early 1970s, I might easily conclude that they were arguing against functionalism. However, for me, writing in the 21st century, sociology certainly entails much more than this. While late in the book they do mention functionalism specifically, they continue to apparently equate this with "professional" sociology, barely acknowledging critical theories such as feminism at all — or the long history that qualitative sociology has had of engaging with the "micro" of social interaction. This lack of engagement is glaring given that they are exploring the way in which the Montreal massacre was accounted for as an issue of violence against women.

My final concern with the book had to do with their lack of strong conclusions regarding crime or violence. While each chapter contained a conclusion section, summarizing the angle of analysis for that section, I wasn't clear on what their overall research questions were. Obviously, an important focus of the book was to demonstrate the utility of ethnomethodology, but this conclusion was weakened by the lack of precision in their arguments against other methods of analysis. As I read the book it became apparent to me that one possible conclusion might be an exploration of the ways in which violence is constructed or accounted for through the mundane and ordinary; there are hints in this direction, but the idea is never fully developed. I find this a shame, because there is such potential for the authors to suggest an alternative way of understanding deviance — i.e., not as "deviant," but as something that is embedded in the "normal."

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy Eglin and Hester's book. On the contrary, I found it illuminating. Had they spent less time making oversimplified arguments against other forms of sociological thought, and more time clearly explaining the scope (and limitations) of ethnomethodology, I think their purpose would have been easier to discern, and the worth of the analysis easier to identify. However, even despite these faults, the authors made some interesting observations, and I enjoyed the layered approach to the media accounts — first examining the characters and setting, then turning their attention to the stories put forth (and also those that were not put forth), and finally discussing the commentary from professionals, including academics, on those stories.


Kristin Atwood University of Victoria

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