Neighbouring as an Occasioned Activity

Abstract

To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting, an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds, and property maintenance, suburbia suffers perhaps worst of all from weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary is frequently a premise for social scientists to define their version of “the good community,” bemoan its absence or decline, and has little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to advance one or another political agenda conventional stipulative studies miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level. Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice we proffer an alternative approach to the study of community and its moral and spatially implicated organisation. From our ethnographic fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat, how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours.

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