Neighbouring as an
Occasioned Activity
“Finding a Lost Cat”
Eric Laurier
Angus Whyte
Kathy Buckner
University of Glasgow
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 re-
lations between residents. Such disparaging commentary is frequently a premise for social scien-
tists 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 po-
litical 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.
People in the suburbs live in a world characterised by nonviolence and noncon-
frontation in which civility prevails and disturbances of the peace are uncommon.
In this sense, suburbia is a model of the social order. The order is not born, how-
ever, of conditions widely perceived to generate social harmony. It does not arise
from intimacy and connectedness, but rather from some of the very things more
often presumed to bring about conflict and violence—transiency, fragmentation,
Authors’ Note: Funding for this research was provided by ESPRIT—Project 25621.
space & culture vol. 5 no. 4, november 2002 346-367
DOI: 10.1177/120633102237477
©2002 Sage Publications
346

isolation, atomization, and indifference among people. The suburbs lack social co-
hesion but they are free of strife. They are, so to speak, disorganized and orderly
at the same time.
—Baumgartner (1988, p. 134)
Definitions of the good community, requirements for the good community, the
loss of a sense of community, and the new places we find community are the stock in
trade of regional, urban, and of course, community studies. It is a perennial research
topic and an important one (Bryson & Thompson, 1972; Gans, 1962; Lynd & Lynd,
1929; Morris, 1988; Nancy, 1991; Rose et al., 1965; Seeley, Sim, & Loosley, 1963; Stacey,
1960; Suttles, 1968; Tonnies, 1887/1995; Webber, 1964; Whyte, 1943; Wirth, 1933).
Alongside research on community, a great deal of effort is devoted to developing good
communities, investing in them, planning their spatial arrangement, drafting policy
that will encourage them, selecting their housing types, and to some extent attempt-
ing to select their inhabitants. Indeed, this article arises out of a substantial research
programme—The Connected Community—by the European Commission into new
forms of information and communication technologies that could support local com-
munities.Worries about the placelessness of, particularly, the Internet prompted a call
for the development of technologies that would encourage proximate groups to
strengthen their sense of community. In The Living Memory Project, this was trans-
lated into the ongoing design and specification of a system that would fit into the
everyday lives of the residents of a suburban city neighbourhood (for more detail see
Laurier et al., 2000).
Within the suburban residential area (Corstorphine), which our project delimited
by postal district, there were numerous “communities of practice” (Wenger, 1998)
rather than any unified entity that could be identified as the community. It was not
that we expected to be able define or identify the local community for more than our
own practical purposes, because in keeping with the praxeological approach that we
will advance later, it is the spatial and temporal arrangement of practices that lead to
the forming of communities (Thrift, 1999). Given that spatially proximate residence
was bound to our project’s definition of community members, one of the most salient
categories we selected to investigate was that of residents’ being neighbours. Or rather,
once again given our social practice approach, we were interested not solely in what a
neighbour is for another neighbour but furthermore in describing how neighbouring
as a sociomaterial practice occurs as “relations in public” (Goffman, 1963, 1971).
In accord with the guiding policies of ethnomethodology and conversation analy-
sis, the good constraint we imposed on our observations of suburbia and neighbours’
relations was to, as best we could, explicate the relevant observables for neighbours as
neighbours and not for us as professional researchers and/or social theorists (Coulter,
2001; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970; Sacks, 1963; Schegloff, 1999). In the material that fol-
lows, then, we will first introduce the ethnographic studies of suburbia and the ele-
ments of their work that we have drawn on in our own. In this first part, we simulta-
neously introduce summaries from our generalisable conventional social science
results, which show similarities to the North American and Australian case studies. In
our second part, we provide a sample of our ethnographic empirical material, and
through and by its close description and explication, we aim to show methods, cats,
ways of talking, pointing, and so on to be reflexively tied to the spatial organisation of
suburbia. Building on descriptions made available by conversation analysis and eth-
N e i g h b o u r i n g a s a n O c c a s i o n e d A c t i v i t y 347