On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.

Robin James Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University, UK. His research is concerned with the ethnomethodology and ethnography of interaction in public space and mobile embodied practices. His work is influenced by, and contributes to, developments in the analysis of categorisational practices. He has also published on qualitative research methodology more generally and is the current editor of Qualitative Research and associate editor of SAGE Research Methods Foundations. He is co-editor of Urban Rhythms: Mobilities, Space and Interaction in the Contemporary City and The Lost Ethnographies: Methodological Insights from Projects That Never Were.

Richard Fitzgerald is Professor of Communication at the University of Macau, China (SAR). He has researched and written extensively on methods of qualitative discourse analysis with a particular focus on membership categorisation analysis (MCA) and ethnomethodology. His recent publications on MCA include Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis, with W. Housley, and a co-edited issue of the Journal of Pragmatics with S. Rintel and W. Housley under the title Membership Categorisation Analysis: Technologies of Social Action.

William Housley is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University, UK. He has published extensively on qualitative and social research methods, sociological theory, the study of practical reason, ethnomethodology, membership categorization analysis, social interaction and digital sociology. He is co-editor of Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis with Richard Fitzgerald.