About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations 2. Discovering Sacks 3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks 4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders 5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks 6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender 7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths 8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction 9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies 10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings 11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection 12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interactions and Social Order 13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions 14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons 15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’ 16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action 17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media
About the Author :
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.
Review :
‘With this volume, the editors have created a successful compilation of texts on aspects of Harvey Sacks’ work that is unrivaled in terms of thematic and disciplinary breadth … The authors manage, on the one hand, to present well-known and established topics and perspectives of Sacks’ work and their continuations in different research contexts, and on the other hand to show less explored possibilities for connection.’ - Dominik Gerst, Svenja Heuser and Maximilian Krug, Qualitative Social Research (translation)
'This book keeps connection with Sacks’ brilliance, and is a reminder of the mirandum of Sacks’ work. The chapters are written in an engaging manner with authors sharing details of their first encounters with Sacks’ work.' - Timothy Halkowski, Symbolic Interaction
'This newly published volume, On Sacks contains many recollections of scholars’ first encounters with Harvey Sacks’ work. These stories provide situated contexts locating each author among a community of scholars with whom they shared the discovery of Sacks’ work. These anniversary-like recollections provide a snapshot into academic networks that embraced Sacks’ new ways of examining everyday interactions. Many of the text’s authors describe how Sacks’ work sparked a significant turn both in their own thinking and away from the trend to advance professional sociology […]. It is my hope that this collection will entice a new generation of scholars to experience the joy of Sacks.' - Trudy Milburn, Discourse Studies
