Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis has evolved over several decades as a distinct variant of ethnomethodology. Its beginnings can be traced to the mid-1960s, to the doctoral research and the unpublished but widely circulated lectures of Harvey Sacks. Sacks was a University of California sociologist who had studied with Harold Garfinkel, the founder of the ethnomethodological movement, as well as with Erving Goffman. While not an ethnomethodologist, Goffman's proposal that face-to-face interaction could be an analytically independent domain of inquiry certainly helped inspire Sacks's work. Two other key figures whose writings (separately and together with Sacks) contributed to the emergence of conversation analysis were Gail Jefferson, one of Sacks's first students, and Emanuel A. Schegloff, another sociologist trained in the University of California system who was decisively influenced by Garfinkel and, in much the same manner as Sacks, by Goffman (Schegloff 1988).
Sacks, like Garfinkel, was preoccupied with discovering the methods or procedures by which humans coordinate and organize their activities, and thus with the procedures of practical, common-sense reasoning in and through which "social order" is locally constituted (Garfinkel [1967] 1984). In addressing this problem, he devised a remarkably innovative approach. Working with tapes and transcripts of telephone calls to a suicide prevention center (and with recordings of other, somewhat more mundane sorts of conversations), Sacks began examining the talk as an object in its own right, as a fundamental type of social action, rather than primarily as a resource for documenting other social processes.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 6,945 words (approx. 23 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Conversation Analysis Access Pass.
