In short, Sacks came to recognize that the talk itself was the action. It was in the details of the talk that we could discover just how what was getting done in the activity was accomplished, systematically and procedurally, then and there, by the coparticipants themselves. This appeared to be an especially fruitful way of investigating the local production of social order.
As Schegloff (1989, p. 199) later wrote in a memoir of these first years, Sacks's strategy in his pioneering studies was to first take note of how members of society, in some actual occasion of interaction, achieved some interactional effect—for example, in the suicide center calls, how to exhibit (and have others appreciate) that one has reasonably, accountably, arrived at the finding "I have no one to turn to"—and then to ask: Was this outcome accomplished methodically? Can we describe it as the product of a method of conduct, such that we can find other enactments of that method that will yield the same outcome, the same recognizable effect? This approach provided, Sacks suggested, an opportunity to develop formal accounts of "members' methods" for conducting social life.
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