Harvey Sacks
Harvey Sacks was a sociologist in the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way real people actually used language in the real world. Despite his early death in 1975 in a car crash and the fact that he did not have time to publish widely (his major published books are based on lecture notes) he founded the sub-discipline of conversation analysis and is increasingly influential on, for example, discursive psychology.
His major work, Lectures on Conversation, is composed of transcribed lectures held from spring 1964 through to 1972, and comprises of about 1200 pages. Almost all of his published materials stem from the corpus that his literary executor Emanuel Schegloff makes public bit by bit.
Further reading
- Harvey Sacks: Lectures on Conversation (1995) ISBN 1557867054
- Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel (1986) On formal structures of practical action, in: J.C. McKinney and E.A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1970, S.338-366. Reprinted in H. Garfinkel, ed., Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, S.160-193.
Sacks, H. (1963) ‘Sociological Description,’ in Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 8:1-16. Sacks, H. (1972) 'An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology', in D. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction, Free Press, New York, pp. 31-74. Sacks, H. (1974) 'On the Analyzability of Stories by Children', in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology, Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp. 216-232. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. 1974 'A Simplest Systematics for the Organisation of Turn-Taking for Conversation', in Language, 50:696-735.