Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

Harvey Sacks's early death in 1975 robbed the social sciences of one of its most original thinkers.Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, his lectures and papers were enormously influential in sociology and sociolinguistics and they played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.The recent publication of Sacks's Lectures on Conversation has provided an excellent opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution. In this new book, David Silverman provides a clear introduction to Sack's work and reassesses its value for sociology, linguistics, anthropology and psychology.Using a variety of examples, he explains Sacks's ideas on method, language and talk-in-interaction.He argues that Sacks's work offers a highly original perspective on language and social life and raises fundamental questions for the social sciences - questions which, after more than twenty years, remain vitally important and largely unanswered. Written