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RICHARD M. COUGHLINCONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Conversation analysis has evolved over several
decades as a distinct variant of ethnomethodolo-
gy. 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to the doctoral research and the unpublished but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 emer-
gence of conversation analysis were Gail Jefferson,
one of Sacks’s first students, and Emanuel A.
Schegloff, another sociologist trained in the Uni-
versity 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, com-
mon-sense reasoning in and through which ‘‘social
order’’ is locally constituted (Garfinkel [1967] 1984).
In addressing this problem, he devised a remark-
ably innovative approach. Working with tapes and
transcripts of telephone calls to a suicide preven-
tion center (and with recordings of other, some-
what 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. 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 investi-
gating 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 de-
scribe 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 ac-
counts of ‘‘members’ methods’’ for conducting
social life.In this way, Sacks sought to address the basic
question of (as he put it in one of his early manu-
scripts) ‘‘what it is that sociology can aim to do,
and... how it can proceed’’ (Sacks [1964–1968]
1984, p. 21). Sociology, he argued, could be a
‘‘natural observational science,’’ concerned with
the methodic organization of naturally occurring
events, rather than with behavior that was manipu-
lated through experimental techniques or other
interventions such as surveys, interviews, and the
like. And it could be committed to direct observa-
tion of this organization in situ, rather than de-
pendent upon analytic theorizing and a concomi-
tant reliance on idealized models of action.Naturalistic observation also met the
ethnomethodological mandate that all evidence