CONVERSATION ANALYSISfor the use of members’ methods, and for mem-
bers’ orientation to or tacit knowledge of them,
was to be derived exclusively from the observed
behavior of the coparticipants in an interactional
event. As Schegloff and Sacks (1973, p. 290) subse-
quently summarized the logic of this stance, if the
event, the recorded conversational encounter, ex-
hibited a methodically achieved orderliness, it ‘‘did
so not only to us [the observing analysts], indeed
not in the first place for us, but for the co-partici-
pants who had produced’’ it. After all, the task was
to discover members’ methods for coordinating
and ordering conversational events, and these could
not in any way be determined by analysts’ concep-
tual stipulations or deduced from inventive theories.
The contrast with other methods and approach-
es for studying interactional processes could not
be sharper, particularly with those methods adopt-
ed by Bales (1950) and Homans (1961) and their
many followers, with their commitment to theo-
retically derived and precise operational defini-
tions of social phenomena as a prerequisite to any
scientific investigation (see Sacks 1992, vol. 1, p. 28
and p. 105, for his thinking on Bales and Homans).
But Sacks’s methodological stance contrasts even
with those traditions usually regarded as neigh-
bors of conversation analysis, such as symbolic
interactionism and Goffman’s ‘‘micro-Durkheimian’’
approach. These approaches assume that without
an analytically stipulated conceptual scheme, there
is no orderliness (or the orderliness cannot be
seen) in what Garfinkel (1991) terms ‘‘the ple-
num’’—the plentitude of members’ lived experience.
Sacks was also making a well-reasoned argu-
ment for the importance of studying mundane
conversation, directly confronting the belief that
sociology’s overriding concern should be the study
of ‘‘big issues’’; that is, the belief that the search for
social order should center on the analysis of large-
scale, massive institutions. Social order, he insist-
ed, can be found ‘‘at all points,’’ and the close
study of what from conventional sociology’s point
of view seemed like small (and trivial) phenome-
na—the details of conversation’s organization—
might actually give us an enormous understanding
of the way humans do things and the kinds of
methods they use to order their affairs (Sacks
[1964–1968] 1984, p. 24).
This last proposition bears special emphasis,
for Sacks felt that these details went unnoticed,
and perhaps could not even be imagined, by con-
ventional analytic sociology. When had sociolo-
gists concerned themselves with the profoundly
methodic character of things like how to avoid
giving your name without refusing to give it, he
argued, or with how to get help for suicidalness
without requesting it? Or with members’ methods
for things like ‘‘doing describing’’ and ‘‘recogniz-
ing a description,’’ methods that provide for hear-
ing the first two sentences from a story told by a
young child—’’The baby cried. The mommy picked
it up.’’—as saying: The mommy who picked up the
baby is the baby’s mommy, and she picked it up
because it was crying. Though apparently mun-
dane, this observation provided the basis for a
series of investigations regarding members’ cate-
gorization methods and eventually came to pro-
vide for an entirely different approach to studies
of social institutions and phenomena like race and
gender. Sacks noted that since every person can be
categorized at any time in various ways (for exam-
ple, in terms of age, gender, or stage of life), a
person’s use of, or reliance on, one category rather
than another to guide his or her actions with
others must be grounded in one of a multitude of
discoverable systems of relevance, some of which
are potentially applicable in any situation, such as
age, race, and gender, and others that are more
limited in their use, such as occupationally defined
categories or those made relevant by the organiza-
tion of conversation itself, such as speaker/hearer,
caller/called, and the like.As these last examples of categories suggest,
‘‘membership analysis’’—making sense of who
someone is for the purpose of appropriately de-
signing some next action—is an unremitting prob-
lem for members of a society, one that has to be
solved in real time, and for which there is no single
solution. Furthermore, who a person relevantly
‘‘is’’ for the purposes of some next action can
change from moment to moment. As a conse-
quence, Sacks pointed out that sociologists can no
longer innocently categorize populations whatev-
er way they (and their theories) see fit. Instead,
analysts must similarly demonstrate the relevance
of a category to the participants in any scene, as well
as its consequentiality for them in terms of how the
action proceeds, in order to ground its use in any
sociological investigation (see Silverman 1998 for
a useful summary of this argument).