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Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

ISBN: 978-0-745-61711-4

September 1998

Polity

232 pages

Description
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 in a lively and accessible way, this book will be of particular interest to students of sociology, sociolinguistics, social theory and method, but it will also be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, psychology and related disciplines.

About the Author

David Silverman is an author known for leading the novice and the expert through the complex underground corpus of Harvey Sacks's work.

Features
  • The first, book-length introduction to the work of Harvey Sacks - a very influential American sociologist who invented an approach to the study of language which is called Conversation Analysis
  • This book explains Sacks's ideas and methods in a clear and accessible way using examples which will be easily understood by students and non-specialist readers
  • The author relates Sacks's work to a wide range of disciplines including sociology, linguistics, anthropology and psychology.