My gratitude towards a most powerful analytical legacy. Some remarks on the importance of the research work of Harvey Sacks for process-analytical sociology

Abstract

Harvey Sacks’s studies opened up a new “observational habit” for looking at social processes and interactive work as expressed by speech activities. It stressed formal features of social processes that would be normally taken for granted by mainstream sociology and therefore not reflected at all. These are the phenomena: (a) sequential order of social activities of relating to others, (b) sequential order of speech interaction, (c) temporality and history of social processes of interaction, (d) categorization devices and category bound activities, (e) the formal-order apparatus of social process phenomena and mechanisms, (f) the impetus and obligation, i.e. the “force”, stemming from the exertion of the formal order apparatus.
In conversation analysis Sacks was engrossed within the extremely creative exploration processes of a first layer of analysis regarding the formal order phenomena (of ongoing conversation). However, in the examples given during his lectures he would also hint at the possibility of a second layer of analysis: being intrigued by culture as “an apparatus for generating recognizable actions” [Sacks 1992: 226]. And this might be a concept for reminding process-oriented social scientists – and not just linguists – of the perennial epistemological importance of Sacks’s explorations in his conversation analysis and in his earlier work.