ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides something of an overview of a key aspect of Sacks’s work or traces the influence of Sacks’s approach within and through a particular domain. It focuses on Sacks’s contribution beyond conversation analysis and especially the ‘ethnographic edge’ of his studies as part of what he describes as Sacks’s ‘Plenum’. The book deals with the two key themes in Sacks’s work and the ways in which they have been increasingly shown to be inextricably intertwined: categorisation practices and sequential analysis. It traces different aspects of the ways in which those two pillars of Sacks’s sociology have been taken forward in the work of scholars and analysts in different fields. In drawing together different perspectives and fields in which Sacks’s work is central, between which there is often friction, the collection is proposed as an opportunity to generate light rather than heat.
