ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Rod Watson provides a brief discussion of how Sacks’s work was introduced to Manchester ethnomethodologists and the impact this had on the development of ethnomethodology in the UK, as well as reflecting on his own engagement with Sacks’s work. While noting an early shift of focus between Garfinkel and Sacks towards the discipline of sociology, Watson also highlights how both effectuated a seismic shift in understanding of sociology and social action. For Watson, it was Sacks’s particular analytic approach, which he argues is most clearly demonstrated in his lectures, that demonstrates Sacks at his most accessible, innovative and inspiring. What is also clear from the lectures is that Sacks was not only interested in interaction, but also collected data from a range of different sources that allowed access to members’ methodic practices wherever they could be found. For Watson, the continuing legacy of Sacks’s work is an analytic mentality that can address a range of contemporary conceptual and empirical issues and from which researchers can continue to derive pointers for future analyses.
