ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take an analytic attitude that regards the internal diversities within the work of Harvey Sacks as complementary, and the approaches of Sacks and Harold Garfinkel as mutually elaborating. I outline “Sacks’s plenum”, an array of ways of working out problems of description and the analysis of members’ practices. Sacks’s plenum takes Sacks beyond the study of conversation and accounts for methodological policies, his engagement with foundational issues, the development of reflexively informing analytic approaches, his “ethnographic” sensibilities, and overlaps between “quiddity-based” analyses of specific settings and “formal” analysis in the discernment of general, recurrent practices. Sacks’s work is redolent with organizing principles (or members’ practices) that facilitate the explication of phenomena of social order beyond the realm of talk-in-interaction, whereby we can examine sequential and categorial orders in other environments, contextures that inform my own research in various areas, including public space and textual analysis. In demonstrating how Garfinkel’s and Sacks’s work has dovetailed in my own analyses, I refer to Sacks’s formulations of organizing principles including “normal appearances”, “noticeable absences”, and “sociological reconstruction”.
