Conversation Analysis

Since the early 1960s, beginning with the work of Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff, conversation analysis (CA) has grown into an international interdisciplinary enterprise. The approach was inspired by both Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, largely through their mutual connection with Harvey Sacks, who with Emmanuel Schegloff was a student of Goffman at Berkeley. Goffman and Garfinkel exchanged work in the early 1950s, and the three, Sacks, Goffman, and Garfinkel, met in the late 1950s. From then on, Sacks continued to meet with Garfinkel, and his first studies in the detailed analysis of conversation emerged from the convergence of his Goffman-inspired interest in the moral commitment involved in interaction and Garfinkel's insistence on an ethnomethodological (EM) study of the details involved in the production of ...