Harvey Sacks (1935–1975)

Harvey Sacks was one of Goffman’s most important graduate students. Sacks (along with Emmanuel Schegloff) was Goffman’s PhD student at Berkeley from 1960–1966. Some of Goffman’s later work, including Forms of Talk (1981), was written in response to the new discipline of Conversation Analysis that Sacks was carving out. From 1960, Sacks worked closely with Harold Garfinkel. What Goffman and Sacks have in common is a conception of interaction grounded on social contract, what Goffman referred to as a „working consensus“ with „involvement obligations“.The big difference between Goffman and Sacks is the degree to which they treat social objects made in interaction as fragile. For Goffman the self is fragile, but social categories, language and meaning are not. Goffman lets in symbolic meaning and consensus. For Sacks and Garfinkel, all words, gestures, and actions are fragile, indexical, and must be placed in sequences of action in an orderly way – to acquire meaning.