Sacks and Garfinkel, early on

Early on, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks were independently and sometimes collaboratively pioneering an alternative to the prevailing theories of social action and models of formal analysis by radically re-specifying the study of social life and social order. Garfinkel and Sacks rejected the notion that rules were adequate to explain or determine social action. They focused instead on the methodic practices and competencies through which social order is enacted and recognized, treating the features of a setting and the actions in that setting as situated accomplishments of the participants to that setting and activity. Sacks “envisioned the possibility of a science of practical actions that would elucidate formal structures exhibited in actions” [Lynch 2017: 11, later published as Lynch 2019], while Garfinkel resisted any program of formal analysis. Yet when viewed together, this paper argues that their groundbreaking corpus of studies demonstrates an already existing world of specific occasions, practical tasks, embodied skills, and contextures of activity as these are regularly organized by people in situ, in real-time, and in material detail.