Emanuel Schegloff's life is like the conversations he studies: structures (e.g., graduate school, marriage) and plans (e.g., dissertation topics) blend with and give way to chance encounters (e.g., meeting Harvey Sacks his third year of graduate school at Berkeley), fortuitous and unexpected events (e.g., suddenly losing the data source for his dissertation and luckily finding another one), and tragedy (the premature death of Harvey Sacks). These and other events during the course of his intellectual life have shaped the context in which he made decisions about his work and developed his unique perspective on the study of language and interaction.

Conversations also involve individuals with goals and plans, who nonetheless create their actions on a moment-by-moment basis during the talk, in conjunction with and in response to the actions of others, and the ongoing and unfolding physical and social context the actors are both embedded within and create. Those with an interest in Conversation Analysis (CA) will find this account of Schegloff's life work to date, and how he got there, both fascinating and inspiring.

Schegloff started off in sociology, and although he never left it, he ended up providing a new way of looking at human action which builds from the work of Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, and others. His approach at least provides an alternative to sociology's previous areas of interest and attack, and perhaps a profound challenge to them. As John Heritage writes in the introductory chapter to this volume, Schegloff's CA has made a contribution to sociology which has eluded theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, Mead, Parsons, Bourdieu and Habermas: “to develop a conceptually coherent framework for the sociological analysis of interactional conduct, [and] … develop that framework into an empirical discipline through a cumulative and interlocking series of empirical investigations” (p. 2). Heritage continues:

The concern of many, however, is how CA can be considered sociology when the traditional concerns of sociology (e.g., relationships between race, gender and class) are not prominently visible in his work. Schegloff uses Goffman's concept of a membrane “that surrounds an interaction – that marks how and where it is bounded off from the surrounding setting and world – [and] can serve to filter out a lot of the things that are in some sense ‘objectively’ true about the individuals who compose the interaction” (42–43) to address this issue. Whether, in any particular instance, objective facts about an individual participant (such as race, gender, or class) are relevant depends on how the participants use and orient to these categories in their interaction – which does not mean they have to talk about them explicitly, but there has to be some way of showing each other, and hence also analysts of the interaction, their relevance for the talk. As Schegloff states in the second chapter, the purpose of his work is to develop “our understanding of how it is with humans in talk- and other-conduct-in-interaction, and how that relates to other disciplines whose activities intersect this domain.” (16). That is, it is not that race, class, and gender matter only when they are oriented to in the talk, but that they matter for the interactants and the interaction when they are oriented to in the talk:

This focus on human action and interaction rather than on the individual permeates Schegloff's approach to CA. Again picking up on Goffman (this time the distinction between “men and their moments” and “moments and their men”; 38, citing Goffman 1967:3), Schegloff argues that an approach to the study of social life which focuses on the individual and sees the settings or situations such individuals interact within as “contingent, transient, ephemeral contextual properties” (37) cannot be maintained when direct observations of what people actually do and say are made – for instance, via the use of tape-recorded or videotaped data. This kind of data forces us to understand the situated nature of human action rather than focusing on individual actors and their plans, goals, and intentions:

Thus, Schegloff's critique of the cognitivist stance of Western thought leads to a focus on studying interactions rather than individuals, and hence to the need for close analysis of electronically recorded data.

It is perhaps the insistence of Schegloff and other conversation analysts on this research approach and these types of data that results in the exceptional durability of CA research findings. Heritage, in his introductory chapter, points out that even Schegloff's CA findings from 30 years ago have withstood the test of time. Much of the body of CA research that has been done over the years by Schegloff and others appears to be cumulative: CA is building a consistent body of knowledge about how interaction works which is providing an ever-broadening base for our understanding of human action.

In addition to its durability, CA is noteworthy for its potential for direct application to practical, real-world problems and issues. Ruth Lesser's chapter on the use of CA for studying, diagnosing, and helping patients manage speech disorders such as aphasia highlights just one of the many practical areas in which CA has had a profound influence. She reports “that conversation analysis gave a clinically more useful result in identifying the communicative consequences of aphasia than did the structured methods [e.g., role playing and questionnaires]” (150). Preliminary studies in which CA was used to provide advice to aphasic patients and their caretakers have had promising results. Regarding conversation analytic research into speech disorders, Schegloff argues that it is necessary to understand how “normal” people converse in order to be able to understand the conversation of speech-disabled people. This is an additional practical justification for conversation analysts' intensive study over the past 30 years of the basic structures of talk in ordinary settings. Schegloff reminds us that “no institutional domain is totally segregated from general social life” (47), and that the study of ordinary talk is necessary to generate analytical tools for understanding talk in particular settings. Thus, the knowledge base developed by conversation analysts on the organization of talk in ordinary settings is a vital precondition for understanding the talk of aphasic patients, doctor-patient communication, emergency calls to the police, and so on. As Heritage notes, “Above all, almost every paper he [Schegloff] has written underwrites the notion that because ‘language is the vehicle for living real lives,’ the primary research site for CA must be the ‘real life’ of ordinary conversational interaction.” (7)

This book begins with a brief introductory chapter by Heritage, followed by the main attraction, a lengthy interview with Schegloff conducted by Světla Čmejrková and Carlo L. Prevignano, in turn followed by a chapter by Charles Goodwin. These three chapters will be of great interest to anyone interested in CA, and they would make good assignments in classes covering this approach. Ruth Lesser's chapter on the role of CA in language pathology is also extremely useful as a demonstration of the advantages and challenges of applying the CA approach to practical real-world problems. The book also contains two chapters critiquing Schegloff's work. They appear to be marred by inadequate understandings of his approach, and they detract from but do not remove the value of the book, which is worth buying for the four chapters mentioned above.