We have added our recent contribution to Richard Harper’s Festschrift in the Papers Post 2020 Section. I am sure you will all join us in thanking Richard for his contributions to Sociology, EMCA, HCI and CSCW over the years and wishing him a long and long and happy retirement
An interesting fact of history. It was through Richard Harper that ethnomethodologists in Santa Barbara laid their hands on the mimeographed lectures of Harvey Sacks. Sometime in the mid-1980s Richard Harper boarded a plane in Manchester and headed to Santa Barbara to spend one year studying how to study the contemporary workplace from Don H. Zimmerman. Zimmerman, a student of Garfinkel from the early 1960 was a pioneer in ethnomethodological “studies of work” even before the phrase was coined by Garfinkel. His study of the accomplishment of fact in records in a welfare office was a pioneering study of organizational reasoning.
Indeed he did! It followed a year’s visit Don made to Manchester as a Simon Fellow (I think. Wes would know if that’s true).