Introduction

By the time of Erving Goffman’s death in 1982, a stream of European social theories gradually came to define much of what has later turned into accepted sociological knowledge regarding the contours and changes of modern, late-modern and postmodern society. Many of these theories were representative of what Charles Wright Mills (1959) had famously dubbed “grand theory”—often rather abstract, sweeping and almost all-encompassing attempts at providing theoretically detailed depictions of some of the most significant large-scale features of society and social transformation. A lot of what is now an integral part of the theoretical treasure trove of contemporary sociology was exactly produced during and immediately after the time when Goffman developed his own ideas about “the interaction order.” Throughout his writings, Goffman’s own eyes remained firmly fixed on this “interaction order,” a domain primarily reserved for microsociological exploration and analysis. Goffman first proposed this notion in his doctoral dissertation based on his in-depth study of the Shetland Island crofting community (Goffman 1953) and returned more explicitly to it again in his undelivered Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association shortly before his death (Goffman 1983).

Among these towering figures of European social theory rising to prominence during the time Goffman was writing, and in the immediate aftermath of his death— in the words of Walter Korpi (1990) so-called “Pegasuses,” who in their work were relying primarily on macrosociological insights and synthesizing efforts—were the likes of Jürgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, Axel Honneth, and more recently Hartmut Rosa and Andreas Reckwitz. Even though some of them wrote and published while Goffman was still alive, they nevertheless often remained conspicuously absent from most of his texts with only very few direct references. Adding to this, these scholars—however with some notable exceptions—also to a large degree refrained from drawing on or referring to Goffman’s ideas, thus indirectly contributing to the unfortunate separation between macro and micro perspectives in sociology.

As opposed to Goffman, who in his work limited himself to an in-depth investigation and analysis of “the interaction order,” these European social theorists were concerned with much more comprehensive societal issues and large-scale changes.