Like many tales of interdisciplinarity, the one of the encounter between sociology and semiotics has its share of multiple and surprising beginnings, abrupt separations, and fights about boundaries and primacy. Indeed, sometimes the relationship between the two disciplines could be taken as an exemplar case of everything that goes wrong when disciplines get into mutual contact. Since we, as editors of this volume, write from the point of view of a double fascination— with sociology and semiotics, simultaneously— the point is how to achieve some degree of cross-disciplinary integration, despite the fact that the relationship can be often characterized as “ambivalent,” “frustrating,” and yet overall “exciting.”

Behind those difficulties— and that is a convenient starting point— lie indeed very deep theoretical and conceptual reasons, not least because both semiotics and sociology have always aimed very high, and very ambitiously, at reaching some intradisciplinary understanding of key features of social life. Semiotics often proclaimed its capacity to unlock the mystery of the possibility of communication. In turn, sociology made an equally ambitious and sometimes unrealistic promise to reach an understanding of the possibility and reality of the social, in terms of its mechanisms for the production of order and, simultaneously, change. Both gave for themselves a mission that was larger than life, and it is no surprise, then, that in many of their incarnations both disciplines have been perceived to have failed— and yet, sometimes, there's no success like failure.

As semiotics and sociology gave up on their “imperialistic” (Eco, 1976) attitude and aspirations, they were ready to face each other and to assess more equanimously the nature of their convergence, which was at times very implicit and subtle. The rise of interpretive social science (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979) made the encounter very explicit, though, and “semiotic” (as an adjective) and “semiotics” (as a discipline) not only fashionable terms, but also the pillars of a research program.