Introduction

It is no secret that social interaction was Erving Goffman’s abiding sociological concern. His first major article, “On Face-Work,” opened with the statement: “Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him either in face-to-face or mediated contact with other participants” (Goffman 1967, 5). At the end of his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959, 254) reminded readers that it addressed not “aspects of theatre that creep into everyday life” but rather “the structure of social encounters […] those entities in social life that come into being whenever persons enter one another’s immediate physical presence.” Subsequent books confirmed that social interaction, conceptualized in his original and highly distinctive manner, lay at the heart of Goffman’s sociological attention. Yet to many readers, the title he gave to his posthumously published Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (ASA) must have seemed novel: “The Interaction Order” (Goffman 1983). The concept of interaction order built on the widespread recognition of his preoccupation with social interaction while at the same time it added something new. It emphasized how interaction, those practices occurring in “environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s response presence” were socially organized in distinctive ways. The interaction order was a “domain” of inquiry that stood alongside kinds of social order—the economic order, the legal order, and so forth—routinely embraced by the sociological gaze. To the many readers of his eleven books and numerous academic articles, interaction order would have been a new term, though not to those few who were familiar with the concluding chapter of Goffman’s (1953) doctoral dissertation. The overall aim of the Address was “to sum up the case for treating the interaction order as a substantive domain in its own right” (Goffman 1983, 2).

Goffman was a sociologist whose writings attracted fascination and puzzlement in equal measure. For readers seeking meaning and motive in the work of Goffman, his posthumously published “The Interaction Order” (Goffman 1983) exercises a special claim. It was a paper completed in the knowledge that its author might not live to see its publication.