Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that is well integrated into sociology. However, few social scientists have taken the direct route to the roots of phenomenology to either Husserl or Heidegger. They have instead been guided and accompanied by other researchers, whose works have functioned like bridges of knowledge. The work of this kind that has spawned the interest among social scientists in phenomenology is without any doubt Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s famous book The Social Construction of Reality (Berger 1970:15; Berger and Luckmann 1991). It is through their works that social scientists have come to appreciate another Austrian social scientist, namely Alfred Schutz (1899–1959). And with the help of Schutz, some have traveled the road all the way back to the father of phenomenology, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).

Though much knowledge has been generated by researchers that have taken the Berger and Luckmann–Schutz–Husserl road, it comes with some drawbacks, primarily an egological (atomistic) view on human beings. To rectify this problem, this chapter takes the reader on a tour along the second road to phenomenology, which leads us to the German philosopher, the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The point of bringing up Husserl and Heidegger is to show that their different versions of phenomenology today are relevant to sociology and other social sciences. The discussion of Heidegger will uncover paradigmatic assumptions (Kuhn 1962) of the social sciences that are taken for granted. It is shown that Heidegger’s ontological approach is a more radical sociological starting point than the Husserlian (Cartesian) egological that has come to dominate the social sciences. To show the concrete implication, this text explains how these two approaches give different accounts of what is one of the most central notions in the social sciences, institutions.

The First Road to Phenomenology: Egological Epistemology

The first road to phenomenology is well-known. When talking to people in the social sciences who have used phenomenology, their story is often identical. After having read Berger and Luckmann, they got interested in Schutz, and they may have studied the works of Husserl, or at least have had a look at it.

Introduction

The experience of European integration provides a challenge to classical realism. The newly partnered states of Western Europe constructed a community narrative of ‘no more war’ embodied by the creation of a security community embodied in economic integration of Original Six of the Treaty of Rome – with its original six members – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and West European military integration within NATO (Kupchan, 2010). With these steps, Western Europe turned its back on the fratricide that led to three Franco-German conflicts in less than 70 years, which resulted in two world wars (Stern, 2007).

The twentieth-century international system had Europe as its reference point: first, as the subject of empires in decline; and, subsequently, after World War II, as the object of superpower competition with a divided Germany at the front line (DePorte, 1979). During the Cold War, the debate was dominated by Waltz’s focus in the international relations literature on bipolarity, namely, the ideological and material competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Structural realism, also called neorealism, placed the emphasis squarely on the international system, the so-called third image (Waltz, 1959). In hindsight, the waning years of the last century may be perceived as a bridge decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 (Chollet and Goldgeier, 2008). That period from 11/9 to 9/11 bore witness to the rise of the internet as the driver of the latest phase in the history of globalisation, namely, the information and communications technology revolution. This latest turning point in world history featured a frequently disorienting experience of contrasts between old-world hierarchies and new social networks (Ferguson, 2019).

The early twenty-first century has experienced a series of three inflexion points. The first came right at the end of the bridge decade with the attacks on the United States in 2001. Less than a decade later, the world experienced the financial crisis of 2007–8, which left many Western countries in a state of future shock (Aliber and Kindleberger, 2015).

Man is a being of conflict. Is he also necessarily a being of war? The confrontation with the world is constitutive for the deficient human being; however, confrontation does not only mean conflict but also self-assertion in an environment that appears violent, hostile and contrary to life. Man’s confrontation with his world is not necessarily warlike, but it is also never free of any violence.

Brilliant metaphors are ready to point out the confrontation with the world. Let us think of the distinction between land and sea; man, wrote Carl Schmitt, is a being of solid ground (Schmitt, 1942). A firm standpoint is gained in space, on the earth, but the real admiration is nevertheless for the motif of taking the sea. The sea becomes the symbolic motif of reality; it is unpredictable, disorderly, shapeless and indeterminate. The dominion over the seas is, as it were, world dominion. The ocean reveals a defining facet of the human condition: if you venture too far out, you will be swallowed up by the elements; it is only on land that man wins the confrontation, when he opposes his will to the arbitrariness of the powers that be.

Another metaphor about realities in which we live is found in polar regions. The eternal ice confronts man with the experience of infinity. Under a mass of ice that stretches across the land masses like a gigantic carpet, life is, as it were, negated (Blumenberg, 1979, 1999). The human world threatens to suffocate under the rule of ice; everything that would be significant in the human world threatens to be shrouded by eternal silence.

The eternal ice threatens absolute insignificance and silence, but in the present, the ice becomes the object of a relationship of concern. In a global context, the melting of the ice becomes a metaphor of concern, both figuratively and literally. For beneath a thawed sheet of ice are the traces of a new kind of relationship of violence and world. Worry is not directed against the world, but is its own expression – henceforth, it no longer applies to the traditional reference to the world, which would simply be based on one’s own survival. Categories have to be found for this world relation of concern. A language must be formed that can break free from the old orders.

I had always known I was adopted, but it wasn’t until I turned 18 when my parents decided it was time to give me my adoption papers. Until that time, I hadn´t really been very concerned about my adoption. I am a bit darker than the average Dutchman, and I didn’t look like my parents, who were light-skinned Dutch people, but I never was discriminated against or treated differently by my family or friends. I had great parents, loyal friends, and nothing to really think about, or so I thought.

I had never given my adoption papers a thought nor had I wondered what might be contained in them. When my parents presented them to me, I flipped through them, but casually, just out of curiosity. It was a thick document, written in Greek, without an English translation. Suddenly my eye caught the word ‘leprosy’ and I sat up a little straighter. I read and reread the text, which stated that my biological mother, at the time of my adoption, was hospitalized for leprosy.

I was utterly shocked and asked my parents for explanations. Leprosy? What do you mean leprosy? How did she get this and where from? It actually still existed at that time? My mother told me that they had no more information than what was in the documents and said that my birth mother had not been present at my final “handing over,” because she was in the hospital being treated for the disease. My parents never met her nor had they seen her. I knew then and there that I wanted to go back one day to find out exactly what happened. This was also the very moment when I decided to learn Greek.

I was born in 1959 and was one-and-a-half years old when my parents adopted me in June 1961. They adopted me at the same time as my brother, Peter, who was three years old. Peter is not my biological brother and was from another family in Corfu. Ill and the second youngest in his family, his parents were unable to take care of him. After having spent some time in the care of different foster mothers, he eventually came to the Baby Center Mitera, from where he and I would both be adopted. Peter lived there for only two months.

Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the concept of entrepreneurship

• 2. To highlight the factors responsible for the wider acceptance of entrepreneurship in the twenty-first century

• 3. To appreciate some prominent entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial contributions

• 4. Learn about entrepreneurial intention and the resulting entrepreneurial ventures

• 5. To introduce sustainability entrepreneurship that solves societal issues

Introduction

Erving Goffman has been characterized as simultaneously a rebel and reactionary (Collins 1986). He publicly presented himself as a scholar who was unconcerned with politics, ideological arguments, and pragmatist sociology. He was deeply committed to a form of micro-sociology that privileged the realm of everyday interactions and his field of inquiry, on the margins of mainstream sociology, and unconventional methodologies positioned him as an outsider in the discipline. He found amusement and pleasure in the possibilities of individual interactions to subvert social expectations and order (Marx 1984). Goffman’s choice of subjects and study—the everyday lives of the stigmatized, institutionalized, marginalized—was ripe for a pragmatist analysis. Nevertheless, he eschewed wading into the politics of the day and avoided any overtly prescriptive or moralizing stance in his writing; at first glance he presents a face of agnosticism to his subjects. Goffman’s silence on matters of social importance and structural change, in his work and in his interactions with students and colleagues, exists in tension with his empathetic descriptions of the plight of marginalized individuals. Nevertheless, a holistic reading of Goffman’s work unearths implicit values and political commitments, bearing in mind that his intellectual project was an unfinished one.

This chapter draws on themes and analyses throughout Goffman’s work to pull together the threads of political commitment therein. Colleagues and students have characterized him as largely apolitical in his everyday life, and Goffman once described his own politics as “anarchist”—a debatable claim (Gamson 1985) that perhaps spoke to the value that Goffman placed on the individual. However, despite the criticisms that have been levied, Goffman’s work and understanding of the interaction order has much to offer to contemporary sociologists concerned with a politics of identity and of the margins.

The role of politics and partisanship in sociological inquiry has long been debated in the discipline. A vocal polemicist, Alvin W. Gouldner (1962) was deeply critical of sociologists’ attempts to promote the “myth” of value-free sociology. He distinguished between “value free” sociology and sociological “objectivity,” arguing that the analyst’s political and moral commitments must be made explicit to promote reflexivity and to ensure that the terms of the analysis and the basis of judgment are transparent (Gouldner 1968).

Colorful stories were part of my daily life while growing up in New York City. Everyone living there seemed to have at least one juicy domestic yarn to share with a fellow subway rider or a neighbor on a sitting area bench. Through storytelling, bonds were forged and new friendships made. My family had plenty of their own tales to tell. Yet the stories that circulated in our household never felt like they belonged to me—I couldn’t grab them and re-tell them in my own circle of friends. My line of descent was different; my bloodline was unknown. I rejected the sagas of my adopted family and took refuge in those contained in a slim, time-worn volume—the tales of my favorite Olympians.

As a child, I remember crying for poor Demeter whose innocent daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, the somber ruler of the underworld. I marveled at the lovely Aphrodite, who was born out of the blood and foam of Ouranos’ dismembered body. And, of course, there was Athena, the namesake of that ancient and polluted modern city where I was born, that wise and cunning goddess, who challenged the young and frightened Arachne to a tempestuous weaving contest no mortal could bear. I felt a strange kinship to these mythic deities, but Pandora was my favorite— it is said that curiosity drove her to open wide that coveted box, exposing mere mortals to the dark creatures inside. Like Pandora, my own curiosity and my growing need to find my own family ‘ιστορία’ (history) eventually led me back to Εƛƛάς (Hellas), land of light and immortality.

April 1962

Today was the day—the day she would say goodbye to something that had been sheltered deep inside her swollen body for the past nine months, something that squirmed around constantly looking for a place to be, and then came into the world “μϵ τα πόδια”—feet first.

She was denied the opportunity of seeing or holding her tiny boarder. The doctors took the baby while she was still “asleep”—asleep in that trance state so common to mothers giving birth during that time.

Peter L. Berger (1928–2017) was a towering intellectual figure in the field of sociology and public intellectual life from the second half of the twentieth century into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. His Invitation to Sociology introduces generations of students to the field. And, what better introduction could students have to the discipline. Berger was just simply fascinated by human beings in all their various endeavors, and ways of living. In his autobiographical reflections, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (2011), he explains how he was merely interested in finding out about American life and the course he enrolled in at the New School taught sociology through the novels of Honore de Balzac. These novels of Balzac captured the comedic drama of life in Paris, and in so doing provided a window into the everyday world of ordinary individuals. Berger was hooked. Sociology became his disciplinary home, but that was just a bureaucratic designation. He was a social scientist, an observer of humanity, and a critical analyst of social relations and their impact on practice and performance in religious life, in commercial life, and in social life in general.

The subtitle of Berger’s fascinating memoir is: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. For anyone who has read Peter L. Berger, listened to him give a lecture, or had the opportunity to visit and converse with him, the one obvious fact is that he was never boring and certainly never a bore. He was simply one of the more fascinating people you ever encountered in this academic life. Charming and self-effacing, Berger was a great storyteller and loved to use jokes to illustrate profound points. He did not rely on academic jargon to make his points, but instead wrote intelligently in plain language—this is as true for The Social Construction of Reality as for Invitation to Sociology (1966). He simply invited his readers to join him in an intellectual journey to understand mankind in all walks of life and in all his endeavors—even those that most of us would like to keep behind closed doors and hidden from public examination. He was simply curious about the way we live, work, play, love, pray, etc.

Introduction

Judging by the Sraffa edition of his Works and Correspondence (Ricardo 1951–73), more than one half of Ricardo's writings was devoted to money. However, many commentators in this domain only consider his early publications, what Sraffa called his ‘Bullion Essays’ of 1809–11. It is as if Ricardo's turn to the study of value and distribution from 1815 onwards changed nothing in his monetary views or at worst made them more confused. Such an attitude obviously downplays his Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency (Ricardo 1816) and the monetary aspects of On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, which cannot be reduced to the sole Chapter XXVII ‘On Currency and Banks’. It also neglects many interventions by Ricardo from 1819 until his death in 1823, whether in print, speeches or correspondence. This is not only to be regretted because the ‘Bullion Essays’ were written in the exceptional circumstances of the suspension of convertibility while the later contributions were concerned with the conditions and effects of the return to a normal system of convertible notes. Focusing on the ‘Bullion Essays’ also postulates that Ricardo's theory of money was disconnected from his theory of value and distribution. On the contrary, when in 1815 he shifted from monetary issues to political economy at large, Ricardo was conscious that the understanding of commodity price required coordinating these two theories. To know whether he succeeded in doing so one must assess the logical consistency between them. I will contend that only after 1815 did Ricardo develop a mature theory of money, both specific and coherent.

Failing to take account of the whole of Ricardo's writings on money has nourished some myths about his monetary theory. Indeed, myths have been common for long in the literature on his other theories, but nowhere are they more frequent than on money. Just to mention a few: most of Ricardo's economics is concerned with a non-monetary economy (barter); Ricardo held a commodity-theory of money (money is gold); he also held a strict quantity theory of money (in which the general level of prices varies proportionally with the quantity of money); according to him paper money (banknotes) behaves like metallic money, with its quantity adjusting automatically thanks to convertibility and international gold flows; his precept for the issuing bank was to maintain a 100 per cent proportionality between issues and metallic reserves.

Introduction

This chapter charts the emergence and development of the concept “situation” in sociology and related fields, with special focus on the ways that the writings of Erving Goffman intersect with these developments. It begins with an examination of the borrowing of situation from the vernacular and its elevation into a key term of thinkers like John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, but also a wide range of others who developed it in varied directions. Each section charts the conceptual linkages of various thinkers, focusing primarily on three traditions: pragmatism, existentialism, and functionalism. The result is a genealogy of the “situation” that reveals Goffman’s situational sociology as a thoughtful response to those traditions.

But the chapter also shows that “situation” is not just another social science term; it is an oppositional concept. That is, the term historically has served the function of opposition to another related term in the same semantic field. This opposed term is “nature” and its cognates “instinct,” “reflex,” “heredity,” and so on—all elements of biological determinism. In the thought of the pragmatists, the existentialists, the Chicago sociologists, and generations of social scientists after them, the argument for the importance of “situation” is often accompanied by an argument against the role of “nature” (and later other determinisms) in social behavior. Whereas early twentieth-century anthropologists followed Franz Boas in developed “culture” as the oppositional term to “nature,” pragmatist social scientists advanced the term “situation.” The term thus became an intellectual marker, a carrier of significance in the social sciences not just as an explanatory concept but also a rhetorical device, a way of marking off the territory of a particular type of analysis. As the pragmatist terms “habit,” “attention,” and “adjustment” fell away from disuse, “situation” remains.

So much of this study unearths well-trodden territory. The history of pragmatism in sociology, the role of the “situation” in philosophy, William I. Thomas on “definition of the situation,” Goffman’s interactional sociology—all these topics have been examined and told before. But the present chapter has two key advantages over many earlier analyses. First, it examines its authors not by reporting from secondary or tertiary sources, or rehashing often stale narratives, but by going to the original texts themselves.

Introduction

It seems apposite, even if rather conventional, to open this essay by quoting Ricardo's famous statement in the Preface of his Principles:

Ricardo's statement elicits three – perhaps more unconventional – remarks. Firstly, it must be noted that it implied a significant change, in relation to the foundational definition proposed by Adam Smith, with regard to what is seen as the ‘principal problem’ or the ‘true objects’ of the science of Political Economy. Ricardo motivated this shift, away from the production of wealth to its distribution, not only by the unsatisfactory treatment of this problem by his precursor (I: 5), but also, and more importantly, by referring to the theoretical difficulties involved in ascertaining the absolute size of the social product and its development over time (in a letter to Malthus of 9 October 1820):

A second remark concerns the fact that Ricardo's focus on income shares or ‘proportions’ gave rise to a novel wage concept that he first presented in the Principles: the notion of the ‘real value of wages’.

My name is Yiannoula.

I was born of a married mother and father in Messini, Greece, in 1957. My father had accidently fallen into a well after a night of drinking and died there, leaving my mother, Chariklea, a widow before I was born. She was suddenly left with five children to raise and care for all on her own. With the encouragement of an attorney, who was working with the now defunct organization Parents of Greek Orphans (POGO), which helped secure children for couples in the United States, my Yiayia (my grandmother) helped to convince my mother to put me up for adoption. When I was 14 months old, after the preparation and signing of the adoption papers, my mother herself traveled with me from Messini to Athens and reluctantly handed me over to an attendant (a stranger) on a plane. I was flown to Houston, Texas, on November 25, 1958, and was united with an American couple who lived in San Antonio, Texas.

Previously, while my adoption proceedings in Greece were being finalized, my adoptive parents were also in the process of adopting another baby, a newborn from their hometown. My adoptive father had requested a baby boy. His request was not fulfilled. Instead, he received two baby girls: me, from Greece, and an infant from Texas.

The couple who became my parents had lost their only child at the age of 17 months. After what must have been a horrific experience, it was my father’s idea to adopt. My mother wanted nothing to do with it. Even though she had lost her daughter seven years earlier, she was still grieving. I was intended to be the most “suitable” match for her deceased daughter. But from the minute I arrived, I can tell you, I also felt like I wanted nothing to do with her. Could I sense her feelings about me?

Growing up, there were no goodnight kisses, no sweet stories and no “I love you” before bed. There was only yelling and screaming. I was never allowed to go to many places and was desperately ashamed of the way we lived. My father was a self-employed house mover. He was always bringing home “stuff” left behind by the previous owners.

Introduction

In a keynote speech opening the 2019 F8 Developers Conference in San Jose, California, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his company is about to enter a new chapter in which greater focus will be put on the protection of users’ personal information. Having admitted that Facebook ‘[doesn’t] have the strongest reputation on privacy’, he then promised ‘historically important’ changes to the services it offers, including a new, entirely encrypted ‘privacy-focused platform’ parallel to the already existing traditional social network (Facebook for Developers). The ostensive effort to address user-privacy-related concerns comes at a moment when the platform is mired in multiple investigations, drawing criticism from state actors all around the ‘Western’ world. For instance, shortly before Zuckerberg’s announcement, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada issued a report in which it accused Facebook of committing ‘serious contraventions of Canadian privacy laws and fail[ure] to take responsibility for protecting the personal information of Canadians’ (OPC, 2019). More recently, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved a record fine of $5 billion after deciding the company violated the FTC’s order from 2012 when a settlement was reached following charges of ‘deceiving consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public’ (FTC, 2019). Meanwhile in Europe, Facebook is subject to 11 pending investigations by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) alone, all falling under possible violations of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

These select few examples are merely a fraction of many more instances when the interests of digital platforms appear to stand in direct opposition to the information privacy rights of their users. Moreover, an examination of the structural characteristics of the business model adopted by companies like Facebook, Amazon or Google suggests that further privacy breachesshould be anticipated, as they tend to be the rule rather than exception. Since the very logic of capital accumulation that digital platforms rely on is based on personal data collection and its analysis and assembly into information products that are sold to third parties (Fuchs, 2012), it begs a question about the adequacy of applying a privacy-oriented legal framework to effectively protect users’ personal information.