Modern societies are in a difficult situation, and not just today. Various scenarios are embellished that conjure up the creeping decline, whereby the focus is less on a concrete form of state and more on an entire culture. Cultures such as the West, whose religious powers are dwindling, are doomed in the long run because decadence and inertia, but above all a loss of meaning, have an impact within (Onfray, 2017). Such narratives, which may overemphasise politics, culture and religiosity, attract attention through their sceptical worldview alone. They are heard and applauded insofar as they give space to speculation that cannot be doubted by any logocentric strategies.

Nevertheless, there are a multitude of reasons to defend the form of modernity and, if possible, to prolong its existence. The following reflections can possibly contribute a part to this and, paradoxically, by drawing attention to the dark sides of history and the present. In this respect, the following remarks are to be understood as a specific form of defence that sharpens the eye for the shallows and negative sides of one’s own.

This negativity can be seen in various dimensions. It concerns the relationship between domination and violence in general and the history of violence of the rising nation state in particular. Put simply, democracy casts a long shadow into the past, which has to do with the categories of order formation, homogenisation and the civilisation of the foreign. However, in order to avoid a one-sided presentation, the historical review must be combined with a political and a cultural–psychological reflection. Here, history, culture, psychology and politics enable an overall view of the shades of the order of modernity. And from this point of view, with an open eye on the historical conditionality of the present, progress in thinking can be hoped for in the best case.

We pick out two examples in the following. Both times, we are dealing with violent events that received little attention for a long time and were only officially recognised after long struggles. Both cases – the colonial violence on the African continent and the genocide of the Armenian people – lead our reflections to situations of suffered violence that are difficult to bear.

Although better known for his foundational writings in the sociology of religion, modernity, and capitalism, Peter L. Berger was for his entire life preoccupied with the challenge of modern pluralism. He understood the latter as involving, not just the growing diversity of religious traditions in society, but the deeper question of how human beings can co-exist in peace in an age when a shared experience of both everyday realities and ultimate meanings gives way to social worlds in which individuals with deeply different world views live side by side in society. In this chapter, I provide an overview of Berger’s evolving understanding of modern pluralism. In the final and larger part of this chapter, I review and assess the ideas he developed in the last years of his life, during which time I had the pleasure of being his colleague.

Pluralism as an Emergent Effect of Modernity

In his early works, including The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967), and his no less monumental The Social Construction of Reality (1966; co-authored with his life-long friend, Thomas Luckmann), Berger linked the problem of modern plurality to what he described as the dialectics of social life. According to the latter model, social worlds are products of an ongoing interaction between the individual, social structures, and the institutions of society as a whole. The interaction begins when an individual “externalizes” meanings through cognitive and physical activity, thereby contributing to the creation of broader social structures which, in a third phase of the dialectic, are then “reappropriated” or internalized as “structures of consciousness” (Berger 1967, 14). Seen from this ever-evolving perspective, “subjective reality is […] always dependent upon specific plausibility structures […] without which the definition of reality in question cannot be maintained in consciousness” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 174–75).

Drawing on such early twentieth-century scholars as Emile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto, Berger argued that religion often has a privileged place in the construction of this social reality. “Religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation” for a particular world view or social reality, providing an overarching “social canopy” for meaningful human experience.

My name is Nicholas Webb and I was born on January 18, 1954. I grew up in the shadow of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, during the 1960s and 1970s. My dad, Harvey, and my mom, Louise, were almost 45 years older than me, which made for a different perspective on how to raise a child, since my other friends had much younger parents.

Mom wanted me to be raised Catholic because she was and her parents were born and raised in Italy and emigrated from there in 1899. Dad was raised in the heartland of America and was Protestant and his family emigrated from England in 1629. His personal belief and “religious” philosophy was, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” Mom won, though, and I went to catechism. I was never baptized or confirmed a Catholic, but I went to a Catholic church with my friends.

I was an only child and felt a desire to have a sibling, but it never happened. I remember going out to play and not wanting to play by myself, so I would knock on the doors in my neighborhood, homes of my friends, looking for someone to play with.

Early on I realized that I looked a lot more like my Mom than my Dad, so undoubtedly, I felt like I was more Italian than American. My school friends were not as dark as I was, except for my Mexican friends. I played well with others and I liked having a lot of friends, which I did. School was fun and I did pretty well. I was a good student, but I seemed to always get in trouble for talking all the time. As an only child, I guess I was happy to be in the company of other children and so was chatty.

The summer of 1966 brought a surprise that would change my life forever. As I was filling out my paperwork to register for junior high school, there was a question I didn’t know the answer to. What is your city of birth?

I asked my parents and my Dad told me that I was from a little country across the ocean. Greece, he said. You were born in Athens, he added.

Introduction

When Erving Goffman passed away and left his earthly shell in the early morning hours of November 20, 1982, something passed away with him, but something—and indeed something important—also lived on. Even though Goffman left his earthly shell, he had ignited an inextinguishable fire in the minds of those of his students and readers who saw in his work the discovery of a new realm of human and social life that needed to be charted and researched. Goffman is known to have provided a spark for new generations of scholars and researchers in their endeavor to excavate and carve out new details of what he himself had termed “the interaction order”—the heretofore relatively unchartered realm of face-to-face interaction. In the exploration of this realm, Goffman wanted to retain for himself and those who followed lead what he called “a spirit of unfettered, unsponsored inquiry” (Goffman 1983, 17), extending to all elements and areas of social life. It was this unfettered and unsponsored curiosity about a part of social life that had been so routinely overlooked—face-to-face interaction—that Goffman in his lifetime turned into a legitimate concern for sociologists.

Goffman died at the age of sixty, and we are only allowed to speculate what he could have invented and accomplished had he lived another ten or twenty years. But prior to his premature death he was a prolific writer publishing eleven monographs and a number of important journal articles. Perhaps if the quantity in itself was not impressive, the quality and originality of Goffman’s books was matched by few. Goffman was a maverick, a lone wolf, throughout his career. His books and articles were singleauthored, and compared to today’s publishing patterns and strategies (sometimes with a never-ending listing of authors even for a short piece), Goffman remained a DIY-man, relying mostly on his own wit and ideas but also creatively incorporating the inspiration of many fellow social scientists, novelists, playwrights, authors of technical manuals, etiquette books, and other types of unconventional material into his own corpus of work (often meticulously mentioned in his abundant footnotes, see Jacobsen 2022b).

Introduction

The year 1847 has gone down in history and memory as Black ‘47. It was the second year of the Great Famine. Hunger, destitution and death were everyday occurrences. Among those best placed to convey a picture of the unfolding tragedy were the priests of the Catholic Church who ministered to three-quarters of the population. Living among people, many of whom were illiterate, particularly so in the Gaelic-speaking areas west of the Shannon and in south Munster, they were articulate witnesses for their people. They saw the Famine at its worst and some of them died in the course of their duties, mainly from epidemic fevers. This was true also of clergymen of other denominations, medical doctors and poor-law administrators, whose professions brought them in close contact with the disease-infected victims of hunger. We have seen in the last chapter that the Death Census was fundamentally a statistical survey, though one that needs to be handled with care. Its proponents wanted to quantify the effects of famine on mortality across Ireland by comparing the number of deaths between October 1846 and April 1847 against the same period a year earlier. However, in addition to providing this information most of the respondents included vivid testimony, often running into many hundreds of words on conditions in each of their parishes. They wrote about hunger, disease, swollen stomachs, insanity, emigration, death; a few even included lists of the names of the dead. Some spoke critically of political economy, proselytism, outrages, inadequate soup rations, tight-fisted rate payers, and of course of landlords, particularly if absentee. Some wrote haunting individual stories of the suffering they had witnessed, of parishioners unburied by the roadside, of workers collapsing on the public works, of families dying in the filth and cold of their cabins. They might also acknowledge acts of charity and benevolence, and profess loyalty to their ‘gracious Queen’. The panacea of repeal of the Union found frequent expression, as well as words of heartfelt devotion to the ‘Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell. Politics aside, these eyewitness accounts offer unique, personal, and frequently harrowing insights into the ravages of the Great Famine at one of its worst stages.

I’m really not sure when my mom and dad were going to tell me I was adopted. I’m sure it would have been in good time.

But I found out another way. I was at the house of a good friend. They had a daughter who was their foster child. We used to play for hours with our Barbie dolls. One day we went to the kitchen for a snack. I must have been about five or six years old and her mother looked at me and said, “You know you were adopted, don’t you?”

When I got home, I ran up to my mom and pointed to her stomach and said, “I didn’t come from your stomach?” I remember she just looked at me and said, “No, you didn’t come from my stomach. It’s true. You are adopted.” She began to explain saying, “Greece cried out to America and to all the countries of the world that they had starving babies that needed to be adopted. We wanted to adopt a child. We looked through thousands of pictures of all the babies and we found you. We chose you.”

This information and the way it was delivered to me changed the trajectory of my life, how I looked at the world, how I felt about my parents. My life was my life, but with a twist. There was so much unknown about me.

After the news broke, my nights in bed were spent thinking about the parents I had in Greece, not knowing anything about them and they not knowing anything about me. I began crying myself to sleep at night, saying over and over to no one there, “I’m here, I’m here now.”

My adoptive parents were both Jewish. My father’s parents came from Russia and escaped Stalin and communism. He grew up in New York and had a sister, who had two children.

My mother’s family was from Minnesota. She was the baby of the family and had two sisters and a brother. My two aunts lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, near to us in the city.

I would not describe us as a typical Jewish family. We didn’t go to temple, but we celebrated both Hanukkah and Passover with one of my aunts and her family.

Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the role of culture in women entrepreneurship

• 2. Evaluate the negative impact of gender stereotypes

• 3. Understand how women entrepreneurs utilize social and psychological capital

• 4. To understand the importance of business networks for women entrepreneurs

Opening Profile: Time Warner Cable

Time Warner Cable reported a huge quarterly loss of television subscribers, the largest in its history: 306,000 of its 11.7 million subscribers had dropped the company, the New York Times reports. An impasse with television networks CBS over fees led to Time Warner blacking CBS out of millions of homes in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas for a month during the summer of 2013.

The parties’ ultimate agreement was viewed as a victory for CBS, which won a promise of significantly higher fees for its programming in the blacked-out cities, from about $1 per subscriber to $2, as well as the digital rights to sell its content to web-based distributors such as Netflix. Time Warner halted the blackout and conceded in large part because it feared a mass exodus of subscribers if the dispute interrupted the start of Monday night football on CBS.

Time Warner’s disappointing news highlights why attempts to punish a negotiation counterpart into conceding often backfire. Time Warner’s focus on the pain it was inflicting on CBS blinded it to the likelihood that it would suffer from the blackout at least as much. Rather than spurring agreement, such hardball tactics tend to escalate disputes and drive parties even farther apart.

Don’t Take Things for Granted; It Will Cost You

Women are generally perceived to have lower power than men. The statement finds support from data provided by UN women, 2018. The data suggests that millions of primary school-aged girls are not able to attend primary schools. The same is not true for primary school-aged boys. UN women also highlight that there is a global gender pay gap of about 23 percent and women are also more likely to experience physical and sexual violence from their partners. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was estimated that 60 percent of the world’s poor were females of a variety of ages (UNIDO, 2001).

The authors penned down the present textbook, with a clear purpose to guide, motivate and encourage readers from a different background who aim to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams by employing effective negotiation skills. It offers the readers a unique experience of learning through a variety of chapters intersecting the areas of negotiation and entrepreneurship. All the topics presented in chapters have been meticulously curated keeping in view the impact and benefits to the readers. The textbook consists of ten chapters ranging from introduction to entrepreneurship, interpersonal behavior, role of communication, conflict management, negotiation planning and strategy, negotiation process and effective tips, negotiation for women, negotiation and cultural differences.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur’s role in society. Entrepreneurship has always been a component of our traditional cultures and old civilizations in general, even from the beginning of recorded history. Understanding entrepreneurship from an entirely new angle is extremely important in today’s competitive business environment. The dynamic changes in the internal and external environment of business necessitate a new perspective and a deeper understanding of the available data.

When it comes to starting a venture and dealing with conflicts, Chapter 2 is all about it. All of the things that stand in the way of starting your own enterprise lead to conflict. Entrepreneurs must learn how to deal with a variety of competing situations while preserving relationships rather than tearing them apart. Entrepreneurs can learn about various conflict resolution strategies, models and styles by studying various approaches to a conflict. As an entrepreneur, conflict management is one of the most sought-after abilities. When dealing with a variety of scenarios including opposing viewpoints and competing interests, these abilities are critical.

According to Chapter 3, entrepreneurs need to communicate well in order to succeed. Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings as well as their problem-solving abilities through effective communication. It also fosters trust, openness and transparency. An entrepreneur’s ability to successfully manage any problem rests on their ability to communicate at many levels, as well as their use of various techniques and methods.

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.

Introduction

Dramaturgy—the comparison between social life and theater—is the most influential of Erving Goffman’s metaphors. Exciting, intriguing, and visually striking, the image of actors on stage, performing characters in scenes, invites us to take a seat in the audience and enjoy the show. Throughout Goffman’s work, we find recurring themes of mystery, deception, and illusory appearance, encouraging readers to question what might lie behind the scenes. His tone is conspiratorial, promising to share with us the secrets he has learned about the performative intricacies of human social behavior. Goffman’s canonical texts, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Interaction Ritual (1967), and Relations in Public (1971), document the ways in which teams of actors display and uphold tacitly agreed-upon versions of social reality. Later and more esoteric works, such as Frame Analysis (1974) and Gender Advertisements (1979), deal with the power of presented knowledge claims and discursive forms of truth.

Yet, despite this intellectual concern with dramatic distortion, Goffman is careful to keep himself hidden, remaining elusive and inscrutable behind the page. We rarely see Goffman-the-person, as he eschewed subjective inference in favor of dry observation, while Goffman-the-author had an understated voice that was intentionally measured. Rather than wearing his heart on his sleeve, he cloaked himself in mystery and left the audience guessing. Professionally, Goffman was famously reluctant to align himself with any disciplinary field, theoretical perspective or ideological position, rarely gave interviews, forbade lecture recordings, and sealed his personal archives (Shalin 2013). Ironically, this self-obscuration only serves to increase the audience’s fascination with who Goffman was and what he was intending. Imagined in posterity, through this tantalizing lens, he cuts more of a celebrity figure than anyone could have done in real life.

There is no shortage of critical reviews, analytical accounts, and personal recollections by Goffmanian scholars (Ditton 1980; Burns 1992; Manning 1992; Winkin 1999; Scheff 2006; Smith 2006; Jacobsen 2010; Raffel 2013; Scott 2015; Hood and van de Vate 2017), and an impressive repository of documentary resources, the Erving Goffman Archives (Shalin 2013).