ABSTRACT
Although Goffman's work focused primarily on the interaction order and its properties, he did comment on the connections between the interaction order and other social orders, such as institutions. Beyond its foundational role in Giddens’ structuration theory, we can directly connect Goffman's work to institutional contexts. There is much in his work to suggest that these linkages are possible, although Goffman himself did not develop these connections. McCannell suggested that Goffman tried to establish the interaction order as a social order in its own right, yet as he pointed out, “If there was ever a subject matter enmeshed in and determined by institutional arrangements … it is face-to-face interaction” (MacCannell, 2000, pp. 28–29). And Goffman himself noted that
To confine ourselves to the large social formations resembles the older science of anatomy with its limitation to the major, definitely circumscribed organs such as heart, liver, lungs, and stomach, and with its neglect of the innumerable, popularly unnamed or unknown tissues. Yet without these, the more obvious organs could never constitute a living organism. On the basis of the major social formations—the traditional subject matter of social science—it would be similarly impossible to piece together the real life of society as we encounter it in our experience. Without the interspersed effects of countless minor syntheses, society would break up into a multitude of discontinuous systems. Sociation continuously emerges and ceases and emerges again.
(Simmel, as quoted in Goffman, 1953b, p. iv)