ABSTRACT
Erving Goffman is certainly the best-known and most influential “classical thinker of the second generation”. Few sociologists of subsequent generations have been able to avoid exposing themselves to his works and immunizing themselves against their influence. As naturally and harmoniously as Goffman have fit the image of the “classic thinker in a gold frame”, his sociology of the interaction order was and remains by no means uncontroversial. Thomas Luckmann’s genre research not only has decisively contributed to the further development of the sociology of language but also continues to this day to promote the exploration of communicative behavior, where technical media are involved. Moreover, Hubert Knoblauch not only translated a large number of Goffman’s works into German, but also, through a series of systematic presentations in which he repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the interaction order in Goffman’s sociology, quite decisively contributed to the revision of Goffman’s German-speaking reception.
