Legacies and problematics of microsociology in the Social Studies of Finance

Abstract

Erving Goffman’s work is often read as a quasi-anthropology of social interactions, disclosing the fundamental micro-processes of sociality. This paper argues that his work ought rather to caution sociologists against axiomatics regarding the micro-ontology of social order, and attempts to rescue from Goffman’s work references to the vanishing and transformation of social order. An example of the relevance of this attempt is research in the social studies of finance (SSF), whose interactionist strand reconstructs financial processes in their quality of social order and normative microcoordination. Yet precisely as these works, referring to Goffman and other analysts of social micro-processes, make financial markets legible for sociologists, a task arises for them: to represent not only the orderliness, but also the strains and transformations of the interaction order as envisaged by Goffman. Only this will enable SSF to analyze the translations of broader structural transformations in finance as they present themselves on the microlevel of financial interactions.