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).

Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s major, most renowned, and significant book is definitely The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, published in 1966 (Berger/Luckmann 1989 [1966]). This publication is considered as classical writing of the sociological discipline. The International Sociological Association (ISA) lists it as the fifth most influential sociological book written in the twentieth century (ISA 1998), directly after Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1958). The ground-breaking success of The Social Construction of Reality had to do with the specific zeitgeist of the 1960s combined with a re-definition of a sociology of knowledge and uniting presumably very contrary theoretical social scientific paradigms of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and George Herbert Mead (Eberle 1992). The “revolutionary spirit” of the current times was combined with a decisive new orientation in the social sciences, specifically with respect to sociology of knowledge. If we follow Berger’s argumentation, the book was written in the eve of the cultural revolution in the Western world, in the late 1960s, when the social sciences and other disciplines were characterized by various forms of neo-Marxism. The two authors did use Marx’ writings, but they were not Marxists (Endress 2019: 57). Berger describes the late 1960s as “an enormous rock concert” (Vera 2016a: 23). But the effect of the book came later, because according to Berger, in the cacophony of cultural upheaval the sober tone of the book could not be appreciated: “It is not possible to play chamber music at a rock festival” (Berger 2011: 92; Steets 2016a).

Both scholars, Berger and Luckmann, were students of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where one of their teachers, Alfred Schutz, had a major impact on their work. Especially, when the idea for the Social Construction project came up, as Peter L. Berger explains in his autobiography (Berger 2011), it was Schutz who gave the initial idea for it. Berger and Luckmann participated in Schutz’s seminar on the sociology of knowledge, in which Schutz mainly dealt with the work and critique of other social scientists, leaving his own perspective apart.

In the final phase of his life from the autumn of 2016 to April of 2017, Peter Berger was preparing a major international research project he intended to lead together with me when I was at that time the director of the Academy of World Religions of Hamburg University. The endeavor to explore the moral limits of religious pluralism in an international consultation process was cut short by his death on 27 June 2017. Yet its goal is too important to allow it to be forgotten.

The intent of this chapter is, on the one hand, to outline the project as it emerged (cf. Weisse 2019) and lay out the ideas underlying it. On the other hand, it is also intended to give readers an insight into Berger’s strategic thinking as it found expression in our planning. A selection of e-mails he wrote during the planning phase between November 2016 and April 2017— two months before his death—will serve to illuminate his thinking “from the inside.” They demonstrate the seriousness and tenacity needed to initiate such a major project, but they also offer refreshing glimpses of his kind humor and sarcastic wit. Finally, it will paradigmatically take up the approaches developed in a discussion that took place at a commemorative event one year after his death (Weisse and Steets 2019) and sketch perspectives for further academic engagement.

The Ideas Underlying the Project “The Moral Limits of Religious Pluralism

Until the turn of the millennium, Peter Berger had viewed the secularization thesis as key to religious sociology. By the early twenty-first century, though, he was beginning to doubt its validity. At the same time, he came to regard the increasing religious pluralization of Western societies as the central development. He went on record stating: “The idea that modernity secularizes, inevitably secularizes, is wrong. Full stop. This is empirically wrong. What modernity inevitably does is: it pluralizes.” (Berger and Weisse 2010, 19). He further elaborated this approach in the context of his theory of “two pluralisms” developed after 2014:

Can violence be put into words? A question that is much more difficult than it appears at the moment of a judgement, a report or a simple narrative. As a phenomenon, violence can be depicted, it is then raw or refined, experienced directly or only in a roundabout way, it is experienced intensely or carried out at a cool distance. As an experience, however, violence is not transferable and only belongs to the person to whom it happens. Violence is therefore first of all a philosophical problem that we can approach with the help of psychological introspection, but apparently never get to its actual core.

That talking about violence presents such a difficulty is surprising given the rich body of writing that sociology and philosophy, historiography and politics have produced. Violence is a subject of the utmost seriousness and yet speaking about violence seems to face various barriers. This has not only to do with the fact that violence forms a phenomenological prism that expresses both a relational event and a structural problem. Rather, the problem goes back to the complex relationship that connects violence with the discourse about violence.

One can basically distinguish between two forms in which violence is talked about. The first possibility takes the form of a social diagnosis in which the extent of de facto violence is mapped. With the help of statistical methods, if one draws a line from the past to the present, a decrease in de facto violence could be determined. Looking at complex statistics, historical evidence and theories of civilisation, the twentieth century then receives a surprising description. This century laid the foundation for an age in which violence as a means of politics was noticeably declining, writes Steven Pinker (Pinker, 2011). The dwindling importance of violence has many sources: developmental psychology and brain physiology, education and moral theory, historical chronicles and even countable death rates all contribute to this judgement.

The other form in which we can approach violence in history and the present is the discourse on violence. While the sober analysis of historical violations relies on predictability, such as the average probability of a violent death, the discourse on violence finds itself entangled in the violence of language. It begins with the fact that it remains unclear, must remain unclear, what ‘counts’ as violence (Liebsch, 2014).

A million dead. A million fled. That is how one distinguished writer summarised the devastating consequences of the Great Famine in Ireland. In season after season in the later 1840s, a mysterious plant disease destroyed the potato crop which was the main source of food of the labouring classes. Hunger stalked the land, followed in quick succession by killer diseases. notably typhus, which preyed upon those weakened by famine. Malnutrition, disease, suffering, and, finally, death, sealed the fate of a million or so souls. As in famines elsewhere, those most affected were the poorest. In Ireland, these were the cottiers and the rural labourers, as well as a sprinkling of town labourers, who even in the best of times struggled to make a living. But these were the worst of times. When a population census was taken in 1851 at the end of the famine, a quarter of the population had vanished through death or emigration. This collapse was brutally compressed within the space of a few years.

In the context of Irish history, it was the greatest disaster since the other great famine of 1740–41. Taking a wider view, relative to population size, the catastrophe ranks among the most severe famines of the modern world. It retains an important place in the psyche of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora to this day. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention. In particular, a tremendous amount of work has been completed on mortality, emigration, relief efforts and the wider political, social and psychological consequences of the calamity, though highly politicised accounts such as genocidal interpretations of the Famine no longer enjoy wide currency. Our understanding of the Great Famine is now much more comprehensive and nuanced, as well as being firmly located in a comparative context.

Yet much remains to be retrieved and understood, particularly at the level of the rural poor. The ‘holy grail’ in terms of grasping the experience of the crisis surely must be a set of famine diaries produced by those most badly affected, small farmers, cottiers and labourers. Such personal accounts have never materialised, though at least one fake diary captured the public imagination in the 1990s.

“Objectivation” is key to the sociohistorical process of The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In the architecture of Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of the sociology of knowledge, objectivation is the link between action and culture. Action is what people knowingly try to bring forward; culture is the long-lasting and often unintended effect of people’s actions, for example, institutions. Objectivation is at the center of the “dialectical” process that turns subjective meaning into social facts and social facts into subjective meaning. The former, called externalization, is informed by Durkheim and his postulate of social facts; the latter, internalization, is dedicated to Max Weber and his ideal of subjective meaning. Berger and Luckmann label these processes “dialectical” since they consider them to be permanent and continuing, in the sense that they run “simultaneously” both for the individual and for society as a whole (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966, 149).

The designation of this process as dialectical is not intended to place the subjective outside the social, as it were (Knoblauch 2020, 40). Instead, from a pre-social subject, social theory needs to proceed from subjects who are set in relation to others from the very beginning of their lives. Neither subjective meaning nor consciousness but relationality is therefore the starting point of social theory, which—similar to what is described in interactionism as the “looking-glass effect”—results in reflexivity and subjectivity.

Husserl’s phenomenology, referring back to Kant and Descartes, is the classical source of subjectivity as a theoretical stance. It was Alfred Schütz who, informed by Bergson’s time phenomenology and Dewey’s pragmatism, transferred subjectivity into the empirical fact of intersubjectivity (cf. Schütz 1970). Anthropologically, actors must not be seen as entities already endowed with subjectivity but with the “capacity of subjectivation” (Steets 2019, 136). According to Silke Steets, “subjectivation is never just a one-way street from society to the subject. It is this interplay between one’s own reference to others and external reference from others that subjectifies” (Steets 2019, 136). Meaning is the way in which subjects relate to one another. And objectivations are crucial in these continuing action processes because they mediate the way in which subjects are able to refer to each other.