Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982) was a Canadian-born sociologist and writer.
The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective that began with his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
In 2007 Goffman was listed as the 6th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide, behind Anthony Giddens and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.
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Goffman was born in 1922 in Mannville, Alberta, Canada to parents Max Goffman, and his wife, Ann (née Averbach). He was descended from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had joined the great inflow of Russians into Canada just before the beginning of the century. The family later migrated to Dauphin, in Manitoba, where his father kept what must have been a fairly successful tailoring business. After three years at high school of Winnipeg, he became a student at the University of Manitoba (with chemistry as his ‘major subject’) in the first year of the Second World War, but left off studying to move to Ottawa to work for the National Film Board of Canada established by John Grierson. Later he developed his interest in sociology. It was also during this time that he met Dennis Wrong who was a renowned North American sociologist at the time. This meeting worked as a motivation to leave Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a B.A. in sociology and anthropology in 1945. Afterwards, he moved on to the University of Chicago and received his M.A. and Ph.D for sociology, in 1949 and 1953 respectively. He was the younger brother of actress Frances Bay.
Along with many other sociologists of his cohort, Goffman was heavily influenced by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in developing his theoretical framework. Goffman studied at the University of Chicago with Everett Hughes, Gregory Adams, Edward Shils, and W. Lloyd Warner. He would go on to pioneer the study of face-to-face interaction, or micro-sociology, elaborate the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and develop numerous concepts that would have a massive influence.
Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his formulation of symbolic interaction as dramaturgical perspective in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which begins with an epigraph by George Santayana about masks. Largely working within the tradition of symbolic interactionism, he greatly elaborated on its central concepts and application. For Goffman, society is not homogeneous. We must act differently in different settings. The context we have to judge is not society at large, but the specific context. Goffman suggests that life is a sort of theater, but we also need a parking lot and a cloak room: there is a wider context lying beyond the face-to-face symbolic interaction. "Throughout Presentation of Self, Goffman seems to perceive the individual as nothing more than a cog responsible for the maintenance of the social world by playing his or her part. In fact, he refers to the self as a 'peg' upon which 'something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time.'"
Goffman wrote the following works: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Forms of Talk and many other books and essays. Many of his works form the basis for the sociological and media studies concept of framing.
In 1961, Goffman published the book Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates which was one of the first sociological examinations of the social situation of mental patients, the hospital. The book includes four essays: Characteristics of Total Institutions (1957), The Moral Career of the Mental Patient (1959), The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital, The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades. In Asylums, Goffman is mainly engrossed with the details of having been hospitalized to a psychiatric hospital and the nature and effects of the process he defines as ‘institutionalization’. He describes how the institutionalisation process socialises people into the role of a good patient, someone ‘dull, harmless and inconspicuous’, which in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness.
This was Goffman’s first and most famous book, for which he received the American Sociological Association’s MacIver award in 1961. It was also the first book to treat face-to-face interaction as a subject to study in the sociological aspect. Goffman treated it as a kind of report in which he frames out the theatrical performance that applies to face-to-face interactions. He believed that when an individual comes in contact with other people, that individual will attempt to control or guide the impression that others might make of him by changing or fixing his or her setting, appearance and manner. At the same time, the person that the individual is interacting with is trying to form and obtain information about the individual. Goffman also believed that all participants in social interactions are engaged in certain practices to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others. This led to Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis. Goffman saw a connection between the kinds of acts that people put on in their daily life and theatrical performances. In social interaction, like in theatrical performance there is a front region where the “actors” (individuals) are on stage in front of the audiences. This is where positive aspect of the idea of self and desired impressions are highlighted. There is a back region or stage which can also be considered as a hidden or private place where the individual can be themselves and get rid of their role or identity in society.
Goffman argues secrecy underlies all social interaction. The dramaturgical approach functions to explain this curious state of affairs. In his own words, the chapter on "Teams" concludes:
A team, then, may be defined as a set of individuals whose intimate co-operation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained. A team is a grouping, but it is a grouping not in relation to a social structure or social organization but rather in relation to an interaction or series of interactions in which the relevant definition of the situation is maintained. We have seen, and will see further, that if a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent and character of co-operation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret. A team, then, has something of the character of a secret society. The audience may appreciate, of course, that all the members of the team are held together by a bond no member of the audience shares. Thus, for example, when customers enter a service establishment, they clearly appreciate that all employees are different from customers by virtue of this official role. However, the individuals who are on the staff of an establishment are not members of a team by virtue of staff status, but only by virtue of the co-operation which they maintain in order to sustain a given definition of the situation. No effort may be made in many cases to conceal who is on the staff; but they form a secret society, a team, in so far as a secret is kept as to how they are co-operating together to maintain a particular definition of the situation. Teams may be created by individuals to aid the group they are members of, but in aiding themselves and their group in this dramaturgical way, they are acting as a team, not a group. Thus a team, as used herein, is the kind of secret society whose members may be known by non-members to constitute a society, even an exclusive one, but the society these individuals are known to constitute is not the one they constitute by virtue of acting as a team. Since we all participate on teams we must all carry within ourselves something of the sweet guilt of conspirators. And since each team is engaged in maintaining the stability of some definitions of the situation, concealing or playing down certain facts in order to do this, we can expect the performer to live out his conspiratorial career in some furtiveness.
This book is a collection of six of Goffman’s essays; the first four essays were published around the 1950s, the fifth is published in 1964, and the last essay was to finish the collection. His six essays are “On Face-work”, “Embarrassment and Social Organization”, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”, “Alienation from Interaction”, "Mental Symptoms and Public Order” and “Where the Action Is”. Goffman's first essay, “On Face-work, focused on the concept of face, which is the positive image of self that individuals have when interacting with others. Goffman believed that face “as a sociological construct of interaction, is neither inherent in nor permanent aspect of the person”. Once an individual gives out a positive self image of themselves to others they then feel a need to keep or live up to that set image. When individuals are inconsistent with how they project themselves in society, they risk being embarrassed or discredited, therefore the individual remains consistently guarded, making sure that they do not show themselves in an unfavorable way to others.
This book was Goffman's way of trying to explain how conceptual frames structure the individual’s perception of the society; therefore, this book is about organization of experiences rather than organization of society. Frames organize the experiences and guide action for the individual and/or for everyone. Frame analysis, then, is the study of organization of social experiences. One example that Goffman used to help people better understand the concept is associating the frame with the concept of a picture frame. He used the picture frame concept to illustrate how people use the frame (which represents structure) to hold together their picture (which represents the context) of what they are experiencing in their life. The most basic frames are called primary frameworks. These frameworks take an experience or an aspect of a scene of an individual that would originally be meaningless and make it to become meaningful. One type of primary framework is natural frameworks, which identifies situations that happened in the natural world, and is completely physical with no human influences. The other type of framework is social framework, which explains events and connects it to humans. An example of natural framework would be the weather and an example of social framework would be the meteorologist who reports people with the weather forecast. Goffman concentrates more on the frameworks and tries to “construct a general statement regarding the structure, or form, of experiences individuals have at any moment of their social life”.
During his lifetime he was awarded the following:
During his career Goffman served at the following institutions:
He was also the 73rd president of American Sociological Association
Erving Goffman
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