Summary
Contents
Subject index
Part of the SAGE Social Thinker series, this book serves as a concise and inviting introduction to the life and works of Erving Goffman, one of the most prominent social theorists in postwar sociology. Goffman's ideas continue to influence scholars in various fields and have also attracted many readers outside conventional academia. Goffman's overall research agenda was the exploration of what he termed the interaction order—that is, the micro social order that regulates the co-mingling of people in each other's immediate presence. He coined several new concepts (face-work, impression management, role distance, civil inattention, etc.) with which to grasp and understand the complexities and basic social restructuring of everyday life, many of which are now part of sociology's standard vocabulary.
Goffman's “Mixed Methods”
Goffman's “Mixed Methods”
Nobody ever worked or wrote quite like Erving Goffman. The research topics he chose for attention, the way he presented them, and his approach to conducting sociological research in general were at the time of his writing quite exceptional. One of the main qualities of Goffman's writings was their sophisticated commonsensical character, which was evident in his unique ability to defamiliarize the apparently trivial nature of everyday life while at the same time making his readers sensitive toward the nuances, depths, and hidden dimensions of quite ordinary events. Alasdair MacIntyre once thus described Goffman's ability to capture this familiar and trivial world as a special way of seeing “the familiar with the eyes of a stranger, while at the same ...
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