Goffman, Erving (1922–1982)

Erving Goffman was born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to parents of Jewish-Ukrainian descent. In 1945, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in 1953. After graduating from Chicago, Goffman accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968, he left Berkeley to accept a distinguished chair in sociology and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Goffman remained at Pennsylvania until he died as a result of stomach cancer in 1982. At the time of his death, he was the president of the American Sociological Association, and he crafted his last published work, “The Interaction Order,” as his presidential address.

Goffman was one of the most original and provocative sociologists of the twentieth century. He used his extraordinary analytic skills to establish a new field of sociology—the study of face-to-face interaction. In doing so, he demonstrated how and why “the interaction order” was a relatively autonomous realm of social life, influenced but not determined by culture and social structure. In crafting his groundbreaking analyses, Goffman drew on the insights of a diverse array of scholars, including Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, and Everett Hughes. Goffman also extended the ideas of these thinkers in notable ways, applying them to unexplored aspects of social life and blending them with his own distinctive insights and concepts. Goffman's special genius laid in his ability to use remarkably incisive metaphors and observations to reveal the intricacies of face-to-face interaction.

Goffman became best known for developing the dramaturgical theory of interaction. According to this theory, social life mirrors theater, and people are like actors on a stage. To realize desired selves, individuals must be “good actors” who can adeptly manipulate props, masks, moods, and settings to manage the impressions of others. Selves, then, are dramatic effects—they become established through convincing performances and depend on the responses of others. Selves are thus thoroughly social in nature. Rather than being private possessions or personal capacities, selves are something others temporarily grant to individuals based on their situated performances.

Goffman acknowledged that as people negotiate selves and construct social meanings, they draw on codes rooted in the framework of culture. These codes get expressed through an elaborate assortment of role performances, dramaturgical displays, and interaction rituals. Yet Goffman emphasized that interaction does not simply serve as a vehicle through which culture gets enacted and reproduced. Instead, the interaction order has its own distinctive logic and dynamics. While culture informs this order, it only sets broad parameters for action. That is, culture offers social actors “rough drafts” for behavior, thereby leaving them room to improvise as they perform roles, present selves, and define situations.

In 1974, Goffman developed an approach called frame analysis to examine how people organize their experiences and define situations. In many respects, frame analysis offered semiotics of contemporary culture. According to Goffman, frames refer to interpretive schemes that enable people to make sense of activity occurring around them. In analyzing frames and their implications, Goffman demonstrated how they can be reworked into “keys” and thus take on meanings that are patterned on but different from their original meaning. For example, the frame of “a debate” could be keyed as a “mock debate” or as a “debate practice.” As Goffman highlighted, the process of keying complicates interactions by undermining frames and making people uncertain about what is happening. Most crucially, Goffman delineated the basic keys and frames that individuals use to organize their experiences. In the process, he revealed how these interpretive schemes serve as a kind of glue that holds culture, structure, and interaction together, albeit somewhat tenuously.

...