Goffman, Erving: Asylums

Background

Of the various paradigms in sociology, Goffman is most frequently associated with symbolic interactionism, which emphasizes the importance of interaction over structure in explaining social action. The emergence of symbolic interactionism as a bona fide sociological paradigm can be traced back to the lectures of George Herbert Mead; however, it was his student, Herbert Blumer, who coined the term. Although Goffman resisted identifying himself with this perspective, Goffman's own theoretical canon is quite consistent with Mead's work (Rawls, 1987). For example, Anne Warfield Rawls suggested that the first tenet of Goffman's interaction theory involves the notion that “the social self needs to be continually achieved in and through interaction” (p. 136), which is similar to Mead's contention that “the self” arises from social experiences.

However, it should be noted that, while linkages between the Chicago School, symbolic interactionism, and Goffman's theoretical treatises can be made quite effortlessly, these connections have been brought into question. For example, Blumer openly critiqued Goffman's work, pointing out that his approach focuses too heavily on the individual or the micro-level of analysis and ignores the broader collective, macro-level. This might seem to be an odd criticism coming from a symbolic [Page 384]interactionist such as Blumer, but the individualist dilemma is at the crux of most criticisms and misapprehensions of Goffman's work.

According to Jeffrey C. Alexander, the individualist dilemma results when sociologists maintain that social action occurs primarily through face-to-face interaction between individuals, and collective patterns emerge randomly from these dyadic relations; however, these same theorists then drew from collective patterns to explain face-to-face interactions. This dualism, or explaining social action by appealing to face-to-face interactions at the expense of deterministic collective patterns, is rampant in Goffman's sociology. Alexander contended that Goffman's work suffered from a “brilliant ambiguity,” which ultimately allowed it to draw fire from symbolic interactionists like Blumer. His ambiguity also left his theoretical musings open to structural and systematic interpretations, such as the ones offered by Randall Collins and Anthony Giddens. For example, Giddens pointed to Goffman's description of the “total institution” in Asylums as an attempt to “approach the overall study of social organization directly” (p. 257). Still, Alexander was probably closer to the truth when he noted that the dualism between the individual and the collective is exceptionally salient in Goffman's Asylums as he remarked, “Goffman cannot have it both ways, yet there are times when he wants to, when he simply cannot or will not decide” (p. 237). This inconsistency in Goffman's approach led George Psathas to propose considering Goffman a social theorist malgré lui, but Giddens (among others) maintained that “Erving Goffman was one of the leading post-war sociologists of the post-war period” (p. 250).

...