Goffman, Erving

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was one of the most important sociologists in the twentieth century. The focus of his work was the organization of observable, everyday behavior, usually but not always among the unacquainted in urban settings. Using a variety of qualitative methods, Goffman developed classifications of the different elements of social interaction. The hallmark of his approach was the assumption that these classifications were heuristic, simplifying tools for sociological analysis that did not capture the complexity of lived experience. In addition to the study of everyday social interaction, Goffman retained a strong interest in the sociology of mental illness. This began in the 1950s when he conducted ethnographic research at a large hospital in Washington, D.C. He considered the study of everyday interaction and the study of mental illness as two sides of the same coin. The intellectual context of Goffman's work was both the narrow sociological concerns of the 1950s and 1960s and the broad scholarly concerns of this era. This vantage point allows us to understand his work as an extension and integration of the perspective of symbolic interactionism, the methodological assumptions of Chicago Sociology and the sociology of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel, both of whom he greatly admired. However, his work should also be understood as a reaction against three dominant intellectual traditions of this time. The first is the “grand theory” of Talcott Parsons, the second is the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud, and the third is the positivistic, quantitative trend of many social scientists of this era. Goffman's work is therefore a response to these three gravitational pulls. Goffman made a concerted effort to engage in sociological research that did not acquiesce to the demands of these research traditions. In addition to the literary quality of his writings, the elegance of his formal sociology, and the subtlety of his observations, the theoretical sophistication of his work has assured a continuing audience for his work after his death, even though there is to date no “Goffman School” of sociology to extend his research.