A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and cotnrol the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience. The discussions of these social techniques offered here are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.
The two essays in this classic work by sociologist Erving Goffman deal with the calculative, gamelike aspects of human interaction. Goffman examines the strategy of words and deeds; he uses the term "strategic interaction" to describe gamelike events in which an individual's situation is fully dependent on the move of one's opponent and in which both players know this and have the wit to use this awareness for advantage. Goffman aims to show that strategic interaction can be isolated analytically from the general study of communication and face-to-face interaction. The first essay addresses expression games, in which a participant spars to discover the value of information given openly or unwittingly by another. The author uses vivid examples from espionage literature and high-level political intrigue to show how people mislead one another in the information game. Both observer and observed create evidence that is false and uncover evidence that is real. In "Strategic Interaction," the book's second essay, action is the central concern, and expression games are secondary. Goffman makes clear that often, when it seems that an opponent sets off a course of action through verbal communication, he really has a finger on your trigger, your chips on the table, or your check in his bank. Communication may reinforce conduct, but in the end, action speaks louder. Those who gamble with their wits, and those who study those who do, will find this analysis important and stimulating.
Forms of Talk extends Erving Goffman's interactional analyses of face-to-face communication to ordinary conversations and verbal exchanges. .... [from back cover]
Until recently, to be in a "public place" meant to feel safe. That has changed, especially in cities. Urban dwellers sense the need to quickly react to gestural cues from persons in their immediate presence in order to establish their relationship to each other. Through this communication they hope to detect potential danger before it is too late for self-defense or flight. The ability to read accurately the "informing signs" by which strangers indicate their relationship to one another in public or semi-public places without speaking, has become as important as understanding the official written and spoken language of the country. In Relations in Public, Erving Goff man provides a grammar of the unspoken language used in public places. He shows that the way strangers relate in public is part of a design by which friends and acquaintances manage their relationship in the presence of bystanders. He argues that, taken together, this forms part of a new domain of inquiry into the rules for co-mingling, or public order. Most people give little thought to how elaborate and complex our everyday behavior in public actually is. For example, we adhere to the rules of pedestrian traffic on a busy thoroughfare, accept the usual ways of acting in a crowded elevator or subway car, grasp the delicate nuances of conversational behavior, and respond to the rich vocabulary of body gestures. We behave differently at weddings, at meals, in crowds, in couples, and when alone. Such everyday behavior, though generally below the level of awareness, embodies unspoken codes of social understandings necessary for the orderly conduct of society.
The author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life analyzes a person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to people society calls “normal.” Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront, and be affronted by, the image others reflect back to them. Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals” He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma, the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts. “This short book established the conceptual understanding of stigma that continues to buttress contemporary sociological thinking.” —Sociological Review
Canadian-born Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was the twentieth century’s most important sociologist writing in English. His 1953 dissertation is published here for the first time, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The remarkable study, based on fieldwork on a remote Scottish island, presents in embryonic form the full spread of Goffman’s thought. Framed as a “report on a study of conversational interaction,” the dissertation lingers on the modest talk of island “crofters.” It is trademark Goffman: ambitious, unconventional in form, and brimmed with big-picture insight. The thesis is that social order is made and re-made in communication—the “interaction order” he re-visited in a famous and final talk before his 1982 death. The dissertation is, as Yves Winkin writes in a new introduction, the “Rosetta stone for his entire work.” It was here, in 360 dense pages, that Goffman revealed, quietly, his peerless sensitivity to the invisible wireframes of everyday life.
Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moment and their men," writes Erving Goffman in the introduction to his groundbreaking 1967 Interaction Ritual, a study of face-to-face interaction in natural settings, that class of events which occurs during co-presence and by virtue of co-presence. The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into situations, whether intended or not. A sociology of occasions is here advocated. Social organization is the central theme, but what is organized is the co-mingling of persons and the temporary interactional enterprises that can arise therefrom. A normatively stabilized structure is at issue, a "social gathering," but this is a shifting entity, necessarily evanescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures. The major section of the book is the essay "Where the Action Is," drawing on Goffman's last major ethnographic project observation of Nevada casinos. Tom Burns says of Goffman's work "The eleven books form a singularly compact body of writing. All his published work was devoted to topics and themes which were closely connected, and the methodology, angles of approach and of course style of writing remained characteristically his own throughout. Interaction Ritual in particular is an interesting account of daily social interaction viewed with a new perspective for the logic of our behavior in such ordinary circumstances as entering a crowded elevator or bus." In his new introduction, Joel Best considers Goffman's work in toto and places Interaction Ritual in that total context as one of Goffman's pivotal works: "His subject matter was unique. In sharp contrast to the natural tendency of many scholars to tackle big, important topics, Goffman was a minimalist, working on a small scale, and concentrating on the most mundane, ordinary social contacts, on everyday life.
Erving Goffman will influence the thinking and perceptions of generations to come. In Frame Analysis, the brilliant theorist writes about the ways in which people determine their answers to the questions “What is going on here?” and “Under what circumstances do we think things are real?”
The Goffman Reader aims to bring the most complete collection of Erving Goffman's (1922-1982) writing and thinking as a sociologist. Among the most inventive, unique and individualistic of thinkers in American sociology, his works first appeared in the early 1950's at a time when a more formal, traditional sociology dominated the scene. In this collection, Goffman's work is arranged into four categories: the production of self, the confined self, the nature of social life, and the framing of experience. Through this arrangement, readers will not only be presented with Goffman's thinking in chronological order, but also with a framework of analysis that clearly introduces the social theoretical ideas by which Goffman shaped the direction of sociological thought through the late twentieth century.
Erving Goffman was one of the most pre–eminent authors of the post–war period in social science. His ideas have had an extraordinary influence and have become well known to a wide audience. This is the first systematic appraisal of the legacy of his work. The book brings together a group of eminent scholars from sociology, linguistics and social psychology, all of whom are internationally known for their own work. Contributors include Adam Kendon, Randall Collins, Robin Williams, Emanuel A. Schegloff, Christian Heath, Stephen C. Levinson, P.M. Strong and Anthony Giddens. The contributors analyse and seek to build on Goffman′s work in a sympathetic yet critical way. Some chapters describe the main parameters of the "interaction order", as Goffman portrays it, serving as a useful introduction to his approach. Others show how future investigations of the interaction order may be developed. This book will become a standard source for undergraduates and postgraduates in linguistics, social psychology and sociology, and for anyone interested in the development of modern social theory in general.
The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into situations, whether intended or not. This is an interesting account of daily social interaction viewed with a new perspective for the logic of our behavior in ordinary circumstances.
A total institution is defined by Goffman as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated, individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and, mental hospitals, in particular. The main focus is, on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self. Each of the essays in this book were intended to focus on the same issue--the inmate's situation in an institutional context. Each chapter approaches the central issue from a different vantage point, each introduction drawing upon a different source in sociology and having little direct relation to the other chapters. This method of presenting material may be irksome, but it allows the reader to pursue the main theme of each paper analytically and comparatively past the point that would be allowable in chapters of an integrated book. If sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back to where it best applies, followed from there wherever it seems to lead, and pressed to disclose the rest of its family.
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