Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (eBook)

Philip Manning (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-0-7456-6766-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The work of Erving Goffman has had an enormous impact throughout the social sciences. Yet his writings have not received the detailed scrutiny which they deserve.
This new book is the first comprehensive and accessible account of Erving Goffman's contributions, ranging in its scope from his very earliest work right up to the projects upon which he was engaged at the time of his death. Goffman's writings, Manning argues, are much more systematic and conceptually powerful than is ordinarily acknowledged. The book thus offers a defence of Goffman's writings as well as providing an introduction for those who have no prior acquaintance with Goffman's ideas.

Philip Manning, Cleveland State University

Inhalt

1. Introduction and Overview.

2. Early Writings.

3. Social Life as a Game.

4. Trust and the Rules of Social Interaction.

5. Goffman's Sociology of Deviance and Conformity.

6. Goffman's Later Work: Frame Analysis.

7. Goffman's Methods.

8. Goffman and Modern Sociology.

Bibliography.

Rezensionen

'Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology is first-rate
sociological exegesis.' Reviewing Sociology

'Manning has written an excellent introduction to, and
commentary on, the work of Erving Goffman.' British Journal of
Sociology

'... Timely and compact book... ... An important book for any
anthropologist or sociologist likely to engage in ethnographic work
in a modern society.' The Australian Journal of
Anthropology

Textauszug

1

Introduction and Overview

INTRODUCTION

In this book I present a brief, but comprehensive, account of the ideas of Erving Goffman (1922–82), and show why these ideas are central to modern sociology. The idea that Goffman is central to sociology is mildly ironic, because he is often remembered as an outsider, a brilliant maverick, a one of a kind genius, a man who is “bleakly knowing” about modern urban life. From this view, he is a dispassionate observer who sees through our day-to-day performances and self-presentations. For example, Gary Marx tells us that “Goffman presented himself as a detached, hard-boiled cynic, the sociologist as 1940s private eye. His was a hip, existential, cool, personal style” (1984: 637). Although there is truth to this view, it does have one limitation: it plays down Goffman’s commitment to the development of sociology. His acute observations about everyday life were not only meant to make us think again about our day-today behavior; they were also part of an abstract analysis of social interaction. For many years Goffman tried to develop a general theory of face-to-face interaction, a theory that could be used to interpret any social exchange, whether it took place in a bar or a boardroom. However, despite his enthusiasm for this general theory, he also remained extremely skeptical about the possibility of discovering such a general theory. It is as if he were committed to finding this theory at one moment and indifferent to it at the next.

For his supporters, it is the tension between his attempt to develop a theory of social interaction and his doubts that such a theory exists that makes his work so provoking. For his critics, this tension makes Goffman inconsistent, and his books hard to interpret. Often Goffman seems to have two contradictory “voices”: one voice tells of a general pattern beneath different examples of ordinary behavior, while the other emphasizes the crucial differences between examples.

Although Goffman’s attempt to develop a general theory of face-to-face interaction is fascinating in its own right, it also raises a question. Is it possible for sociologists to develop a general sociological theory, a theory both of institutions and social interaction? In his introduction to Frame Analysis, Goffman wrote about the limits of his own work while supporting the ambitious projects pursued by other sociologists:

I make no claim to be talking about the core matters of sociology – social organization and social structure. … I am not addressing the structure of social life but the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives. I personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual’s current involvements to be second. (1974: 13)

In the final chapter I look at one attempt to develop a general theory of “the structure of social life” using Goffman’s ideas. This is the structuration theory developed by Anthony Giddens. This theory thrusts Goffman to the center of contemporary debates about the relationship between structure and agency. In the later chapters in this book I suggest that in order to theorize agency it is necessary to understand the use of rules in everyday life. I suggest that Goffman offers an incomplete account of rule-following, and that his ideas have to be supplemented with insights from ethnomethodology. I do not see Goffman as a precursor to ethnomethodology; rather, I believe that a combination of his ideas with theirs provides an important resource for mainstream sociology. I also believe that Giddens’s theory is the best available vehicle for their delivery.

There are many ways of describing Goffman: he can be seen as a one of a kind observer, a cynic, an ethnographer, a symbolic interactionist. In this book, I portray Goffman as someone with competing visions, as someone who sees both cynical manipulation and trust in social interaction, as someone who sees sociology as both cumulative science and as humanistic enquiry, as someone who sees his own work as both a loose set of acute insights and as an organized description of the basic elements face-to-face interaction.

However, this is in the future. In the rest of this chapter I play the book as a whole on fast forward, anticipating and sketching the ideas that will be considered in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

Goffman was primarily an observer of face-to-face interaction who possessed an extraordinary ability to appreciate the subtle importance of apparently insignificant aspects of everyday conduct. Goffman made his readers aware of this almost invisible realm of social life, with the result that the banal exchanges and glances observable in any public place become a continual source of fascination. With the exception of Simmel’s, his general descriptions of face-to-face interaction are unmatched.

Let me begin with a biographical preliminary. Born in Canada in 1922, Goffman obtained a BA degree in sociology and anthropology from the University of Toronto in 1945. A chance meeting with Everett Hughes persuaded him to move to Chicago for graduate work, which led to a doctoral thesis about social interaction on a small island community off the coast of Scotland. The thesis was actually written in Paris, where he was exposed to the then fashionable doctrine of existentialism. After completing his Ph.D. at the end of 1953, and unable to obtain a tenure track position, he worked for Edward Shils on a project concerning social stratification. During this time he wrote the first edition of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In 1956, a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health allowed him to move to Washington, DC to study the experience of inmates at a large urban mental hospital. In 1961, Herbert Blumer invited him to join the sociology faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. After six intellectually successful years at Berkeley, he spent a transitional year as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, where he remained until his death of cancer in 1982, at the age of 60.

Throughout his writings Goffman worked to develop a vocabulary that could describe the general features of face-to-face interaction. Although this was primarily a problem of description, it also meant that he had to explain the motivations behind everyday behavior. As a result his work contains many “how” and “why” accounts. For example, he discussed both the odd behavior of people in elevators, describing the way they stare at their feet or the floor numbers above the door and the reasons why this behavior is important to others sharing the elevator. We can understand his work as a kind of map to the uncharted world of everyday life. Goffman saves us from over-familiarity, allowing us to see the complexity, stability, and importance of apparently mundane social interaction.

Curiously, we are quite unable to explain how or even why we do most of the things that we do with supreme practical ease in our daily lives. Whether walking down a street or answering a phone call, the way we perform these activities is both more intricately patterned and more important than most of us could believe possible. In our daily lives we often act on autopilot: we comply with a set of implicit instructions that govern our behavior. Social life is patterned because we often choose to follow these instructions and thereby make the world predictable. Predictability is an astonishing collective accomplishment.

Even subtle departures from such patterns can undermine our confidence that the social world is as it appears to be. Departures are understandable if they replace the prevailing definition of the situation with another; they are destructive if they cannot be interpreted. One of the major legacies of Goffman’s work is that it shows us how the fragility of day-to-day life is lent solidity and order by small gestures and ritual offerings. Many of the details of face-to-face encounters (which we frequently fail to notice) reappear in his books as examples of how our trust in an otherwise unruly environment is maintained. For example, when a man apologizes for inadvertently stepping in front of someone in a queue, it is easy to miss the way he touches her elbow as he speaks; but it is this physical contact that assures her of the sincerity of the apology.

With the help of many examples Goffman identified the factors that underpin our confidence in the social world. He typically convinces us of this by suggesting scenarios in which that world suddenly becomes quite alien and startling. For example, when we pass pedestrians in the street, we routinely establish eye contact for a moment, only to then look away. This gesture is a ritual courtesy that affirms respect among strangers in a small and almost unnoticeable way. However, to maintain that eye contact for even an extra few seconds before looking away transforms a gesture of support into a hostile act: it becomes a “hate stare” of the sort practiced against Blacks in America’s deep South in the 1950s (Goffman, 1963: 83).

By scratching at the surface of many of our day-to-day routines, Goffman uncovered a machinery of social interaction. However, it would be wrong to use this metaphor to suggest that we are just inanimate cogs; or to put the matter in a more contemporary idiom, just hardware for interactional programs that churn out a predictable and generally safe social world. On the contrary, Goffman was fascinated by our reflexive ability to manipulate these procedures for social...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.5.2013
• Reihe/Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Reihe/Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: accessible • Account • Book • Classical Social Theory • conceptually • Contributions • earliest work • enormous • erving • First • Goffman • goffmans • Introduction • Klassische Sozialtheorie • New • ordinarily • Powerful • Projects • Sciences • Scope • scrutiny • Social • Sociology • Soziologie • Systematic • Work • Writings
• ISBN-10: 0-7456-6766-X / 074566766X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6766-9 / 9780745667669