Ervin Goffman’s (1922-1982) work on interaction analysis aimed to describe how participants behave in normal, everyday interactive encounters and paved the way for a
minute descriptive analysis of the dynamics of discourse at a micro-social level. This, in turn, helped to revive the interpretive sociology, which was proposed by scholars such Simmel, Sapir, Mead, and the Chicago School of sociology and known for its ethnographic and symbolic-interactional approaches (cf. Blount, 1995; Smith, 1999, 2006).
In particular, Georg Simmel discusses in one of his essays how the number of people in groups impacts on the social interaction that takes place within them (Simmel, 1964: 118ff.). He compares a dyad and a triad. The existence of a unit of two is argued to be based on the existence of the individuals involved in it, whereas an aggregation of three people exist as a group even when one person is not present as the member of the group may feel the triad to be present and acting also in their absence. Simmel further argues that “among three elements, each one operates as an intermediary between the other two” (Simmel, 1964: 135) and the two-fold function of a mediator is to unite and to separate.
Simmel’s work had a significant impact on the intellectual climate at the University of Chicago during Goffman’s ‘apprenticeship’. In his publications, Goffman stresses the mutual impact of interactional behaviour on the individual participants belonging to a group and on the group itself, and applies this notion both to stable social gatherings and to situated encounters (e.g. police interviews), where the focus is on face-to-face interaction as a system of activity.
In the next sections, I will analyse Goffman’s description of self in social interactions (with a particular focus on the issue of role), alongside the concept of frames and the organisation of experience.
3.1.1 The notion of self and the nature of social life
Goffman’s micro-sociological analysis in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, provides a detailed account of process and meaning in everyday interaction. Here the author lays out the basic elements of the argument.
In micro-interactions, every person sends two signals, i.e. those they give and those they give off (Goffman, 1959: 2; cf. also Smith, 2006: 2):
The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off.
That which the participant gives is usually what we say or our verbal signs;34 that which we give off are usually the non-verbal cues, which help to situate and verify what is being said. This study is largely about understanding how these different types of expressiveness are managed, and the types of interaction elements that are important to managing and understanding these types of expressiveness. To that end, Goffman employs “dramaturgical principles” (Lemert & Branaman, 1997: lxiv) which regulate the mode of presentation employed by the actor and its meaning in the broader social context (Goffman, 1959: 240).35 Interaction is seen as a performance, shaped by environment and audience and constructed to provide others with impressions that are in line with the actor’s desired aims.
In this framework of ‘dramaturgical sociology’, social interaction is analysed in terms of how people live their lives like actors performing on a stage, and human actions depend upon time, place, and audience. The self is thus defined as a sense of who one is or “of what sort of person he is behind the role he is in” (Goffman, 1974: 298), a ‘dramatic’ effect emerging from the immediate scene being presented (cf. Ritzer, 2007). In other words, Goffman (1959) creates a theatrical metaphor to define the method in which one human being presents itself to another on the basis on cultural values, norms, and expectations.
Performances (or presentations of self) can have disruptions of which actors are aware; however, most run successfully. The actor’s aim is acceptance from the audience through carefully conducted performance; if the actor succeeds, then the audience will view the actor as they want to be viewed. Moreover, the interactant’s performance takes place regardless of the mental state of the individual, as a persona is often assigned to the individual in spite of their lack of faith and knowledge of the performance itself.36 Thus, the individual can be said to develop an identity or persona as a function of interaction with other interactants and
34 Here, Goffman refers to coded behaviour, i.e. the evidence we produce for what we mean, rather than the
propositions we express (cf. Grice’s (1989) notion of what is said in 4.2.2).
35 It has been noted (cf. Mey, 1993) that by limiting his analysis to a dramaturgical study, Goffman’s symbolic
interactionism situates him well in developing an understanding of micro-sociological function; however, it fails to apply the activities of the everyday world to the larger social world (i.e. larger institutions and processes).
36 The author provides the example of the doctor who gives a placebo to a patient, fully aware of its lack of
through an exchange of information that leads to the development of their identity and behaviour (cf. O’Driscoll, 2009).
Goffman claims that the process of establishing a social identity is intertwined with the concept of front, which is described as “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance” (Goffman, 1959: 22). The front – otherwise known as the mask – can therefore be defined as a standardised, generalisable and transferable technique for the performer to control the manner in which the audience perceives them and for others to understand the performer on the basis of projected character traits.
Moreover, in Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model, a distinction is drawn between the concepts of status and role. A status is similar to a part in a play, and a role serves as a script, ‘supplying’ dialogue and action for the characters. As on stage, individuals in their everyday interactions manage settings, clothing, words, and non-verbal actions to give a particular impression to others. In other words, in order to present a ‘compelling’ front the actor is required to fulfil the responsibilities deriving from their social role and to communicate the characteristics of their role to others; this process is dubbed “dramatic realization” (Goffman 1959: 30) and is founded upon the activities of impression management, i.e. the interlocutors’ strive to maintain the desired impression, or rather the control - or lack thereof - and communication of information through the performance.37 Each individual performance is described as the presentation of self and is characterised by such efforts to create specific impressions in the minds of others.
Goffman explores nature of group dynamics through a discussion of “teams” and the relationship between performance and audience. Teams are defined as groups of individuals who “cooperate” (Goffman, 1959: 79) with each other, although teams of one person are contemplated. Team members must cooperate and share the party line, attempting to achieve joint goals dictated by the group (cf. Smith, 1999, 2006). Such cooperation may therefore manifest itself as unanimity in behaviour or in the assumption of differing roles for each individual, determined by the desired intent in performance.
37 The importance of impression management is most visible with marginalised people, whose deviance forces
A basic issue for many performances is to ensure that the audience does not get information that would discredit the team’s performance. To this effect, each actor is required to maintain their front in order to promote the team performance; this is claimed to reduce the possibility of dissent (Goffman, 1959). The individual actor is therefore under great pressure to conform to the desired front in the presence of an audience, as a deviation would destroy the credibility of the group’s performance. In other words, the team must be able to keep its secrets and have its secrets kept.
In this context, Goffman (1959: 80ff.) analyses the types of individuals who learn about a team’s secret and describes the bases and the threats of their privileged positions (however, the latter are never clear-cut). The most interesting conflicts include:
1. the informer, such as a spy or traitor, who pretends to be a member of their team, is allowed backstage, but then joins the audience to disclose information on the performance;
2. the shill, i.e. the opposite of the informer in that they act as though they were ordinary members of the audience, but are in fact members of the performing team;
3. the go-between or mediator, who acts with the permission of both sides, facilitating communication between various teams;38
4. a non-person, who are present during the interaction, but in some respects do not take the role either of performer or of audience, nor do they pretend to be what they are not (e.g. waiters and the very old).
Finally, there are three basic roles in such a scheme, each centred on whom has access to what information. Roles dealing with manipulation of information and team borders (cf. (1) and (2)), roles dealing with facilitating interactions between two other teams (cf. (3)), and roles which combine what Goffman describes as front and back region (cf. (4)), i.e. the division between team performance and audience (Goffman, 1959: 107).
Extending the dramaturgical metaphor, the author divides regions into front stage, backstage and outside the stage behaviour, according to the relationship of the audience to the performance. Firstly, as the term implies, front stage is where the actor formally performs and adheres to conventions that have meaning for the audience. It is a part of the dramaturgical performance that is consistent and contains generalised ways to explain the situation or role
the actor is playing to the audience that observes it. The actor knows he or she is being watched and acts accordingly. Goffman (1959) states that the front stage further involves a differentiation between setting and personal front, which are necessary for the actor to have a successful performance. Secondly, group members engage in backstage actions when no audience is present; thus this is where facts suppressed in the front stage or various kinds of informal actions may appear. For example, a waiter in a restaurant may perform one way in front of customers, but might act in a much more casual fashion in the kitchen. Lastly, outside (or off-stage) is where individual actors are not involved in the performance (although they may not be aware of it) and may meet the audience independently of the team performance on the front stage. Specific performances may be given and the audience segmented.
To sum up, while the ‘official stance’ of the team is visible in their front stage presentation, in the back stage “the impression fostered by the presentation is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (Goffman, 1959: 112), indicating a more ‘truthful’ type of performance. In the backstage, the conflict and difference inherent to familiarity are more fully explored, often developing into a secondary type of presentation – according to the (relative) absence of the responsibilities of the team presentation. To be outside the stage involves the inability to gain access to the performance of the team, described as an “audience segregation” in which specific performances are given to specific audiences, allowing the team to devise the front for the demands of each audience (Goffman, 1959: 137).
Though detailed, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life does not provide a comprehensive description of interactive processes. In exploring the construction of presentation amongst interactant and teams, Goffman does not fully explore the importance of ritual or ceremony in the dramaturgy or the construction of character. A reading of these complementary concepts from Goffman’s later work - including Asylum and Interaction Ritual - provides a means to expand the analysis of the interaction of everyday life into the broader experiences of human interaction.
3.1.2 Multiple-role performances
In Asylum, co-interlocutors are said to understand each other as multiple-role performers rather than as people with one single all-dominating identity (Goffman, 1961: 142). The
author further defines the notion of role as in itself consisting of three different aspects, namely normative role, typical role and role performance (Goffman, 1961: 63).
Normative role would be defined by the commonly shared ideas about a certain activity, what people in general think they are or should be doing when acting in a certain role. Instead, the notion of typical role takes into account that the conditions for performing a certain role typically fluctuate from time to time and place to place. This means that individuals develop routines to handle typical situations not foreseen by shared established norms (cf. O’Driscoll, 2009).
In any specific case, there are aspects of the individual’s behaviour which stem neither from normative nor from typical standards, but are to be explained by circumstances in the situation (e.g. other people present, light, noise, physical objects) and by the performer’s personal style while on duty. This is what Goffman identifies for exploration as the individual’s role performance.
In taking on a social role, the individual performers must see to it that they make a credible impression on the role others, i.e. the relevant audience with whom they interact in the role in question (Goffman, 1961: 85); consider, for instance, the typical role other of a doctor is a patient. The moral aspect of role – i.e. ideas about rights and wrongs – is what makes the performing individual identify and become identified as a holder of a certain role.
Role analysis is usually concerned with the range of activities in different social settings in which a certain actor is typically involved (e.g. at work meetings or holiday resorts), but it also concerns the range of activities the actor engages in within the walls of certain establishments (e.g. what nurses do at the hospital); alternatively, the study of a particular role may be limited to a particular type of situation (e.g. the role of nurse in the nursing staff conference). Roles related to such activities can be called activity roles, and they are part of what Goffman (1961) terms a situated activity system, that is “a face-to-face interaction with others for the performance of a single joint activity, a somewhat closed, self-compensating, self-terminating circuit of interdependent actions” (Goffman, 1961: 96).
An important analytical implication of role in Goffman’s definition is that the elementary unit is not the individual, but the individual acting in an obligatory fashion within a system of activity. To explore a social role he suggests that one start by distinguishing what activity is
uniquely performed by individuals acting in this role, compared to the activities performed by the role others.
A situated system of activity thus engages only a part of the individual, and what he or she does or who he or she is at other times and places is not given specific attention. The role others similarly perform other roles at other times and places not necessarily relevant at any other moment. Of basic interest is how the role-holder’s and the role other’s respective actions – differentiated and interdependent – fit together into patterns defining a situated activity system.
Norms of social behaviour are typically brought to attention when people experience them to be transgressed by someone. Garfinkel (1967) effectively demonstrated this through his ‘candid camera’ type of experiments. In a situation where one individual breaks a shared social norm, for instance ignores the order of a queue, other participants may redefine the event as a non-queue situation; alternatively, they may try to make the ‘norm breaker’ understand the established queue order. Nonetheless, transgressions of norms can also be understood as made ‘off-the-record’ and the definition of the situation remains the same without being pointed out explicitly.
The concept of role distance provides a sociological means of dealing with one type in divergence between obligation and actual role performance. In brief, it applies to the case when a conflicting discrepancy occurs between, on the one hand, the self-generated in actual social interaction, and, on the other, the self-associated with a formal status and identity. A general point about role distance, as well as any aspect of role performance, is that the individual’s display of it presupposes his or her action and the immediate audience’s reaction; i.e. mutual confirmation between co-present people. Consider, for instance, the following passage (Goffman, 1961: 105):39
By introducing an unserious style, the individual can project the claim that nothing happening at the moment to him or through him should be taken as a direct reflection of him, but rather of the person-in-situation that he is mimicking. […] Explanation, apologies, and jokes are all ways in which the individual makes a plea for disqualifying some of the expressive features of the situation as sources of definitions of himself.
Role distance implies that the individual, while deviating from what is regularly seen as typical performance, still acknowledges a certain performance as the typical one. In other words, the individual seeks to maintain, on a global level, a particular definition of the situation, while simultaneously making an effort to express the separateness between what a serious performer would do and what they are doing in a non-serious fashion, i.e. acting not as all accepting performers of the role would normally act. For instance, a professional on duty (e.g. a police officer) may occasionally address a role other (e.g. a suspect) not as a typical suspect, but, as e.g. a Londoner or as a daughter. And this may be done without being perceived as contrary to the professional norms of police officers.
Such actions can thus be termed role distance with regard to the occupational role. Con- versely, the role other may show role distance in relation to the institutionally defined role (as suspect) and agree to establish an alliance based on shared interests, gender, age, sexual orientation, and so forth. Role distance, Goffman emphasises, “is a part (but, of course, only one part) of typical role, and this routinised sociological feature should not escape us merely because ‘role distance’ is not part of the normative framework of role” (Goffman, 1961: 115). If a certain kind of role distance is systematically utilised by professionals (such as interpreters), this can ultimately lead to a redefinition of their professional role.
To sum up, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life represents an inquiry into the nature of everyday interpersonal interaction and the institutions to which interaction mainly applies.