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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory and Media
- Sprache: Englisch
Erving Goffman’s much-loved works are widely cited in media and communication studies. His books have stimulated research on news framing, mass media and social media, inviting new insights about how communication, self, audiences and public life are mediated by, but also transcend, particular technological forms. What explains the continuing relevance of this highly original theorist?
In this book, Peter Lunt critically examines how and why the concepts developed by Goffman – face-work and the mediated self, frontstage and backstage, impression management, media frames and logics, footing and interaction rituals – still resonate across the field. Ultimately, Goffman’s sociology emerges not only as an enduring influence, but as a source of new inspiration in our ever more interactive world.
Original and incisive, Goffman and the Media is crucial reading for students and scholars encountering this fascinating thinker from a media studies perspective.
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Seitenzahl: 274
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 The Reception of Goffman’s Work in Media and Communication
Introduction
Goffman and Media Studies
The Context of Goffman’s Work
The Reception of Goffman in Sociology
Goffman’s Research Project
Structure of the Book
2 Goffman’s Work: Themes of Communication and Media
Introduction
Dramaturgy: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Social Life as Ritual: Deference, Demeanour and Face-Work
The Sociology of Deviance: Asylums and Stigma
Behaviour in Public Places
Strategic Interaction: Social Encounters as Games
Critical Responses to Goffman’s Work
Frame Analysis
Gender Advertisements
Forms of Talk
Goffman’s Reception in Social and Cultural Theory
Conclusion
3 Mediated Social Interaction
Introduction
Self-Presentation on Personal Homepages
Reconceptualizing the Digital Self
The Self in Social Media
Self-Presentation in Social Media
The Interactional Self on Social Media
Social Media and Everyday Life
Online Ritual, Face and Face-Work
Copresence
Mediated Social Interaction: Participation Frameworks
Conclusion
4 Interactionism and Media Sociology
Introduction
Ceremony, Ritual and Interaction Ritual Chains
No Sense of Place
The Media and Modernity
Broadcast Talk and Infotainment
Framing
Digitally Mediated Interaction: Blurring the Public and Private
Platform Participation: Influencers and Digital Publics
Hyperconnectivity and the Self
Conclusion
5 Conclusions
Introduction
Mediated Social Interaction as Experience, Ritual, Social Practice and Mediatization
Powerful Media and Mediated Self-Formation
Interdisciplinarity and Media Sociology
Structuration and the Relation between the Interaction order and Systemic forms of Social Integration
Final Thoughts
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Theory and Media
John Armitage, Virilio and the Media
David Gunkel and Paul Taylor, Heidegger and the Media
Philip Howard, Castells and the Media
Jaeho Kang, Walter Benjamin and the Media
Peter Lunt, Goffman and the Media
Paul A. Taylor, Žižek and the Media
Hartmut Wessler, Habermas and the Media
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media
GOFFMAN AND THE MEDIA
PETER LUNT
polity
Copyright © Peter Lunt 2025
The right of Peter Lunt to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8892-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937101
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has taken me far too long to write and I would like to thank all those colleagues, friends and family members who have continued to encourage the project and to talk with me, sometimes just to listen to me talk about Goffman. I’ve gained many insights and ideas from discussing the ideas behind this book and hearing other perspectives on Goffman’s work from colleagues in media and communication over the years.
In the early stages of writing the book, I was fortunate to be part of a writing group consisting of Sonia Livingstone, Shani Orgad, Ellen Helsper, Lilie Chouliaraki and Bart Cammaerts, who read and commented on each other’s developing draft chapters as critical friends. I am indebted to Jeff Pooley for his insightful and critical reading of an earlier draft of the book. I have very good memories of discussing Goffman’s work as part of the Ross Priory group which helped shape the very idea of this book. I also benefited from the engagement of my PhD students who took up Goffman’s work – especially Shuhan Chen, who I joined in writing the book Chinese Social Media, influenced by Goffman’s analysis of face-work. On a longer timescale, my interest in how media scholars engage with ideas from Goffman’s writings was stimulated by a book that Sonia Livingstone and I wrote as long ago as 1994 – Talk on Television.
I am grateful for the patience and support of the Polity publishing team, especially Mary Savigar, who has steered me safely towards publication in recent years. Thanks for your patience and support, Mary. I am grateful for financial support from the University of Leicester in the final stages of the manuscript’s preparation. I am also very grateful for editorial support from Andrew Schrock, Dawn Rushen and Tim Clark for their excellent help and advice as copy-editors.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Rodney Livingstone, with whom I had many interesting discussions as the book developed, and who would have been both surprised and delighted to see it finished, and to Sonia Livingstone for talking to me about Goffman among other things since 1981 and for making my life wonderful.
1THE RECEPTION OF GOFFMAN’S WORK IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
INTRODUCTION
This book explores the reception in media studies of the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, from the era of mass communication to the current digital media age. Over a long history from the 1950s, Goffman’s work has been influential in the study of interpersonal and mass communication, and has had something of a renaissance in the short past of studies of digital media. Paradoxically, given his influence on media studies, Goffman’s work focused on the study of social interaction in everyday, face-to-face encounters; he wrote very little about the media and, in his early work, seemed sceptical about the potential of mediated interaction compared to the richness of copresent social interaction. Initially, his work and ideas were influential in the study of interpersonal communication and sociolinguistics. For example, his observations of how participants in social interaction used a variety of ways of signalling deference and creating conditions of civility and conviviality were taken up in sociolinguistics and developed into a systematic study of politeness (Goffman, 1967; Brown and Levison, 1987; Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013). More surprising has been the influence of his work on the study of, first, mass communication from the 1970s and, more recently, digital and social media, given that Goffman valorized copresent, face-to-face interaction as a dynamic, nuanced, creative form of social action through which people realized their social identities, established and sustained social relationships, and contributed to social integration. Yet, as we will see, his work has translated well to the study of mediated social interaction and the interactional affordances of digital media.
In this book, I aim to answer the question of why Goffman’s work has currency in studies of media and communication, and to explore the questions that arise from applying concepts and analyses derived from the study of face-to-face interaction to mediated social interaction. One reason, I will argue, for the continuing relevance of his work is that although Goffman’s empirical research focused on the observation and analysis of social interaction in everyday life contexts, he was convinced that patterns of social interaction generated social order that complemented other forms of social order, such as those that are found in institutions and cultural forms. While he regarded the interaction order as an autonomous form of social order to be studied through microanalysis (Rawls, 2012), he also believed that interaction orders were ubiquitous in social life and played crucial roles in other forms of social integration (Giddens, 1984). Imagine an institution devoid of social interaction, for example. Goffman thought of the interaction order as operating within other social orders; although he did not theorize the relationship between social integration achieved through social interaction and the ordering of social systems, he made numerous observations concerning the role of interaction orders achieved through interaction in copresent social encounters, and framed his studies of social interaction in the context of a range of social theories. In this book, we will see how media researchers have taken up ideas from Goffman’s work to examine two questions: what are the characteristics of mediated social interaction, and how are these played out in relation to media as a sociotechnical system (Brubaker, 2020)?
Goffman (1959, 1983) also believed that social interaction was significant because it played an essential role in various sociological processes, including self-formation, conformity as a secondary adjustment to social norms, social recognition and civility, and strategic interaction. He also believed that social interaction and the interaction order were implicated in social metaprocesses such as forms of public order, regions of social life and individualization. However, although he had these ambitions for the micro-sociological study of social interaction, Goffman did not develop a sociological theory. Instead, in the books produced over his long career, he sought to understand the social implications of interaction from various sociological perspectives and to demonstrate the macro-sociological implications of his analyses of interaction orders, and by implication address sociological questions such as the relationship between structure and agency. For example, Goffman studied the role of ritual in social life, the relation between phenomenology and sociology, the dynamics of framing, the relation between cultural forms such as the theatre and the performance of the self in everyday life, social exclusion as it arose in social interaction, and the characteristics of behaviour in public places. These engagements with sociological theories and processes link Goffman’s studies of social interaction to questions of social influence and power, norms and individualization, even though he did not explicitly theorize these questions.
Goffman was skilled in formulating his observations and interpretations in powerful, evocative and valid concepts that captured the contexts, forms and dynamics of social interactions while pointing to broader social processes and structures. Many of the concepts coined by Goffman have become part of the analytic lexicon of the social sciences as well as being taken up in media studies. Self-presentation, impression management, performance, the distinction between frontstage and backstage, front, setting, ritual forms of social interactions, face-work, deference and demeanour, stigma, asylums as total institutions, relations in public, strategic interaction, focal and peripheral dimensions of social interaction, civil inattention, frames, keying and footing – these are all concepts that Goffman either coined himself or brought to the attention of communication scholars. As we will see throughout this book, they have proved to be a valuable resource in the study of media and communication, illustrating how we coordinate our engagements with others in social life, express and become our social selves, influence others and engage them in reciprocal and cooperative interaction, experience intersubjectivity in relationships and groups, enact our social roles, and generate local social orders that contribute to social solidarity while enabling individuals and groups to realize their purposes and aims.
These manifold social behaviours are also understood by Goffman to contribute to or to constitute social processes, including responses to social constraints, the relation between structure and agency, conformity and individualization. His analyses also recognize the many constraints on how people interact in everyday life, including social norms, civility, morality and etiquette, and the respect others have the right to expect in social encounters, all of which shape the form and dynamics of social interaction. At the same time, he recognized that social interaction created unique opportunities for participants to express themselves, explore their social identities, develop and sustain social relationships, persuade or influence others or bring them to account, and engage in cooperative, intersubjective experiences to thereby shape the situations in which they participated.
Goffman also recognized that although social interactions were a taken-for-granted part of everyday life, managing them was a skilled accomplishment in the context of dynamic face-to-face encounters in which participants had access to multiple channels of communication, including the proximity of bodies, non-verbal communication, being able to watch and monitor each other’s conduct, and engaging in conversation, negotiation or shared experience. Another important distinction in Goffman’s work was the contrast between rules expressed as constraints and creative rule-following in the dynamics of social encounters, through which he recognized the rule-governed and constitutive nature of the interactive order. In order to grasp these nuances and dynamics of social interaction in the concrete contexts of social encounters, Goffman approached the study of social interaction as a participant observer in which he aimed to capture the different forms of interaction in which people presented themselves to others, coordinated their actions and conversations, enacted their social and occupational roles, sought to understand each other, realized their aims and shared experiences across the myriad of contexts and circumstances in which social encounters occurred.
Consequently, when media researchers adapt concepts from Goffman, they buy into concepts that go beyond the summary of patterns of social interaction to engage these broader sociological themes and questions. I address the appropriation of Goffman’s work in media studies in three ways: by exploring the potential of mediated social interaction, especially in the context of the interactional affordances of digital media, to qualify Goffman’s focus on face-to-face interaction and scepticism towards mediated social interaction (Chapter 3); by exploring how Goffman’s work has been linked to media theory and sociological questions in media studies (Chapter 4); and by exploring how it resonates with themes in contemporary, sociologically informed media research into media rituals, mediatization, media as practice, media phenomenology and the interdisciplinary relationships between media studies and sociology (Waisbord, 2014) (Chapter 5).
Throughout the book, two trends in the adoption of Goffman’s concepts in media studies are addressed. First, there has been an emphasis on the analysis of self-presentation as performance derived from his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), and comparatively little work addressing his analyses of ritual and face-work (1955, 1956), social exclusion (1961, 1963a), behaviour in public places (1963b) and strategic interaction (1969). In addition, when self-presentation is studied in media contexts, the focus is often on impression management and the playing of information games by individuals seeking to persuade or influence others by projecting an image of the self, to the neglect of processes of social interaction, its reciprocal forms and intersubjectivity. A related tendency is the comparative neglect of Goffman’s conception of self-formation as reflecting mutual recognition, cooperation and intersubjectivity in contrast to the pursuit of self-interest through social interaction. Also somewhat overlooked is Goffman’s understanding of social interaction as a constitutive practice through which identities and social categories are formed and modified and social solidarity and social orders established; that is, the relation between social and systems integration (Giddens, 1984). This is particularly important given the mediation of everything (Livingstone, 2009) in which social lives and relationships are played out in the context of sociotechnical media systems.
In contrast to the many claims that Goffman eschewed explicit theory development, I place significance here on his implicit acknowledgement of an eclectic range of social theories. For example, a crucial influence on his work was Durkheim’s (1984 [1893]) social psychology, which emphasized the plurality and diversity of modern life in which social solidarity could emerge through ritual, social encounters in everyday life, complementing collective forms of representation that reinforced social norms and moral values. His understanding of the self, as realized in the process of social interaction, was informed by Mead’s (1934) distinction between the ‘I’ as a reaction to others’ expressions and orientations towards the person and the ‘me’ as a consolidated set of beliefs and dispositions, as well as by Durkheim’s (2005 [1914]) duality of the self, which combined elements of purposive, strategic forms of identity with social identity realized through intersubjectivity and participation in social practices. These ideas raise interesting challenges to analyses of individualization as a form of strategic rationality (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). This view of social action as realized through interaction was written in contention with Weber’s (1968 [1922]) analysis of modernity as increasingly dominated by rationalization processes, and Parsons’s (1937) view of social action as structured through the authority of social norms and shared cultural values. In other words, adopting Goffman’s concepts has a duality that points towards the contexts, dynamics and forms of social interaction in concrete social situations and to some of the essential themes and debates within sociology.
GOFFMAN AND MEDIA STUDIES
Goffman’s work first came to the attention of media researchers between the 1950s and the 1970s. At that time, the field was divided between the study of mass communication and of interpersonal communication (Peters, 1999; Peters and Simonson, 2004). In interpersonal communication, and the related discipline of sociolinguistics, Goffman’s work provided insights and concepts that inspired systematic developments in the field (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013). For example, the study of politeness was partly inspired by Goffman’s (1967) analysis of how, through ritual acknowledgement and compliments, in greetings and compliments, participants in social interaction treated each other with respect, deference and civility. Brown and Levinson (1987) took Goffman’s interpretations of patterns of civility in everyday life and developed a systematic approach to politeness, establishing it as an area of study. Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz (2013) also documented how Goffman’s work was taken up in mass communication research. For example, Goffman’s (1974) concept of ‘framing’ has provided the impetus and inspiration for extensive media framing studies from the 1970s to the present (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013; Persson, 2022). His insights have enabled media researchers to develop approaches to analysing how information is ‘framed’ in media reports or programmes through selection, emphasis and narrative forms that often favour dominant or hegemonic perspectives – as discussed in Chapter 4, along with other examples of the application of Goffman’s ideas in the study of mass communication.
Digital and social media blur the boundaries between interpersonal and mass communication, putting the capacity to reach potentially vast social networks into the hands of individuals, and enabling the development of digital spaces constituted through users’ interactions. These developments have led to a resurgence of interest in Goffman’s work in the study of the mediation of social interaction and the emergence of new forms of public life generated by interactions in networks of connectivity (Papacharissi, 2015). Significantly, the interactional affordances of digital media contrast with the limitations of the media technologies of Goffman’s day. Goffman (1959, 1967) contrasted the subtle and dynamic properties of copresent, face-to-face interaction as a paradigmatic context for social interaction with the relatively restricted forms of interactivity of, for example, telephone conversation, and he was also sceptical about the potential for interactivity of mass communication as a one-to-many form of communication that did not afford dialogic forms of social interaction, which now proliferate in the age of digital and social media (Thompson, 1995, 2018). The development of mobile, digital and social media affords interaction at a distance that incorporates various channels of communication, includes visual and auditory cues, and affords simultaneity and interactional formations beyond the dyad, as we will see throughout this book. Goffman could only conceive characteristics of social interaction that afforded the constitution of interaction orders and their social effects as being possible in encounters played out as copresent, face-to-face social interaction, whereas crucial aspects of his analysis of social interaction are now accessible through digital media.
THE CONTEXT OF GOFFMAN’S WORK
A further paradox in the enthusiasm for Goffman’s work in the context of contemporary studies of digital media arises because his work was embedded in his time – the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s – and reflects the intellectual context of mid-twentieth-century American sociology (Calhoun, 2007; Giddens, 2009). Goffman (1963b) often suggested that the interactions he observed and interpreted were framed by middle-class, Anglo-American culture in the historical circumstances of the post-war period of the 1950s and early 1960s, notable for the expansion of consumer society, suburbanization and the rise of the middle classes against a background of international and internal tensions related to the Cold War, generating a contradiction between the growing affluence and access to material culture and a conformist political culture facing the existential threat of nuclear destruction, creating unease and emerging cultural resistance (Gitlin, 1987; Gaddis, 2006; Jaworski, 2022).
While he lived through turbulent times and witnessed radical developments in social and cultural theory, Goffman’s normative project reflected the reformist politics of the progressive movement, as adopted by the Chicago School of Sociology (Bulmer, 1984), combined with liberal humanist assumptions, represented by Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]) late work on the sociology of religion, law and politics. These commitments went against the grain of the mainstream sociology of his day, particularly Parsons’s (1937, 1951) structural functionalism, which, partly in the service of national reconstruction, viewed social order and consensus as achieved in the complex, pluralistic society of the United States by legitimate authority combined with ‘voluntaristic’ conformity to established norms and values. In contrast, Goffman developed a subtle, ‘outsider’ questioning of how social controls and institutional contexts occluded the potential of human action and agency through which individuals might make a difference in their social world. In a sense, at least until the mid-1960s, Goffman was part of an intellectual counterculture (Gitlin, 1987), which found its voice in his criticism of the sociology of deviance and his focus on systemic forms of social exclusion and authority as social control in Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963a).
Over his career, Goffman became increasingly out of tune with the radical politics and critical social theory that emerged in the late 1960s. Whereas he once appeared ‘cool’ as part of a counterculture promoting a reformist agenda, his work seemed increasingly out of step with the more explicit focus on social structures, questions of power and radical social change that emerged in the 1960s (Mills, 1967; Gouldner, 1970; Calhoun, 2007). Within sociology, the perception of Goffman’s work shifted from praise for its subtle questioning of social norms and values to its being regarded as mapping, and thereby reinforcing, the ideology of the emerging middle classes at a time of growing inequality, conflict and political conformity (Gouldner, 1970). In addition, Goffman’s ‘casual’ approach to observation and interpretation and his essayistic writing style were criticized by those who claimed to take a more systematic approach to studying social interaction in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and sociolinguistic theory (see, for example, Brown and Levinson, 1987, on politeness).
Goffman’s preference for empirical observation and antipathy towards explicit theory also looked increasingly problematic by the late 1960s, in contrast to the emerging approaches of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) and critical social theory (Calhoun, 2007). Goffman’s writing also used what would now be regarded as sexist or racist language. Although sensitive to forms of social exclusion (Goffman, 1963a; Rawls, 2022), his lack of sensitivity to the diversity of human experience and his apparent aversion to the politics of protest and social movements, compounded by his essayistic style and frequent use of irony, evoked a sense of privilege. More recently, in contrast, there has been an attempt to rehabilitate Goffman’s work, including close (re)readings of his texts against the background of resurgent interest in his work in sociology (Jacobsen and Smith, 2022), where a contemporary Goffman (Jacobsen, 2010) is being rediscovered.
THE RECEPTION OF GOFFMAN IN SOCIOLOGY
Goffman is much more highly cited among sociologists today than during his career in the 1970s. Given the extensive secondary literature on his work (see Jacobsen, 2010; Jacobsen and Smith, 2022), and the manifold adaptions and extensions of his ideas in sociology and media studies, how can we now read Goffman? Jacobsen (2010) encourages us to continue to read Goffman in new ways and to link his work to innovations and revisions of sociological theory, to which we could add media theory. However, an acknowledged challenge in making sense of Goffman’s work is its lack of explicit theoretical and conceptual development and the eclecticism of his sources, which makes it difficult to align his position with a single sociological theory or tradition. Indeed, Goffman has been classified as a symbolic interactionist, functionalist, structuralist, existentialist, phenomenologist, critical theorist and postmodernist (Jacobsen and Kristiansen, 2010). Jacobsen and Kristiansen (2010) argue that although Goffman’s work overlaps with these traditions, he only partially signed up for some of them.
For example, Goffman’s work is often aligned with his contemporaries at the Chicago School of Sociology, the symbolic interactionists (Blumer, 1992 [1969]; Rock, 1979). Aspects of his work are compatible with Plummer’s account of the ‘four interweaving themes’ (2000, p. 223) shared by the various approaches to symbolic interactionism. First, human beings are capable of language and the use of symbols, which means that their social worlds are infused with meaning-making, through which people define and account for themselves and the situations they are part of in social interaction. The capacity to produce and share meanings enables them ‘to produce a history, a culture, and very intricate webs of communication’ (Plummer, 2000, p. 223). Consequently, although societies and institutions look stable, they are continually being renegotiated and reformed: ‘In the world of the interactionist, meaning is never fixed and immutable; rather, it is always shifting, emergent, and ultimately ambiguous’ (Plummer, 2000, p. 224). Plummer’s second theme focuses on everyday life as a process in which social identities, lives, situations and even societies constantly emerge, evolve and adjust in processes of becoming. Third, symbolic interactionists think of social processes as sitting between society and individuals, so that the central unit of social analysis is interaction, understood as the core process through which the relationship between social processes, structures and individuals is constructed. Consequently, what can appear as fixed features of social life, such as roles, rules of engagement, established routines or moral principles, are open to adjustment or transformation during social interaction. Plummer’s fourth theme is that symbolic interactionism focuses on empirical research rather than abstract social theory, coupled with the idea that social interaction is endemic and, therefore, a part of all aspects of the social world, be it a playground, café or boardroom.
Goffman shared these broad assumptions with symbolic interactionism. However, substantial differences set him apart from the various versions of this tradition. For example, his engagement with Durkheim’s sociology is significant. In his study of routine forms of recognition and civility, Goffman defined his project as an application of Durkheim’s social psychology to the study of everyday life of the United States in the 1950s – in particular, Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]) book on the sociology of religion which was based on a critical reconstruction of the social anthropological record of the lives of Indigenous Australians in the nineteenth century. Goffman adapted Durkheim’s arguments about the soul and the sacred nature of human beings as articulated in positive and negative religious rites, which he saw as reproduced in the everyday courtesies and deferences involved in social encounters. Durkheim, especially as he had been interpreted by Parsons (1937), was a target of the symbolic interactionists partly because he had attempted to establish sociology as a positive science, in contrast to their interpretive sociology, and because he had sought to develop a theory of social structures and processes rather than an empirical study of social interaction. Goffman was also influenced by Simmel (1950) on the relationship between emergent patterns of interaction and established social and cultural forms; Durkheim (1995 [1912]) on the complexities of modern, pluralist societies and the sociology of religion, law and democratic political institutions; Weber (1968 [1922]) on strategic action; Mead (1934) on the social self; and Schutz (1967) on social phenomenology and the structure of the lifeworld and multiple realities.
The eclecticism of these sources is reflected in Collins’s (1994) placement of Goffman’s work in two sociological traditions: the Durkheimian tradition and micro-interactionism. In the Durkheimian tradition, Goffman sits within the lineage of social anthropology in his embrace of the moral basis of social life, the importance of symbolism, the organization of social interaction as ritual, and the cult of the individual. In the micro-interactionist tradition, Goffman inherited the pragmatist dimension of the Chicago tradition in the work of Peirce (2012), Cooley (1922) and Mead (1934), in synergy with Blumer’s (1992 [1969]) symbolic interactionism and in dialogue with ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). Goffman is equally embedded in these somewhat contradictory positions within sociology, leading to a radical eclecticism and claims of a lack of theory development in his work (Jacobsen, 2010).
Goffman inherited many of these sources from the Chicago School of Sociology (Bulmer, 1984) and its creative synthesis of a reformist normative research programme and the philosophy of pragmatism (Misak, 2013). The Chicago School emphasized empirical research in the form of ethnographic study of how people resolved the challenges of living in modern urban society in the context of the disruptions and dislocations typified by the city of Chicago at the start of the twentieth century (Duneier et al., 2014). A key method adopted was urban ethnography, which aimed to develop detailed descriptions of the process of social life using an eclectic set of research methods combined with a sensibility to the practical problems of everyday life, or, as Anderson put it in The Hobo, ‘How individual and collective agents go about dealing with the problematic situations they confront; the forms of practical reasoning they use; the habits, techniques, and attitudes they develop individually and collectively; and the feedback effects of these situations’ (1923, p. 196). For Goffman, the paradigmatic context and means of managing the pressures of modern life was social interaction.
While neither pragmatism nor Chicago sociology were unified doctrines, the core themes of their work were influential on the young Goffman, shaping his normative project, his approach to empirical research and the way he engaged theories and developed concepts. Goffman believed that human beings were best understood as immersed in language and culture, and that intersubjectivity and social interaction affording reciprocal and coordinated social
