Erving Goffman - Dramaturgical Approach Presentation

Ladies and gentlemen, today´s performing….
“ the self “

What is happening in these situations?
Performing the self…

What is happening in these situations?
People are giving a performance,
showing one of their fronts
in a face to face encounter.

Dramaturgicalapproach
Aristotle or Goethe
More systematic work: Kenneth Burke
Idea of dramatism, “terministic screens”
Distinction of action and motion (things move, men act)
Men are “symbol using animals”. They build symbolic structures adding art to life.

Dramaturgicalapproach
Society is a drama in which actions, in terms of social symbols, are the crucial events.
Examples: politics, mass communications, leadership, social movements, rituals, ceremonies
Erving Goffman: What is going on in social interaction?

Its position in research
Epistemology:Constructionism- Meanings are constructed by human beings as they engage with the world they are interpreting.
Theoretical perspective:Interpretivism- looks for culturally derived and historic situated situations of social world.
Symbolic interaction: Explores the understandings of the culture as the meaningful matrix of our life.
Methodology: Ethnography- documenting the culture of people in social settings, getting inside the way each group of people sees the world.
Dramaturgical approach: analogy between life and theater

About Erving Goffman
Born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada
University of Toronto, University of Chicago
Most incisive contributions to social psychology
Interested in exploring the borders: writing on total institutions, stigma, gender relations, role distance and frames

Veryconcernedwiththemicrosociology
Everything people did on face to face interactions
The self is the central organizing feature of all social encounters
Giddens and Habermas -very influenced by Goffman

His mayor publications
The presentation of self in everyday life‎, 1959
Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates, 1961
Encounters: two essays in the sociology of interaction‎, 1961
Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity‎, 1963
Behavior in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings, 1963
Interaction ritual: essays in face-to-face behavior‎, 1967
Strategic interaction, 1969
Relations in public: microstudies of the public order, 1971
Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience, 1974
Gender advertisements: 1979
Forms of talk, 1981
Articles, Essays, Monographs published as books

His basic categories of themes are:
Social order
Social structure
Organization
Social interaction
The self
Social order
He shows a very subversive writing
Authors of: gender, madness, politics, communication, and society have written about Goffman, and there is a wide range of interest in his writings.

What exactly Goffman tells us about his view of the world?
What is going on in social interaction?
Where individuals present themselves to one another?
Dramaturgy is a way of understanding social encounters using the analogy of a stage, or theatrical performance
All social relationships are drama; people are masks in their relations to other.

What exactly Goffman tells us about his view of the world?
All we can know about a person´s self is what the person show us
Impression management
The manipulation of cues to control and organize the impression we give to others
Focus:
Interactions with a high level of performance
Small scale interactions more than a bigger stage
More in the individual, rather than in the situation

The presentation of the self in every day
Rules of social interaction and modes of self presentation
When an individual presents himself before others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him.
They will be interested in their status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, and his trustworthiness…
Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know what expect of him.

Front
Setting - Physical layout and backgrounds
Appearance - Everything we can do to our bodies
Manner - What we do with our bodies
Front stage
Back stage
Face to face interaction – influence upon another´s actions
Encounter – interaction that occurs one occasion
Performance – activity of a given participant on any occasion
Part or routine – the pre-established pattern of action

“What is accepted as reality will have some characteristics of celebration. To stay in one room apart from the party is to stay away from where reality is being performed. People must follow what it is being performed.”
Role- bundles of activities laced together
Dramatic realization - individual must express what he wishes to convey
Role embracement- Idealized roles incorporate officially accredited values of society. E.g. Teacher, priests, parenthood, students.
Role distance

Interaction ritual: essays in face to face behavior
Face: the social value a person claims to himself in an interactionpositive
Face-work: so he will not put himself at risk, or won’t be stigmatized or marked
Some of this face work is our responsibility, but there are other works that show up as established by society

Stigma
When we present a front, we put ourselves at risk
When a person violates moral demands of society
When is different from the assumed categories
When he posses an attribute that makes him different
When someone does not live to those expectations others become morally offended.
Therest: Normals
Stigma
Discredited: people with apparent stigmas: Handicapped
Discreditable: well known but not apparent stigmas: rigid beliefs, unemployed, homosexuals, homeless, alcoholism, suicidal attempts, radical political behavior
Tribal stigma: race, nation, religion

On cooling the mark down: some aspects of adaptation to failure”
Certain fronts are universally acceptable/unacceptable
Being productive, being successful, not being a criminal
Society is dominated by individualism and competition
We live in a society were failure is common
Mark- a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.
Leaving a role maybeinterpreted as a mark
Eg: when a woman voluntarily gives up a profession in order to become a wife and a mother
People have to be cooled out.

Goffman in education

The "Cooling-Out" Function in Higher Education
adaptation to failure
gives “solutions” or cooling-out strategies for students who do not fulfill schools requirements
Using Goffman's concepts to explore collaborative interaction processes in elementary school mathematic
the different roles that emerge in the process of collaborative interaction
the influence of these roles on group achievement and individual learning possibilities

Lives in 2 languages: An exploration of identity and culture
discussion about the American identity
common misperceptions about immigrants as students
Addressing the baseline: Erving Goffman and ethics in a postgraduate degree for practicing teachers.
Problem: Students generally experience great difficulty with conceptual thinking
Findings: Students research changed to go beyond simple description to observations guided by theoretical ideas
Showed how context relates to the forms of behavior in public and to the situation of observing these forms.
Provided insights into an ordinary situation and was a valid way to study characters in that setting
Observation can be focused on looking for specific things rather than trying to note everything

Face - work in facebook
Sel-f presentation theories - internet was not invented or in use
Face to face interaction
Online?
A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook
‘Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook!’: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook

A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook
How Goffman´s approach may be transported to online social networks
How Facebook contributes to our understanding of self-presentation.
Self-presentation is an especially significant element of Facebook.
Facebook is different from face-to-face interactions in that very little is done spontaneously
This means that the self-presentation I under control…. Or not?

‘Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook!’: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook
To observe the social significance of Facebook in the lives of undergraduate university students in the UK
Micro-management of their social lives
Its combination of self-presentation, viewing of others’ personal information and situational relevance to campus life proved attractive to students
They use it for the informal aspects of their education
Education and university-related exchanges - a minor constituent of student postings
Facebook appear to be an important arena within which the ‘behind the scenes work’ are performed
“Raises important questions about how universities will articulate their teaching relationships with internal student cohorts”

Conclusions
Clear to understand
Simple to apply for a highly qualitative interpretivist perspective
Online self presentation, social networks, e-learning platforms, environments - new theories/amendments
Applied:
Societies: rigid beliefs, image as an important issue
Education: students behavior, counseling, academic, stake holders roles in policy implementation, etc.
Medical field: Doctor-patient relationship, ethics.
Political field: leadership personalities, scandals (Watergate)
No one can stay out of performing different roles in their life…
“The world is a wedding”

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Erving Goffman - Dramaturgical Approach Presentation

by Nadia Mireles on Nov 02, 2009

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Erving Goffman - Dramaturgical Approach Presentation — Presentation Transcript