Erving Goffman was a prominent Canadian-American sociologist born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada. He studied chemistry and sociology at the University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, collecting data for his doctoral dissertation on the Scottish island of Unst from 1949-1951. In 1958, he began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley where he published his influential books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959 and Asylum in 1961. Goffman resigned from Berkeley in 1968 and took a position at the University of Pennsylvania, publishing Frame Analysis in 1974. Considered one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, Goffman examined how people manage impressions and adopt roles in social situations

1. ERVING GOFFMAN
Names
By: Marika Saidova

2. Erving Goffman
• Born in 1922-1982, Mannville, Alberta
• Ukrainian Jewish parents

3. Erving Goffman - education
• Interested in chemistry
• Attended St. John Technical High School, then
BSc. At University of Manitoba
• Early 1940s – first encounters with sociology
(Dennis Wrong)
• 1945 – graduated at University of Toronto
• 1949 – 1951 Collecting data for doctoral
dissertation (Island of Unst – Scotland)

4. Erving Goffman - education
• 1953 – succesfully defended his disertation

5. Erwing Goffman
• 1958 – Invited to teach at the University of
California in Berkley
• 1959 – The presentation of Self, 1961 – Asylum
• Progressed rapidly, 1962 full professor
• Stock market, Blackjack
• 1964 – His wife commited suicide
• 1969 The Insanity of Place rumored to be
autobiographical

7. Erving Goffman
• 1968 resigned his position in Berkley
• Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and
anthropology at the university of Pennsylvania
• Frame Analysis, published 1974, hoped to be
his magnum opus
• 1981 - 73rd president of American Sociological
Association,
• 1982 - died from Stomach cancer, in
Philadelphia

8. No matter where
you are, you
always “put a
mask” to get
where you want
and to be part of
something.
“The World is like a stage”

9. Humans are:
Active and knowledgeable

10. Devise their own conduct

11. Guide and control how others see them

12. Different in social settings than alone

13. Social Con Artists

14. DRAMATURGY
 The Theatrical Representation of life
 Consist from Front Stage and Back Stage
 Uses Impression Management as a tool

15. “And to the degree that the individual maintains a
show before others that he himself does not believe, he
can come to experience a special kind of alienation
from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”
Erving Goffman:

17. He was influenced by..
Herbert Blumer Lloyd Warner

19. Erving Goffman’s work was overly impressionistic
Unsystematic: he mainly focused on small groups
Lack of reliability, operationalization and testing.

20. Impact that Goffman had on the society
He is considered the most influential
American sociologist of the twentieth
century"

21. Goffman dramatically revised how
we think of social life

22. Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is
still a major influence in contemporary social
analysis.

23. References
• goffman&source=bl&ots=i9Ny9n6msT&sig=oBk0I3zLnc0BWaattm0
gf_mtEio&hl=en&sa=X&ei=70EkU_OhNcjqswai8oGAAQ&ved=0CG0
Q6AEwCQ
• Fine, G. A., & Smith, G. (2000). Erving goffman. (p. 1688). Sage.
Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/refbooks/Book210765

24. Thank you for
your
attention