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Publications (30)
The posthumous publication of Goffman’s ASA Presidential Address [Goffman 1983] assured that his legacy would be known as the sociology of the interaction order. But exactly how the 11 books and numerous articles making up his oeuvre were related to each other remains an enigma. In the absence of an explicit drive towards cumulativeness or any appa...
There are no references to creative fiction in Erving Goffman’s founding statement of his sociology of the interaction order, his 1953 Chicago doctoral dissertation ( Communication Conduct in an Island Community). Yet four pages into his first and best-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman cites a ‘novelistic inciden...
A complex and multi-faceted thinker, Georg Simmel self-defined as a philosopher but is now best known for his contributions to sociology and cultural theory. Varied as Simmel’s were, the Simmel that Goffman absorbed in his Chicago training was the sociologist of social forms or ‘formal sociologist’. Simmel provided Goffman with a justification to s...
The chapter considers Goffman’s intellectual and career indebtedness to one of his early influential teachers, the anthropologist-turned-sociologist William Lloyd Warner. In the 1930s and 1940s Warner led and directed a series of research studies of community life in America that were widely read inside and outside of academia. Upon arriving at the...
The use by Goffman of interviews, organized and informal ethnographies, and documentary sources is examined in this chapter. Goffman’s empirical materials were a distinctive feature of his overall sociological approach, which might be regarded as a fieldwork-informed, conceptually more precise version of Georg Simmel’s formal sociology. The peculia...
The son of Ukrainian immigrant parents, Erving Manual Goffman was born on 11 June 1922 in Mannville, Alberta, Canada. He attended high school in Winnipeg and entered the University of Manitoba in 1939, majoring in natural sciences. However, his interests shifted toward the social sciences before he left in 1942, still some credits short of his degr...
This discussion assesses the utility of Goffman’s thinking about conversational interaction for illuminating features of a research interview between one of the two authors (LM) and a fellow social work professional. We use this case to explore aspects of Goffman’s contribution to the sociological understanding of spoken interaction. While many of...
In the contemporary world visual data are found in a range of forms and formats and in a variety of practical empirical contexts. Our Introduction considers the growth of visual studies in recent decades and its increasing focus upon practices of visualization and representation. Contributions to this special issue are introduced to highlight the d...
Georg Simmel was the first great figure in sociology’s classical tradition to set out a distinctive conception of society not as a supra-individual structure but as a series of enabling and constraining interactions and associations among human beings. His novel insight was to direct his analytical gaze to the sociological significance of ordinary...
Symbolic interactionism (SI) is a distinctive sociological perspective that stresses the analytic centrality of investigating the meanings people give to their activities. Originating US pragmatist philosophy and its uptake by staff and students working at the University of Chicago, it developed a strongly empirical approach to social life that sig...
This article investigates how the frame concept was used in media studies of the 2009 flu pandemic representation. It examines how frame (or framing) analysis has illuminated sociological features of these depictions and how the frame concept facilitated an analytic understanding of media representations. The article first outlines the principal us...
Brand new chapter on the Postmodernisation of Everyday Life
Erving Goffman's distinctive contribution to an understanding of others was grounded in his information control and ritual models of the interaction process. This contribution centered on the forms of the interaction order rather than self-other relations as traditionally conceived in phenomenology. Goffman came to phenomenology as a sympathetic bu...
Drawing upon an ethnographic study of the sociability practices of a virtual community, this paper identifies certain paradoxical respects in which the ethnographer can be regarded as both present in and absent from the setting. By definition, virtual ethnography describes places that are not spaces. Disembodied persons inhabit those places. Negoti...
Goffman's first substantial sociological work, his M.A. thesis entitled “Some Characteristics of Response to Depicted Experience,” has hitherto escaped critical commentary. Inspection of the thesis yields insights into the early development of Goffman's sociology. It shows that Goffman's later dismissal of positivistic and experimental approaches,...
Drawing upon an ethnographic study of the sociability practices of a virtual community, this paper identifies certain paradoxical respects in which the ethnographer can be regarded as both present in and absent from the setting. By definition, virtual ethnography describes places that are not spaces. Disembodied persons inhabit those places. Negoti...
When people put on training shoes and go outside to run, they render themselves open to what Carol Brooks Gardner has identified as ‘public harassment’ – to multifarious types of ‘abuses, harryings, and annoyances characteristic of public places and uniquely facilitated by communication in public’ (Gardner 1995: 4). An ear...
This paper explores a set of resources for the investigation of newsgroup postings. It suggests that there is considerable potential in using sociological analyses of sociability and social interaction (and in particular the work of Goffman) for this task. A framework for analysis derived from Simmel and Goffman is presented. The paper examines fiv...
This paper explores a set of resources for the investigation of newsgroup postings. It suggests that there is considerable potential in using sociological analyses of sociability and social interaction (and in particular the work of Goffman) for this task. After brief overview of our working concepts the paper looks at thread organisation and conte...
This paper looks at the presentation of self in one online community through examining the organisation of the "talk" that goes on within an ISP specific newsgroup. It looks not at the spectacular identity play often described as taking place in virtual environments but rather at the management of identity in the everyday newsgroup interaction. The...
The development of a culture of communication rooted in the local and small- scale into one that operates within a much larger virtual environment raises a number of interesting issues for those studying CMC. This paper looks at the organisation of the "talk" that goes on within a newsgroup whose core was established in a Scottish island but which...