An interesting view, a type of formalization and definition, of the many components involved in ordinary social interactions, including those of teams (work places, homes, etc). Also included are all the numerous ways that these presentations can go wrong. Written in a scholarly manner, readable but dense. ( )

I picked this up as material for a 2nd year Social Psychology course instructed by Professor R. Prus at the University of Waterloo. It is an essential text, along with Mead, Simmel, and Blumer, for understanding the groundworks of the Symbolic Interactionist approach to ethnographic research and the study of human interaction and lived experience in everyday life.

How we rehearse and perform in all jobs.

Goffman takes an inductive approach to a form of symbolic interactionism. He examines the ways in which people present themselves and exhibit their activities to the world around them. He talks of impression management in which the individual is able to manage and manipulate their own impressions in order to extract a desired response from others. He analyses the individual and the self, viewing these as a product of social interaction. Goffman’s theory of identity uses ‘dramaturgy’ as a metaphor to suggest that we are all participants in some kind of great theatrical performance. We have roles, routines, and representations that we portray to our audience in the ‘front’, ‘back’, and ‘outside’ regions of the stage; the stage being the arena in which social interaction takes place, and the audience refers to others with whom we communicate. According to Goffman, people in the presence of others typically ‘dramatize’ their actions whilst highlighting and emphasizing those aspects of what they are doing, that they wish to convey the most. His ‘dramaturgical’ analysis provides a theatrical analogy to the social interaction of people. Roseneil and Seymour’s (1999) claim, that the range of identity options available to the individual is limited, is somewhat substantiated in Goffman’s work as he refers to the self as being restricted to contextual circumstances with a flexibility that occurs during social interaction. However, Goffman’s definition of the self proposes that it is a product of social construction. Therefore, it may be feasible to suggest that in Goffman’s view, identity may be unlimited in the sense that it can be constructed in many different ways within the myriad of contextual social interaction. ( )

Goffman's view that cultural norms require individuals to perform different versions of themselves in different situations, none of which may acurrately represent the individual. Accessible and engrossing. ( )