Introduction of Erving Goffman, Impression management, Stigma

 ERVING GOFFMAN (Biographical Sketch)

Erving Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada, on June 11, 1922 and died in 1982 at the peak of his fame. He earned his advanced degrees from the university of Chicago and is most often thought of as a member of the Chicago school and as a symbolic interactionist. He had long been regarded as a "Cult" figure in a sociological theory. That status was achieved in spite of the fact that he had been a professor in the prestigious sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and later held an endowed chair at the Ivy league's University of Pennsylvania.

By the 1980 he had emerged as a centrally important theorist. Infact, he had been elected president of the American Sociological Association in the year he died but was unable to give his presidential address because of advanced illness. Given Goffman's  maverick status, Randall Collins says of his address: "Everyone wondered what he would do for his Presidential address: a straight, traditional presentation seemed unthinkable for Goffman with his reputation as an iconoclast......we got a far more dramatic message: Presidential address cancelled, Goffman dying. It was an appropriate Goffman way to go out".

However, when he was asked shortly before his death whether he was a symbolic interactionist, he replied that the label was too vague to allow him to put himself in that category (Manning, 1992). Infact, it is hard to squeeze his work into any single category. In creating his theoretical perspective, Goffman drew on many sources and created a distinctive orientation.

IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT

In general, impression management is oriented to guarding against a series of unexpected actions, such as unintended gestures, inopportune intrusion, and faux pas, as well as intended actions, such as making a scene. Goffman was interested in the various methods of dealing with such problems. 

First, there is a set of methods involving actions aimed at producing dramaturgical loyalty by, for example, fostering high in-group loyalty, preventing team members from identifying with the audience, and changing audiences periodically so that they do not become too knowledgeable about the performers. 

Second, Goffman suggested various forms of dramaturgical discipline, such as having the presence of mind to avoid slips, maintaining self-control, and managing the facial expressions and verbal tone of one's performance. 

Third, he identified various types of dramaturgical circumspection, such as determining in advance how a performance should go, planning for emergencies, selecting loyal teammates, selecting good audiences, being involved in small teams where dissension is less likely, making only brief appearances, preventing audience access to private information, and settling on a complete agenda to prevent unforeseen occurrences. 

The audience also has a stake in succesful impression management by the actor or team of actors. The audience often acts to save the show through such devices as giving great interest and attention to it, avoiding emotional outbursts, not noticing slips, and giving special consideration to a neophyte performer.

Manning points not only to the centrality of the self but also to Goffman's cynical view of people in this work:

            

The overall tenor of The Presentation of Self is to a world in which people, whether individually or in groups, pursue their own ends in cynical disregard for others......The view here is of the individual as a set of performance masks hiding a manipulative and cynical self.

Manning puts forth a "two selves thesis" to describe this aspect of Goffman's thinking: that is, people have both a performance self and a hidden, cynical self.

         STIGMA

Goffman (1963) was interested in the gap between what a person ought to be, "virtual social identity," and what a person actually is, "actual social identity." Anyone who has a gap between these two identities is stigmatized. STIGMA focuses on the dramaturgical interaction between stigmatized people and normals. The nature of that interaction depends on which of the two types of stigma and individual has. In the case of discredited stigma, the actor assumes that differences are known by the audience member or are evident to them. A discreditable stigma is one in which the differences are neither known by audience members nor perceivable by them . For someone with a discredited stigma, the basic dramaturgical problem is managing the tension produced by the fact that people know of the problem. For someone with a discreditable stigma, the dramaturgical problem is managing information so that the problem remains unknown to the audience.

Most of the text of Goffman's Stigma is devoted to people with obvious, often grotesque stigmas (fir instance, the loss of a nose). However, as the book unfolds, the reader realizes that Goffman is really saying that we are all stigmatized at some time or other or in one setting or another. His example include the Jew "passing" in predominantly Christian community, the fat person in a group of people of normal weight, and the individual who has lied about his past and must be constantly sure that the audience does not learn of this deception.