Erving Goffman — Jawn Lam

Works

On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure, Psychiatry, 1952
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1963
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 1974

In Tactics of Organizational Politics

Ideas

Impression management, front and back regions. Goffman treats social life as performance: people manage the impressions others form of them, and those performing together act as a team that shares an interest in the show succeeding. Performances happen in a front region before an audience, while preparation and contradicting facts are kept to a back region the audience does not see.

Cooling the mark out. Borrowing from confidence games, where a cooler stays behind to console the victim so he accepts his loss quietly, Goffman describes how organizations and groups help people who have lost a role or status accept the loss without making trouble. One common method is to offer a substitute status that lets the person save face.

Courtesy stigma. Stigma is an attribute that discredits a person in the eyes of others. It spreads by association: people close to a stigmatized person can be obliged to share some of the discredit, which Goffman called a courtesy stigma.

Frames and fabrications. People make sense of what is happening through frames, organizing principles that answer the question of what is going on here. A fabrication, in his definition, is the deliberate management of activity so that others form a false belief about what is going on.

What it explains

Goffman explains why the appearance of a decision matters as much as its substance: who is seen to propose, approve, lose, or be honored shapes how the audience reads the outcome. His work on face-saving shows why people who lose inside organizations are so often given a dignified exit, and why the people around them can be tarred by association.

Tactics that draw on Erving Goffman (140)

In Thinking Tools

Known for

A sociologist of face-to-face interaction. Frame Analysis asks how people answer the question of what is going on here: through frames, organizing principles that give events their meaning, whether natural happenings or social acts guided by someone's intent.

Tools that draw on Erving Goffman (1)

Frame Analysis