Erving Goffman’s View of “Deviance”: “Self” and “Society” as the Sources of Deviancy and Conformity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Not much has been written about Erving Goffman’s conception of “deviance”. The little that exists often mistakenly reduces it either to what I refer to in this paper as “Stigma and Mental Illness”, or diminishes its novelty by rendering it a variant of “interactionist” view of deviance. The argument of this paper is that he had a broader and novel conception of deviance. In fact, he distinguished between six interrelated types of deviance: (1) Deviance related to presentation of “self” in social interactions; (2) Deviance as lack of self-control and violation of interactional scripts; (3) Deviation from assigned social roles in the system of social stratification; (4) Social deviance, i.e., willful and unabashed violation of social order; (5) Deviation from “identity values”; (6) Deviation due to a search for excitement