The Cloak of Incompetence: A Neglected Concept in the Sociology of Everyday Life

Abstract

Sociologists have gained great purchase from Edgerton’s (1967) introduction of “the cloak of competence” as an analytical concept, particularly those in the study of deviance and health interested in presentations of self as “normal” and those who have studied professional socialization. Our concern in this paper is with the opposite process—the presentation of an incompetent or less than competent self. Situating our analysis within the sociology of everyday life and performing a meta-analysis of a range of studies, we show that displays of incompetence or diminished competence are as pervasive and integral a feature of social life as displays of competence. We explore the wide variety of situations in which social actors engage in displays of diminished competence and make the case for studying them more systematically as a way of understanding the full range of presentational strategies social actors employ. We conclude by suggesting that incompetence/competence are best viewed as a continuum along which individuals seek to position themselves, engaging in “cloaking behavior” to either maximize or minimize their displayed level of competence. We also discuss the relevance of these conceptual ideas to those concerned with the dynamics of social inequality, and the doing of gender, race, class, power and resistance, suggesting that greater attention to cloaking behavior may serve as a bridge between interpretive and structural approaches in sociology.