Dramaturgical Sociology Research Articles

Enter Goffman: On Entrance, Embarrassment, and Role in Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Sociology

This paper argues that the work of Erving Goffman can be profitably re-read with the aid of Juliane Vogel’s work on the cultural logic of “the entrance” [der Auftritt]. Although Goffman’s “dramaturgical sociology” makes use of several theatrical concepts for the analysis of face-to-face interaction in everyday life, “entrance” itself is not among them. The essay begins by demonstrating the significance of entrance for Goffman’s thought. For Goffman, as for Vogel, answering the question, “Who’s there?” is a necessary and pivotal moment in any face-to-face encounter. Then, it turns to the link between entrance and embarrassment, which has long been recognized as a critical concern for Goffman. Embarrassment proves to be the consequence of a “failed entrance” in Goffman’s writing; its status as looming threat to any encounter, and the need for precautions to prevent it, suggest something about the fragility of social intercourse and a certain structural interminability of entrance. The final sections attempt to historicize Goffman’s understanding of the human being as a performer compelled to enter into and out of conflicting and even contradictory roles, then explores theatrical antecedents of Goffman’s social actor in two works from Shakespeare and Kleist.

Business unit controllers' credibility and the hardening of local forecasts

AbstractFocusing on multidivisional companies, this paper analyzes the hardening of local forecasts at the intersection of business units (BUs) and the corporate finance function. It investigates how BU controllers, accountable to both local management and the corporate finance function, seek to establish themselves as competent and trustworthy forecasters vis‐à‐vis their functional superiors. Drawing on Goffman's dramaturgical sociology, we demonstrate how these encounters constitute episodes in a multiperiod hardening game feeding into the management of forecast quality and anticipatory control. We illustrate how expressive performances of their competence and trustworthiness are vital for BU controllers to manage vertical information flows between the local and the corporate level and for aligning corresponding interests. Convincing performances can reinforce BU controllers' status as stewards of the forecasting process and help to maintain a “truce” between the local and the corporate level, assuring corporate controllers that the unit's future is under control.

‘Whose Story is it?’: Co-production and Psychological Ownership of Narrative Reports

The paper examines the co-production of narrative reports in the context of a non-profit innovation network. Prior research on narrative reporting suggests that corporate reports and similar organizational narratives are likely the product of collective efforts of different actors in the backstage. The actual process of (re-)writing such narratives has received little attention, however. In our paper, we examine how the inputs of different individual actors are translated into an organizational narrative. Mobilizing Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology as our main lens of analysis, we highlight different mechanisms of dramaturgical guidance in backstage interactions, and we show how such guidance can have repercussions on the original authors of narratives when they feel like they are losing ownership of ‘their’ stories. Overall, our paper adds to our understanding of the backstage-frontstage dynamics in narrative reporting.

Synergistic co-teaching: Surfacing the invisible flows of dramaturgy in practice in initial teacher education

Global disruptions in higher education provide further impetus to recent calls for fundamental changes in initial teacher education (ITE) curricula and pedagogies. This video-based Interactional Ethnography of on-campus co-teaching practices aims to surface the ‘invisible flows’ of co-teaching as social interaction. The micro-etnhographic discourse analysis of four interaction units across a 2-hour teaching session and a video stimulated recall interview revealed that the co-teachers used intertextual references to signal shared understandings while engaging their ITE students in preparation for a Capstone assessment. Drawing on Goffman's (1959) seminal work in dramaturgical sociology, the joint close micro-analyses of classroom talk, actions, disciplinary expertise and professional histories made transparent how, as a team, the co-teachers relied on their bond of reciprocal dependence and familiarity to gain intersubjectivity. When a disruption arose, they synergistically demonstrated the defensive attributes and practices of a dramaturgical team constitutive of circumspection, discipline, and loyalty as they (re) formulated their planned lesson and co-operatively maintained their common learning goals. This process enabled them to demonstrate a different type of co-teaching pedagogical practice, which we propose as synergistic co-teaching . • Adopts Interactional Ethnography to study co-teaching in Initial Teacher Education • Revisits Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical sociology, teamwork and intersubjectivity • Proposes ‘synergistic co-teaching' as an extension of existing types of co-teaching • Reflects on the affordances of video analysis in studying teaching-learning in-situ

A dramaturgical perspective of online university student behaviours in a second year psychology class

This study applies dramaturgical sociology, specifically Goffman’s approach to region behaviour, to explore where students spend their time doing class related tasks in spaces other than the LMS. The context for this research is a case study of a second year psychology class at an Australian university. Data was collected about students’ front stage setting (the LMS) and backstage setting (students’ experiences on Facebook). Over a 12-week semester 126 students were observed in the LMS. During the semester, 21 students completed fortnightly questionnaires about where they spent their time and with whom. At the end of the semester, 14 students participated in online interviews. The findings that emerged from the data illustrated how the characteristics of the audience in each setting, as well as the timing of communication and duration of each setting, may have impacted a student’s social learning experience. This knowledge can help online teachers to understand the characteristics of a setting that might determine where students prefer to situate their learning experience. While this paper uses a dramaturgical perspective of online university students in a second year psychology class, the students’ experiences can generally be used to understand how LMS’s, social networking tools, and collaborative technologies support and impede social learning experiences in higher education.

Research into Transformations in Everyday Life: Three Methodological Notes

The article focuses on the reflection of my research experience in obtaining qualitative data using narrative interviews. I confronted my own research experience with the phenomenological methodology of Alfred Schütz, dramaturgical sociology of Erving Goffman, and interpretative sociology of Max Weber. The article discusses three problems that emerged during a longitudinal study of everyday life transformation in the long-term horizon of sixty years: 1. How to create a concept of everyday life so it serves not only as a tool for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, but also as a tool for understanding the meanings of the examined empirical world; 2. How to discursively create an image of everyday life transformations during an interview between a participant and a researcher and what it means in relation to the research subject; 3. How to reach understanding between the participant and the researcher during a face-to-face interview.

Sport officials' strategies for managing interactions with players: Face-work on the front-stage

Communication is central to managing perceptions of fairness and performance in sport officiating. Most of the few studies that focus on sport official communication have been limited to ‘one-way’ impressions and decision communication and tend to neglect more dynamic, dialogic interactions with players. This study explored sport officials' identity concerns and motivations and ways officials adapt and accommodate ‘face’ in interactions with players. DesignQualitative methodology. MethodVideo elicitation interviews using an allo-confrontation approach were conducted with 8 male and 6 female sport officials from 7 different team sports representing novice to professional levels. Goffman's (1959; 1967) dramaturgical sociology of interaction was used to frame identity projections and context in officials' communication management strategies. FindingsAnalysis of interview transcripts revealed three distinct ways officials' face concerns emerge and are managed in interactions with players including (1) anticipating players' reactions and modifying presentation of self, (2) asserting and preserving the officials' own face, and (3) giving and restoring players' face. When incompatible interactional exchanges occur in sport matches, officials use different defensive and corrective face-work strategies to assert, re-establish, or appropriate face statuses for themselves and players. ConclusionsThe findings highlight the importance of dynamics and context in sport official communication. They also emphasise the need to maintain relationships, preserve and protect identities, whilst being strategic in interactions with players. We conclude that new conceptualisations are needed in sport official communication to build on current ‘one-way’ concepts that dominate officiating research and training.

The Dynamic and Theatrical Worlds of the ‘Midan’

‘All the world’s a stage …’ tells us the Bard of Avon. Goffman’s application of Shakespeare’s age-old metaphor to our everyday practices helps us understand the complexity of social interaction. His dramaturgical sociology allows us to engage better with the frames of repeated behaviors that we ‘perform’ in social contexts. However, emphasizing the theatricality of action and interaction, especially for problems at the macro-level like acts of revolution, is crucial to make sense of the form of spectacle that results in popular demonstrations, sit-ins etc., in which everyone contributes as actors/spectators to imagine and/or negotiate a different way of being or governance. This paper aims to study the active dynamics of turning an everyday locale such as Midan al-Tahrir into a liminal space in which staged performances on political and artistic levels take place in an attempt to shed light on the inseparability of the political and the aesthetic, the event and the performance. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 highlights the public’s awareness of the symbolic and performative importance of occupying a space, and the creative power that both nurtures and feeds on this liminal experience. In this very example, the Arabic word midan is helpful because of its dynamic connotations as opposed to the static English ‘square’, as this paper examines the experience of Tahrir as a ‘Midan’ where the real, the ritualistic and the playful actively coexist.

Interpretive theories as the theoretical basis for the visual sociology

The article deals with the phenomenology, dramaturgical sociology and ethnomethodology as a theoretical basis for visual studies in sociology. Visual sociology and theoretical approaches are mentioned above are an attention to everyday life and construction of interpersonal interactions between social actors. Thus, visual methods of sociology are methods of collecting and analyzing visual data, and interpretive approaches are theoretical basis

How Autoethnography Works

The aim of the article is to reveal the modern autoethnographic approach to social research. The review of publications edited since the beginning of the 2000's has shown that autoethnography works as a planned, well-structured confession correlating with the outside world. The essentially open and uncompromising representation of each detail in the author’s personal story related to the subject matter, alongside with his/her shift away from neutrality and organized skepticism (according to Merton) in respect of the research issue, establish the principles for an autobiographical approach. The article reflects the peculiarities of modern autoethnographic schools, and describes the methods and techniques of autobiographical writing. There are two trends of autoethnography that are distinguished in Western tradition: evocative autoethnography, which is based on queer theory, and analytical autoethnography, traditionally oriented to conceptual apparatus. The first evocative trend is founded on the metaphors of emotional, authentic, and veracious representations of cultural realities through the autobiographical genre. The second trend, analytical autoethnography, is supported by three research prescriptions: the actual membership in the studied community, and avoidance of understatements, including the unspoken, non-prescribed details of ethnographic work; the desire for theoretical understanding of reality; and the rejection of any authentic reflection of the past. Over the past 20-30 years, there has not been any significant autoethnographic project implemented by the Russian research community appealing to the development of independent theoretical descriptive language. The only exception to the rule is Alexeyev’s so-called "dramaturgical sociology", adjacent to the queer ideology of some Western colleagues. The paper represents a detailed analysis of research innovation embedded by Alexeyev, as well as a logical and theoretical overlapping with the works of foreign authors.

Exploring player communication in interactions with sport officials

La gestion et la communication avec les joueurs sont au cœur de l’arbitrage, mais l’interaction officiel/joueur est difficile a entrainer et reste largement inexploree. Cette etude interroge des capitaines d’equipe a partir d’un eventail de sports. Elle utilise la video et la sociologie dramaturgique de l’interaction sociale de Goffman (The presentation of self in everyday life, 1959, Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behaviour, 1967) pour explorer les differentes facons qu’ont les joueurs d’interagis et d’influer les arbitres. Le comportement des joueurs apparait parfois irrationnel, mais ils sont surtout strategiques. L’attitude des joueurs dans ces interactions va de l’acceptation fataliste face aux decisions arbitrales, par la plainte selective, a un opportunisme permanent. Les joueurs tentent d’influencer les arbitres par l’intermediaire de la plainte, du questionnement, de la flatterie ou des louanges. Ces resultats approfondissent notre comprehension de l’equilibre – entre autorite, responsabilite et respect – qui caracterise une communication et une interaction efficace avec les joueurs.

Strategic Interaction in Player-sport Official Encounters

Sport officiating communication studies use the views of officials and focus on ‘one-way’ communication and behavioural factors such as impression management and decision communication. Little is known about player perspectives and ways players differ in their interaction with officials. This study used Goffman's (1959; 1969) dramaturgical sociology as an interpretive frame to understand players’ views of strategic interaction in player-official encounters. Main findings show the emergence of the ‘unwitting’, ‘naïve’ and ‘covering’ moves (Goffman, 1969) in player-official interaction and that players actively attempt to influence officials and their decisions through deliberate and unconscious strategies such as complaining and selective questioning.

We're Play-Acting: Simulation and Dramaturgical Sociology

BackgroundSimulation or scenario learning is an integral part of health care student development, and despite the increasing amount of research, very little is known about how students and facilitators experience it. MethodsThis compressed time mode, ethnographic approach study incorporated data from student paramedics during and immediately after simulation learning events, and facilitator views of facilitating the simulation experience. This provided an overview of simulation in the student paramedic development pathway. ResultsThe performance aspect of scenarios is echoed in the dramaturgical language used when talking about simulation learning events. ConclusionsThemes such as script, cast, role, and costume were explored, as were media portrayal of paramedics. Usual paramedic settings were also discussed.

Dramaturgical Sociology of Erving Goffman & Impression Management of Dance Performers

Dramaturgical Sociology of Erving Goffman & Impression Management of Dance Performers

Gazing and Performing

The Tourist Gaze [Urry J, 1990 (Sage, London)] is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4000 citations on Google scholar). Whilst wide ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucault-inspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. However, some recent literature has critiqued this notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ for reducing tourism to visual experiences—to sight seeing—and neglecting the other senses, bodily experiences, and ‘adventure’. The influential ‘performance turn’ within tourist studies suggests that the doings of tourism are physical or corporeal and not merely visual, and it is necessary to regard ‘performing’ rather than ‘gazing’ as the dominant tourist research paradigm. Yet we argue here that there are, in fact, many similarities between the paradigms of gaze and of performance. They should ‘dance together’ rather than stare at each other at a distance. In this paper we rethink the tourist gaze in the light of this performance turn and of a Goffmanian dramaturgical sociology by examining the embodied and multisensuous nature of gazing as well as the complex social relations and fluid power geometries comprising performances of gazing. The Foucault-inspired notion of the tourist gaze can be enlivened—made more bodily and theatrical—by incorporating Goffman and post-Goffman analyses and aspects of nonrepresentational theory.

Goffman's Dramaturgical Sociology: Developing a Meaningful Theoretical Context and Exercise Involving "Embarrassment and Social Organization"

The incorporation of new figures to the canon of sociological theory creates unique challenges for the teaching of sociology. We need to rethink the intellectual context of such writers' contributions and devise new ways to involve students in these theorists' insights. This article suggests some of the tasks ahead in reworking our presentation of Erving Goffman's sociology to students. An overemphasis on Goffman's work on the social self in has resulted in a teaching convention that places him among symbolic interactionist theorists. This practice has obscured important linkages of Goffman's other work on social rituals and social forms to other theoretical traditions, most conspicuously the Durkheimian ritual tradition. This article depicts a useful participatory exercise for teaching Goffman's dramaturgical sociology that draws from his little-utilized essay on embarrassment and social organization

Recruitment for fashion careers: A case study of organizational conning

We report a participant‐observation‐based analysis of the recruitment strategies, the formal organization, and the organizational underlife of a privately owned, profit‐making “conning” organization that calls itself a fashion school for girls. Two variations of interactionist sociology, negotiated order theory and dramaturgical sociology, are used. Beyond expanding understanding of how conning organizations operate, implications extend to the issue of deceit in competitive recruitment for scarce human resources as, for instance, in the current practices of some colleges and universities to ensure enrollment minima in the context of a dwindling marketplace.

The sociology of code-switching

Code-switching, a phenomenon commonly found in human communication, has begun to receive greater attention it deserves in sociolinguistics, although it had been a major part of British scholarship as may be represented by scholars like J. R. Firth. Perhaps, what is needed in sociolinguistics now is a micro-theory of code-switching in which the instrumental use of language and other forms of semiotic expression are readily explicated. The model described in this essay provides such a framework. It is based on research in symbolic interactionism and borrows from the rich tradition of dramaturgical sociology. It also relates to the concept of emergence and the negotiation of social reality in the field of ethnomethodology.

The social organization of sexual risk

The gay S/M (sado-masochistic or slave-master) subculture is considered an extreme test case of the risks encountered in casual sex with strangers. The experiences of 35 gay male practitioners of S/M sex show a relatively low rate of fright and injury arising from casual sexual encounters where one man has allowed himself to become prisoner of another. Protected territories, screening processes, negotiation of the S/M scenario, and maintenance of consent throughout the encounter are considered aspects of social control for the level of risk of physical injury and involuntary detention. The dramaturgical sociology of Erving Goffman is used to explain S/M as an alternative sexual lifestyle. S/M is considered a significant form of recreational sex with implications for a social analysis of the intersection of sex and power in North American society.