Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963) and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinarily influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, ...

Introduction

Introduction
GaryAlanFine, PhilipManning & GregoryW.H.Smith

Erving Goffman continues to exercise the sociological imagination. While perhaps not as broad or subtle a theorist as Durkheim, Simmel, Marx, or Weber, the images and slogans of this scholar have become an integral part of the discipline. The dramaturgical metaphor has become sociology's second skin. His writings provide the locus classicus for a number of central sociological concepts, including impression management, face-work, footing, total institution, stigma and role distance. He was a major sociologist who also enjoyed a significant profile outside his home discipline. Erving Goffman was arguably the most influential American1 sociologist of the twentieth century.

While this appraisal would be accepted by many, two additional features are also widely acknowledged. First, Goffman himself can hardly be considered a conventional ...

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