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Samenvatting Contemporary social and sociological theory
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Contemporary social and sociological theoryPROBLEM 4
Goffman’s work lies in his emphasis on the presentation of self/call image. The emphasis on image
that television conveyed was bolstered by technical advances in movie and magazine
production.Movies became spectacles and magazines became filled with glossy pictures. These shifts
in the cultural context impacted the way people understood themselves. Self-image grew increasingly
important and at the same time became less tied to real social groups and more informed by images
seen in television, commercials, movies, advertisements. The importance of meaning and coherence
gave way to the power of an image to gain attention, to be attractive.
Self-image also increased in importance because of changes associated with identities. For most of
history, identities and selves had been embedded in actual social groups, face-to-face communities
that could monitor members' activities and symbolic expressions. Today, social networking sites
along with smartphones and social networking applications have lifted identities and selves out of
socially embedded activities and groups. Thus, the image of identity/self has become free-floating and
virtually available to all. You can express your personal style, rather than group membership. Self-
image has become important because of these social factors.
Goffman argues that for any social encounter to take place, people need to present a self. This isn’t
something people take for granted. Impression management is serious and people manipulate specific
cues in the setting and in their appearance and manner in order to present a specific kind of self to
others. These cues are prepared backstage and presented in a front stage wherein the audience reads
the cues and in response demands a certain kind of performance from the actor. This performance
may be team based, it entails deference and demeanor rituals and face-work, and it may result in
stigma if not properly executed. This fundamental need to present a self for an encounter to occur
results in social order, though that is not the intent of the actors.
Goffman’s perspective has become known as dramaturgy.
Dramaturgy = a way of understanding social encounters using the analogy of the dramatic stage.
In his perspective, people are seen as performers who are vitally concerned with the presentation of
their character to an audience. There are 3 premises:
❖ All we can know about a person’s self is what the person shows us. The self is perceived
indirectly through the cues we offer others. Because of this limitation, people are constantly
involved in the second premises
❖ Impression management refers to the manipulation of cues in order to organize and control
the impression we give to others. We can never be sure we see the authentic self; we always
have to assume that the self we see is real. But for interaction it does not matter if the self we
see is real or false. All selves are communicated in the exact same way. Impression
management involves emotion.
❖ There are particular features of face-to-face encounters that tend to bring order to interactions.
The presentation of self places moral imperatives on interactions. Selves are delicate things
and are easily discredited. Selves depend upon your skill in presenting/ maintaining cues and
the willingness and support of others. Thus, the simple act of presenting a self creates a
cooperative order
Goffman’s main concern is with the self that it is the subject of impression management.
Goffman has a typology of self identity:
❖ Social identity: distant others can tell us about. This identity is composed of social categories
imputed to the individual by the self and others in defined situations. Each category has a
complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of a particular category.
, The category and attributes form anticipation in a given social setting. People in an encounter
lean on these anticipation, transforming them into normative expectations and righteously
presented demands. The only way we can funcion around other humans is by having some
way to predict their behaviors. We use social categories and their accompanying attitudes to
accomplish this. Our expectations come to have a morel/righteous feel to them.
❖ Personal identity: held by people who are close to us. This identity has more/less abiding
characteristics that are a combination of life history events that are unique to the person. This
identity plays a structured, routine, standardized role in social organization just because of its
one-of-a-kind quality. The more you know about me, the less free i am to organize my
presentation of self in any old way. I am held accountable to the self image that I have
presented.
❖ Ego identity: this identity is of the individual's own construction; it is the story we tell
ourselves about who we are, to which we get emotionally attached. This identity is thus the
subjective sense of his own situation and his own continuity and character that an individual
comes to obtain as a result of his various social experiences. We construct that story through
which we see ourselves using the same cues and categorical expectations that others use.
The basic concept to explain the presentation of self is that of a front.
Front = the expression of a particular self/identity that is formed by the individual and read by others.
It is like a building facade. Like a facadem a front is constructed by emphasizing and de-emphasizing
certain sign vehicles. In every interaction, we hold things back. We accentuate other aspects in order
to present a particular kind of self with respect to the social role. A social front is constructed using 3
elements:
❖ Setting: consists of all of the physical scenery and props that we use to create the stage and
background within which we present our performance. Setting tends to ground rules by
making definitions of the situations consistent. This groundedness of settings is part of what
makes us think that roles, identities and selves are consistent across time and space. A place
can be institutionalized. The specific place is restricted. Total institutions have no flexibility.
Total institutions are organizations that control all of an individual’s behaviors, from the time
the person gets up until he is asleep (hospital).
❖ Appearance: what we do to our bodies. Consists of clothing, hairstyle, piercings etc.
Anything we can place upon our bodies.
❖ Manner: refers to what we do with our bodies. Consists the way we walk, our posture, voice
reflection etc.
Manner and appearance function to signify the performer’s social statuses and temporary ritual state.
Different appearances cues are associated with different status positions.
Ritual states refers to:
❖ It is associated with different life phases (birthday, graduation)
❖ It conveys our readiness to perform a particular role. Our appearance tells others how serious
we are about the role we claim
Fronts are prepared backstage and presented on the front stage. For different activities you have a
different preparation backstage. There are multiple front- and backstages and they can occur at any
time and place. Often, it is performance teams that move from front- to backstage. Most performances
are carried off by a troupe of actors. The same is true about social encounters. Members of social
categories assume that others within the category will cooperate in preserving the group face.
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