Word: goffman
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...University of Pennsylvania Sociologist Erving Goffman, that hoary punch line is a legitimate scientific query. In fact, Goffman has been asking -and answering-just such questions for years. He believes that greetings and goodbyes, congratulations and condolences, along with the other little ceremonies of daily life, serve serious purposes: they grease the wheels of social intercourse and help each person to create an acceptable image of himself in the eye of his fellows...
...prison, in Erving Goffman's terminology, is a "total institution," like a nunnery or a boot camp or a mental hospital. The bargaining power of prisoners looks pretty small. They cannot recruit help from outside, communications are restricted, and they have no alumni association that looks out for them. There's not much they can withhold from the institution; much of their work is "make-work." They even have poor opportunities for violence because so much of the time they are locked up. But once in awhile they start some...
These students made friends with other patients and participated in the hospital's social life. They became part of the community that Erving Goffman describes in his book Asylums. One student still tells anecdotes about the people he met. Another said. "You could have great times there. People sat around reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There were some great tall-tale tellers...
...Exploring a Shadow World": In order to achieve a more valuable contribution to sociology, Erving Goffman should study more closely the work of his putative intellectual forebears, Cooley and Mead. Surely social life is more than the banal playing out of prescribed social roles by "normal" social actors. Though social order is based upon a high degree of mutual expectation in role behavior, the viability of social life is fruitfully conceptualized in terms of highly frequent, residual rule-breaking by "normal" persons, as well as by supposed deviants. Are all human relationships as disingenuous as Goffman portrays them...
...Goffman's basic thesis is that man's need for public order and unspoken mutual trust manifests itself in even the seemingly most simple social interactions, such as two people passing each other. Several years ago I observed Erving Goffman walking through Barrows Hall on the University of California campus. He ran into another sociology professor who said, "Well, Erving, I haven't seen you in several years." To which Dr. Goffman replied, "It isn't my fault, David...