46 Facts About Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".

Erving Goffman was from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had emigrated to Canada at the turn of the century.

Erving Goffman had an older sibling, Frances Bay, who became an actress.

From 1937 Erving Goffman attended St John's Technical High School in Winnipeg, where his family had moved that year.

Erving Goffman interrupted his studies and moved to Ottawa to work in the film industry for the National Film Board of Canada, established by John Grierson.

In 1952 Erving Goffman married Angelica Schuyler Choate ; in 1953, their son Thomas was born.

Outside his academic career, Erving Goffman was known for his interest, and relative success, in the stock market and gambling.

In 1982 Erving Goffman died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 19 November, of stomach cancer.

The research Erving Goffman did on Unst inspired him to write his first major work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

In 1958 Erving Goffman became a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, first as a visiting professor, then from 1962 as a full professor.

In 1970 Erving Goffman became a cofounder of the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization and coauthored its Platform Statement.

In 1979, Erving Goffman received the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship, from the Section on Social Psychology of the American Sociological Association.

Posthumously, in 1983, Erving Goffman received the Mead Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning have said that Erving Goffman never engaged in serious dialogue with other theorists, but his work has influenced and been discussed by numerous contemporary sociologists, including Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu.

Erving Goffman's ideas are "difficult to reduce to a number of key themes"; his work can be broadly described as developing "a comparative, qualitative sociology that aimed to produce generalizations about human behavior".

Erving Goffman made substantial advances in the study of face-to-face interaction, elaborated the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and developed numerous concepts that have had a massive influence, particularly in the field of the micro-sociology of everyday life.

Erving Goffman contributed to the sociological concept of framing, to game theory, and to the study of interactions and linguistics.

From a methodological perspective, Erving Goffman often employed qualitative approaches, specifically ethnography, most famously in his study of social aspects of mental illness, in particular the functioning of total institutions.

Erving Goffman's influence extended far beyond sociology: for example, his work provided the assumptions of much current research in language and social interaction within the discipline of communication.

Erving Goffman defined "impression management" as a person's attempts to present an acceptable image to those around them, verbally or nonverbally.

Erving Goffman broke from George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in that while he did not reject the way people perceive themselves, he was more interested in the actual physical proximity or the "interaction order" that molds the self.

In other words, Erving Goffman believed that impression management can be achieved only if the audience is in sync with a person's self-perception.

Erving Goffman's style has been influential in academia, and is credited with popularizing a less formal style in academic publications.

Erving Goffman's students included Carol Brooks Gardner, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie Goodwin, John Lofland, Gary Marx, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, David Sudnow and Eviatar Zerubavel.

Nonetheless, Fine and Manning note that Erving Goffman is "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".

Erving Goffman's master's thesis was a survey of audience responses to a radio soap opera, Big Sister.

Erving Goffman had developed the book's core ideas from his doctoral dissertation.

Erving Goffman describes the theatrical performances that occur in face-to-face interactions.

Erving Goffman holds that when someone comes in contact with another person, he attempts to control or guide the impression the other person will form of him, by altering his own setting, appearance and manner.

Erving Goffman believes that participants in social interactions engage in certain practices to avoid embarrassing themselves or others.

Erving Goffman saw a connection between the kinds of "acts" that people put on in their daily lives and theatrical performances.

Erving Goffman is sometimes credited with having coined the term "total institution", though Fine and Manning note that he had heard it in lectures by Everett Hughes in reference to any institution in which people are treated alike and in which behavior is regulated.

Regardless of whether Erving Goffman coined the term, he popularized it with his 1961 book Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.

Erving Goffman is mainly concerned with the details of psychiatric hospitalization and the nature and effects of the process he calls "institutionalization".

In Behavior in Public Places, Erving Goffman again focuses on everyday public interactions.

Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior is a collection of six essays.

Erving Goffman believes that face "as a sociological construct of interaction is neither inherent in nor a permanent aspect of the person".

Erving Goffman credited Gregory Bateson for creating the idea of framing and psychological frames.

Erving Goffman saw this book as his magnum opus, but it was not as popular as his earlier works.

In Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman provides a platform for understanding and interpreting the interaction between individuals engaging speech communication.

Erving Goffman argues that they are more errors in verbal framing than anything else.

Erving Goffman explains that the way a conversation is keyed is critical to understanding the intent behind many utterances in everyday speech.

Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of conversation being a stage play.

Erving Goffman noted that feminist scholars like Jean Kilbourne "[built] their highly persuasive and widely circulated findings on the nature of gender in advertising on Goffman's original categories".

Specifically, Erving Goffman discusses "self-talk" and its role in social situations.

Lastly, in "Radio Talk", Erving Goffman describes the types and forms of talk used in radio programming and the effect they have on listeners.