After finding the application of his frame analysis model in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy to be very insightful, and subsequently that most of his books were reasonably priced in the second hand market, I went on a bit of an Erving Goffman shopping spree, and got 11 of his works, which I plan on reading in mostly chronological order, then posting some impressions.
First up is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's an attempt to analyze social interaction through metaphors informed by theater. The main idea is that any personal interaction is a finite, limited exchange of data which is supposed to express much a larger body of information. For example, your twenty minute experience at a clothing store is supposed to inform you that you were served by a professional and got fitting clothes at reasonable prices. Twenty minutes are not enough time for you to really perform research on the person or people helping you, make comparisons with other establishments, or evaluate the quality of what you bought. Instead, you were subjected to 20 minutes of a performance, a presentation, of competence, selection, and purchase, that left you with the impression that this is the information you received. In order to do this, the salesperson, their colleagues, and the entire environment were designed and have practiced to create the performance that gives you this impression, aside from - and possibly instead of - actually learning the competence and providing a good price.
From this starting point, Goffman builds up an elaborate theoretical framework: a team of people works together to manage impressions for an audience in a certain front stage, they have a back stage in which to do work that is necessary for the performance, from which the audience is excluded, and in which team members have conversations which establish that they are a team and united in their oppositional relationship with the audience, although the latter do collaborate sometimes to maintain the performance, especially in front of outsiders to the performance itself. The existence of colleagues - members of other teams who perform similar roles there - and other unusual team and audience members further complicate the model.
I think that frame analysis, which he developed later, streamlined this model, or reconfigured it to not feel as layered and sometimes contradictory as it reads. Nevertheless, even in this early study there are a lot of points that resonate with me. Having been in various situations where I was "performing" in this manner - for example, when working in retail - I can recognize a lot of the elements of his model as lived realities. It's interesting to see the way feeling the need to maintain this performance in front of outsiders might make people who are in other contexts antagonistic collaborate with each other. Also, on a very personal level, I've always struggled with getting into and then maintaining the discretion of staying in the backroom, that is required, beyond technical competence, to be a productive member of a team, and it puts some less than stellar experiences I've had in context.
This relatively short book is very readable. I strongly recommend it if anything here sounded interesting. Aside from more elaboration on these points, and a more thorough presentation of the model, with many examples from field work, other studies, and fiction, he makes frequent references to unpublished research by his University of Chicago colleagues, which might otherwise be hard to gain access to.
