Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman ( born June 11, 1922 in Mannville, Canada, † November 19, 1982 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was an American sociologist.

• 4.1 Darstellungsakt 4.1.1 Impression management 4.1.1.1 failures
• 4.1.1.2 expression types
• 4.1.1.3 front stage / back stage

• 5.1 Primary framework
• 5.2 Modulation and deception 5.2.1 Keying - "Modulation"
• 5.2.2 deception

Life

Erving Goffman was born on June 11, 1922 in Manville / Alberta in Canada, the son of originating from the Ukraine Jewish immigrants Max and Anne Goffman. He lived much of his childhood in Dauphin ( Manitoba ).

Goffman first began studying chemistry at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (Canada), to finally come across a job at the National Film Board in Ottawa for social science. He studied sociology at the University of Toronto and at the University of Chicago, he still remained a member until 1951. Finally, he spent 1949-1951 at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, during which to conduct field research in the Shetland Islands. In Chicago Goffman 1953 Anselm Strauss wrote under his dissertation entitled Communication conduct in Iceland to community. The results were later in his most famous work, The Presentation of Self in Every -day Life ( German: We all play theater) a. After a few years in Bethesda, Maryland, and in Washington, DC moved Goffman 1957 by The University of California Berkeley, where he received a full professorship in 1958. There he worked with Herbert Blumer and advanced to a " cult figure ". One last time, moved Goffman 1968 to the East Coast to take up the post of Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Goffman was elected in 1981 as President of the American Sociological Association, but died before its planned inaugural lecture at the consequences of cancer.

From 1952 to 1964 he was married to Angelica Schuyler Choate psychologist, with whom he had a son, Thomas Edward. In 1981 he married the linguist Gillian Sankoff, with whom he had a daughter Alice. The character actress Frances Bay (1919-2011) was his sister.

Work

His work dealt with anthropological, social psychological and psychiatric problems of the basic mechanisms of social, especially socially deviant behavior. Studies on behavioral patterns, interaction rituals, role distance as well as personal self-presentation in everyday life have influenced recent sociological approaches. Central is in Goffman the question of how the individual can maintain its structurally vulnerable autonomy.

One of his most famous works, asylums (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), treats Total institutions and thus triggered the lasting until today aim determining the de-institutionalization of social institutions such as state hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and children's homes from.

Interaction

Goffman defines interaction as " reciprocal action influence that individuals have on one another when they are each other's presence. " So is meant first face-to -face situation. Niklas Luhmann takes this concept and differs from it interaction- free communication (eg writing, audio - Visual transfers).

The concept of "interactivity" as it is used today in terms of programs and interfaces is to distinguish thereof. Because an interaction between man and machine is no interaction by Goffman and Luhmann.

Non- centered interaction

In the case of non- centered interaction of at least two actors are co-present and take each other also true. Due to the alignment of their own behavior takes place because everyone knows that he is perceived.

For example, four people waiting for a bus at a bus stop.

Centered Interaction

In the case of the centered interaction, the actors act not only related to each other, but with each other. They cooperate by being directed for a specific period in " visual and cognitive attention " to one another and together on one thing or activity. In the centered interaction not only for the other characters to be produced, but it also appears that this is happening and the other addressee.

Examples: have a conversation with each other, play a game together, dance together.

Basic assumption

So after Goffman trying to mediate interactions in a certain picture of yourself, because you know that you are being observed. As he continues this thought, he comes to the conclusion that all people generally always play theater and create a facade, Goffman says " a standardized repertoire of expression with stage and props. ": "If an actor takes over an established social role (eg. waiter ), he will find that there is already a certain facade for this role. "

The theater is therefore used as a model for the social world.

Nevertheless, Goffman makes important differences between the theater and the everyday world:

• The level of reality of the theater is fictional
• In the theater usually act at least two actors who embody their roles for each other; as well as the audience. These three positions are reduced in everyday life on two positions: a pure audience does not exist, since every viewer always potentially embodies a role.
• The faith of the performer is different. The actors themselves "believe" in the rule to their roles. It corresponds to (...) ( the ) general use (s) opinion that individuals play its role for the other and his conception staging just for them. For our analysis of such representations will be useful to start from the opposite question, and investigate the extent to which the individual himself believes in the semblance of reality, one sought to arouse in its environment. ( We all play theater, Munich 1959, pp. 19)

Darstellungsakt

• Stage
• Actor, which operates within the context of a particular role specification ( eg student, teacher, geek, class clown, ...)
• Audience

In the real world a constant alternation between performer and audience is possible. One can as a " spectator " at any time " dragged " into the action.

Example: The situation in a typical lecture illustrates this: Apparently the professor of the performer and the students form the audience. In fact, the performers are students but in the role of (individually distinct ) students, which emerges only apparent if now, for example, reports a student and an intermediate question arises.

Impression management

"Impression Management (IM) is the goal -directed conscious or unconscious attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling marketing information in social interaction. "

Impression management is therefore the attempt of control over your own appearance. These include the use of special characters with appropriate connotations, with the help of the knowledge is controlled by one's own person ( regula ting and controlling information). This includes language, facial expressions, gestures, but also interaction- free communication.

Failures

Mistakes are here, however, possible, eg flushing, stammering, " Freudian mistake." These can be threats to the impression management, because you communicate through it something that you really did not want to communicate.

Expression types

Expression you are yourself: word symbols and their substitutes, which are used to convey the information that is generally associated with these symbols. Expression you radiate: expressions that are perceived by the other as a revealing for the actor, as far as they can assume that they are not made ​​for the sake of information.

Even in fictional contents such an interpretation is possible and is partly deliberately provoked, such as detective stories, in which the viewers themselves to be puzzled and only by " red herrings " is performed on the wrong suspects.

Front stage / back stage

Example: a waiter in the restaurant.

• Front stage: the dining room
• Backstage: kitchen

Policy.

• Front Stage: in cameras visible events: stage of the congress, the image in the Studio
• Backstage: behind the camera: in the bodies in unofficial talks in the dressing room of the television studio

By looking at the back of the stage is visible, how and by what means the production takes place.

Self / Self

Under the Self / self Goffman understands the result of the IM. The self is thus a product write-up. One is that, as what others perceive you. So it is nothing more than " a dramatic effect, resulting from an illustrated scene unfolds " (cf. Khazaleh ).

Frame analysis

Subframe Goffman understands learned through socialization experience schemes whose use is unconscious and can help us perceive situations meaningfully. This experience schemas or frames are definitions of situations and therefore important for proper recognition of situations. Man tries to classify each situation in its existing experience schemes / frame. Thus, the frame analysis is " the here and now -off player on that ( is ) the question, What is going on here ' is? " ( Willems 1997: 35). Without matching or learned context, the situation is not meaningfully understandable.

The use of this framework is done unconsciously, to irritations done (example: In the movie The Truman Show, Truman Burbank, the protagonist learns by a falling spotlight that he is not in real life, but in a TV show ).

• Situations are classified into experience schemes, perceived in a certain frame and get a sense in this context.
• Situations are meaningfully only in the context of their own stock of knowledge.

" And we said, the framing 'm doing for the people sense. ' "

Primary framework

• Are general interpretation schemes for the definition of the situation.
• Be experienced as originally and mostly not applied consciously.
• Allow an immediate recognition and identification of situations and events of all kinds
• Ensure the notion of normality.
• Ensure the assumption that everything that is going on in some way in the " cosmology ", ie can be sorted into the social stock of knowledge and the institutional framework assignment.

Modulation and deception

Keying - "Modulation"

The German translator has Goffman terms " upkeying " and " downkeying " somewhat misleading with their musical significance of the " modulation " translated ( "up, down modulate "). It is recommended that generally understandable terms such disillusionment in German - to use disillusionment or to rely on the terminology of narrative theory ( cf. diegesis ).

The keying Goffman defined as:

" Designation for the use of a, system [s ] of conventions, whereby a certain activity, which is useful already in the context of a primary framework, is transformed into something that is modeled on that activity, but is seen by stakeholders as something completely different ' "

Under keying, as it were in the interplay between jest and earnest, Goffman sees the transformation of primary frame, so a modified Außenrahmung, although the core of the situation remains the same. A keying may be accomplished by many things: Acting, Rehearsal alarm, irony, joke communications, satire etc. Keying is risky insofar as is always the possibility that it is not recognized.

Example 1: Alfred Tetzlaff ( One heart and one soul), a role that was created as a permanent satirical complainers, whiners and family tyrant, was taken by many not as a satire, but at face value. The keying was therefore not recognized.

Example 2: dispute between a couple:

• Dispute between a couple on stage
• Movie scene with dispute between a married couple on stage
• Quote of the movie clip in media studies seminar

Nowadays in some formats are alternate frame standard. With the game of the framework, media effects can be achieved, the one-dimensional can not be realized. Also in the field of feature film such mixing are possible, such as the film JFK - Tatort Dallas points. Here each black-and- white photographs and colored documents material are connected to corresponding fictional images and so considerably blurred boundaries in a very suggestive manner. The frames should be made ​​harder to see. Examples: docu-soap, docudrama

Deception

" ... The conscious effort of one or more people, the actions to steer so that one or more other be brought to a false idea of what is going on. "

Examples:

• Fire alarm test without inaugurate the parties previously
• The shipment Understand fun?
• Fraudster who disguises himself as a doctor and outputs

However, it Goffman differentiates between the well-intentioned deception and malicious deception:

• Well-intentioned deception: An explanation would not affect the relationship of the parties.
• Malicious deception: A discovery may lead to far-reaching, and possibly legal consequences.

He points out that there are contexts or situations or places that promote characteristic deception, such as therapist practices or relationships.

Brackets ...

• ... Used for marking and demarcation of social processes from the environment surrounding them,
• Events ... can limit both temporally and spatially,
• Mark ... the transitions of the different frames,
• Modulation signals ... that indicate the parties to frame transformations.

Especially the last point deserves emphasis. Brackets are used to indicate modulation. This may be to: a laugh, a church, ritual acts in movies for the title music and theme or title sequence, a logo and act like it.

Works (selection)

• German: asylums. About the social situation of psychiatric patients and other inmates. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973

• German: stigma. About techniques of coping with damaged identity, translated by Frigga Haug, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-518-27740-5