Search

This article presents a paper which examines Erving Goffman's contributions to the field of sociology, and his work on etiquette and front, and his theory of ceremony. Goffman's disinclination to situate himself within a theoretical heritage or tradition frustrates current efforts to establish his intellectual genealogy. He rebuked those who would attempt to lie him down to one tradition or approach, and he rejected the term symbolic interactionism, the intellectual movement with which he is often associated. Some researchers have sought to compensate for these difficulties by examining Goffman's citations, believing that this practice would yield answers to questions of influential figures. Others who were able to ask Goffman himself, have published their revealing interviews. Still others have offered creative reconstructions of the stages of Goffman's intellectual development. Yet, however rich and varied the influences on Goffman may have been, the literature continues to point to the intellectual centrality of Goffman's Chicago years. Etiquette provides one clue to understanding the social adjustments in personal relations reached in any one historical era. In a world of social and personal differences, of mutual and antipathies, etiquette operates as both a principle of social order and an index of the stability of the society in which it exists.

This paper proposes two analytical concepts that can be derived from and added to the theory of action. Using these concepts, a systematic exploration of the relationship between the pattern variables and the generalised media is given. A matrix of sanction situations generates four ideal-types of sanction interaction in which actors' orientations are aligned and twelve with misaligned orientations. A link with the joint action of symbolic interactionism is suggested and the use of a more developed concept of interaction recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Peter M. Hall's response to Rosabeth Moss Kanter's comments toward his article "A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Politics," published in the 1972 issue of "Sociological Inquiry." The author concludes that Kanter misunderstands his perspective by subsuming it under American liberalism. If there is anything that he is not, it is an American liberal, and if there is anything he is criticizing in American sociology, political sociology, and symbolic interaction, it is consensual, pluralistic, and liberal bias. Hall also does not deny the need to see the totality of the society, its interdependencies, feedbacks, and impacts, in short, society as a system. To settle misconceptions, Hall emphasized that his paper had a special focus and set limits as to its goals and coverage. It was not intended to be a complete analysis of politics nor a complete analysis of American politics.