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This paper draws upon participant observation data conducted before and after all 10 qualifying matches for the 2016 UEFA European Football Championship to explore the dynamics underpinning the Northern Irish Green and White Army (GAWA) football carnival. Supplemented by interviews with Northern Ireland fans themselves and informed by the dramaturgical perspectives of Erving Goffman, the paper contends that the anti-sectarian 'norms' of GAWA football fandom are dominant in public spaces before matches when the GAWA 'performance team' are visible to one another and their audience within a geographically circumscribed space. In a post-match evening context however, various 'cliques' of supporters enact their own social rules within a 'back-stage' environment of more relaxed peer-to-peer surveillance. These at times transgress the established norms of GAWA fan behaviour. The paper acknowledges that inappropriate supporter behaviour, even within small groups, can damage the wider image of football teams and their supporters in 'impression management' terms. But rather than imposing top-down 'solutions' which are often devised with limited input from supporters, we suggest that football governing bodies, associations and clubs should look to work in partnership with supporters to identify creative ways in which supporters can be resourced to proactively become 'norm entrepreneurs' and challenge inappropriate behaviour from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business ethics (BE) professors play a crucial role in sensitizing business students toward their future ethical responsibilities. Yet, there are few papers exploring the ethical challenges these professors themselves face while teaching BE. In this qualitative paper, we rely on the lenses of ethical sensemaking and dramaturgical performance, and draw from 29 semi-structured interview conducted with BE professors from various countries and field notes from 17 h of observation of BE classes. We identify four kinds of rationalities that professors rely on for making sense of in-class ethical challenges, eventually leading them to engage in one of four corresponding types of performances. By juxtaposing high and low scores of two underlying dimensions (degree of expressivity and degree of imposition), we offer a framework of four emerging performances. Additionally, we show that professors can shift from one performance to another during the course of their interactions. We contribute to performance literature by demonstrating the plurality of performances and explaining their emergence. We also contribute to sensemaking literature by offering support to its recent turn from an episodic (crises or disruption-based) to a relational, interactional, and present-oriented understanding. Since professors' performances have an impact not only on their own teaching experiences but also on students' learning experiences, undermining these would result in compromising the efforts that business schools have been making toward sensitizing future managers to their ethical responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes Instagram in the context of metamodern cultural logic, focusing on the study of 1) the structural and (non-)class characteristics of the Instagram community using the theory of capital by Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Putnam, and Michael Woolcock as well as the concepts of master and small narratives; 2) the Spectacle versus Authenticity practices of Instagrammers using the performance concepts by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Erving Goffman; 3) heterochronicity as a new temporality on Instagram in the metamodern condition. I examine the oscillation between the modern features of Instagram, orienting Instagrammers towards the creation of a like-minded community with hierarchical divisions into status groups, and its postmodern features as a fragmented field where actors play their performances that can be perceived ironically. It is emphasized that on Instagram “small narratives” are not imposed from the outside but are involuntarily created by Instagrammers themselves through sharing, liking, and commenting practices. The content of the social (bonding, bridging, and linking), cultural (objectified, incorporated, and certified), symbolic, and economic capital of Instagrammers has been revealed. The paper concludes that Instagram visual practices in metamodern condition oscillate between performances played out by celebrities and authentic self-presentations in which Instagrammers reveal their sincere selves. It demonstrates that Instagram’s heterochronicity is manifested in the simultaneous co-presence of different modes of time in Instagram narratives and the simultaneous appearance of visual posts over different years, which allows to trace the visual self-narration of an Instagram user over time. The heterochronicity of Instagram is its metamodern feature that makes different temporal moments to co-present each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of understanding polysemous words that differ in meaning has dominated discourse in communication studies in recent years. It has not only led to studies on problems of representation between homonymy and polysemy and their linkages in memory, but also involves the various ways that any message can be decoded for understanding. The paper is anchored on two theoretical underpinnings: the framing theory developed by Erving Goffman which explains the use of cognitive skills to make meaning out of individuals' environmental stimuli in daily life; and the relevance theory, which owes its origin to Paul Grice and posits that meaning is first a psychological phenomenon before becoming a linguistic one. The paper examines the concepts of communication production, circulation, use, consumption, distribution, and reproduction, which represent methods by which messages are produced and disseminated; as well as the preferred, the oppositional, and the negotiated forms, which are the major ways that messages are decoded. It also explains how cultural texts or codes, which are essentially systems of meaning whose rules and conventions are shared by members of a culture, lay the foundation for the interpretation of media texts and how 'readers' of media texts can combine their experiences of given media programmes to further communicate such texts to others, a process that is akin to the multi-step flow process of communication by opinion leaders in their extension of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman has a reputation as an intellectual maverick who did not fit neatly into any disciplinary mold. His failure to adhere to professional conventions and occasionally off-putting demeanor are mentioned as an aside that has little to do with his oversize influence on the science of society. This paper advances a thesis that Goffman's status as the most cited American sociologist and widespread influence across social science is related to his principled refusal to fit his scholarship into prevailing scholarly canons. The argument is made that Goffman shared with his mentor, Everett Hughes, misgivings about the narrow professional focus in contemporary sociology, that his cross-disciplinary approach advanced social inquiry beyond its traditional confines, and that his colloquial style and penchant for long essays helped disseminate his ideas. The discussion starts with an overview of Goffman's professional career, after which it moves to the reception of his ideas by fellow sociologists and the impact of his work on neighboring disciplines. The study draws on the interviews, correspondence, and other documents assembled in the Erving Goffman Archives, as well as on several social science citation indexes and datasets illuminating Goffman's stature in various fields of scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends academic debates occurring in the discursive intersections between childhood studies and tourist studies. Drawing on theoretical concepts devised by Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman, it employs a critical discourse analysis that focuses on the representation of tourists in selected travel-themed episodes of three popular children's television series. This study investigates how travel experiences and practices of touristic consumption are discursively constructed and interrogates how this tourist discourse is implicated in relationships performed by children and adults or authority figures in these narratives. The findings imply that children's travel-themed television narratives both challenge and reinforce cultural assumptions about tourist behaviour. This paper highlights how literary devices such as carnivalesque humour and anthropomorphism are employed to convey cultural messages and touristic themes. It also demonstrates that critical discourse analysis is an effective framework for explaining and understanding the various social interactions, roles, and relationships portrayed in these narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and theorises sociability–'the play-form of association'–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a comment by Michael Clauss, Germany's ambassador to the European Union. Asked about virtual diplomacy, Clauss said that Zoom diplomacy is '20% as effective' as the in-person kind. Conceptually, I use contemporary political geography and international relations as well as two thinkers of earlier decades–sociologists Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman–to theorise sociability. Methodologically, I advocate a more playful approach to sources in our study of professional practice. My objective is to prompt further study of sociability in bureaucratic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-presence, proximity, and moving with other people, have long been recognised as important factors in our decision-making and performances of everyday wayfinding. Such arguments have roots in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose concept of the "mobile with" has been widely used to articulate the fluid conglomerations of bodies who come to move together. This paper pushes Goffman's idea of the "mobile with" into the digital age, opening our field of view to an expanded understanding of "co-mobility". Drawing on the autoethnographic accounts of one of our authors, we illustrate that with the advent of new technologies, bodies are constantly and simultaneously connected to near and distant others, and known and unknown travel companions. These complex techno-communities take form in two key ways: via the sensory and haptic forms of communication required in using technological devices, and the virtual presence afforded by the ability to enact these communications across time and space. Using affect as a lens of analysis, this paper illustrates that sharing co-mobile experiences with near and distant others evokes a particular style of presencing. Importantly, the various affects of presence are called into focus in intense moments, with implications for how people perform their mobilities in the moment, and the lingering emotions they carry in contemplating future mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents pieces of evidence of the use of Politeness Strategies and Face threateningActs in dialogues between characters in two drama texts: Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian author (text A) and Othello by William Shakespeare, an English author (text B). This research analyses the relationship between Pilkings, Amusa and Joseph in Death and the King’s Horseman and the relationship between Othello and Iago in Othello. The analysis utilisesthe politeness theory by Brown and Levinson (1978 and 1987) which revolves around the concept of face by Erving Goffman(1967). The thrust of thistheory is to minimise conflict and foster harmony in social interaction. In order to answer the following questions, the data werepurposively selected and qualitative research design is utilized: Do the speeches in the texts satisfy the principle of politeness? What kind of meaning interpretation is depicted in these drama texts? How has speech been used to show the kind of relationship that exists between these characters? It was discovered that while Amusa is utilising negative strategy, Pilkings always makesuse of negative face-threatening actsto avoid his subordinates losing their fear and respect for him; he usespositive face strategy when he dearly needshis subordinates to give him the response he needs. In Othello, the positive face strategy is deployed to enhance an ideal and harmonious master-servant relationship. This paper concludes that the use of politeness strategies is contextualised by the use of power relations between speaker and listener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The making of cosmopolitan cities necessitates competence to engage and live with difference and diversity. More often than not, diversity is treated as a challenge to social integration especially in urban areas with a short history of and less exposure to diversification. However, such overemphasis on diversity as a challenge overlooks a more nuanced approach to urban diversity that is lived and experienced by migrants and the local population. This paper explores 'diversity on the ground' transpiring in 'mundane' encounters between Filipino migrants and South Koreans in Seoul. I analyze how 'taken-for-granted' migrant-local encounters and the social processes surrounding these intercultural interactions are crucial in facilitating or impeding civility and mutual recognition that are crucial in the cosmopolitanization of a global city. Following Erving Goffman's theory of social interaction, I interrogate migrants' and local citizens' behavior towards each other in public spaces following a social script of 'getting along' despite the (in)visibility of differences and otherness. Based on interviews with migrants and Koreans and spatial ethnography of Catholic migrant spaces, I identify two types of encounters: purposeful encounters between migrants and Korean (non)Catholics in given contexts of interactions performing specific interaction rituals, and accidental encounters between Korean public and Filipino migrants when the latter perform both mundane activities and 'strange' sociocultural and religious activities in the sacred and public spaces. This paper concludes with some thoughts into how intercultural encounters within religious spaces contribute to the shaping of urban diversity and making of a cosmopolitan city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leadership scholars are beginning to understand leadership as a distributed phenomenon, produced in interaction and emerging in social situations. Although this perspective has contributed to understanding leadership processes in more detail, it has also been noted that its proponents have largely neglected power and asymmetrical hierarchical relations. In this paper, I address these issues by drawing on Erving Goffman's notion of frame analysis. Through detailed analysis of the interactions in a core-values session, I show how leadership processes that appear to be distributed and emergent from the participants' framework appear orchestrated when understood from the manager's framework. The analysis reveals how power asymmetries operate in the framing of the situation, and how the experience of leadership differs among participants. Talk, text, tools, and movements in time and space all contribute to establish frameworks, and differences in access to these modalities show power asymmetries. The paper highlights how the experience of leadership is framed and how power asymmetries constitute this framing. It thereby contributes to multimodal, constructivist theories of distributed leadership by showing how leadership is simultaneously emergent, distributed, and orchestrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Schelling and Erving Goffman: who influenced whom, when and to what effect? Was there "influence" at all or, as Tom Burns suggests, independent discovery and convergence? These are the questions that this paper is meant to answer. Using available archival material and historical and textual analysis, the paper takes a fresh look at Goffman's interest in and contribution to game theory. It charts the important first meeting in the late 1950s, their subsequent dialogue through publications, and the critical 1964 conference on "Strategic Interaction and Conflict," where Goffman encountered an assembly of defense and nuclear strategists associated with the RAND Corporation. These include Daniel Ellsberg, who was a sharp critic of Goffman's conference presentation, Albert Wohlstetter and, of course, Tom Schelling. During the heated discussion that accompanied Goffman's presentation, the session chairman gave Goffman the sobriquet sorcerer's "apprentice." Ever the ally, Schelling said that he was sympathetic to Goffman's "style of [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Call centers have been critiqued in academia and the media for widespread standardization. This paper argues that although this critique of working conditions is well-intended, it has led to unwanted stigmatization of not just call center work but also of call center agents. Much has been published on call centers, but the stigma this work entails and the effect this has on agents on and off the phone has been overlooked. This paper applies Goffman's notion of stigma to data collected through long-term ethnography and interviews with over seventy call center agents in a London call center. I show how agents experience, manage, and resist stigma. The analysis reveals that agents attempt to hide where they work by adopting different accents and avoiding specific lexis associated with call center language. I conclude by suggesting potential avenues for reducing the stigma of working in a call center, e.g. shifting the dominant discussion in academia beyond debates surrounding standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent sociological conceptualizations of competition emphasize its discursive or institutional aspects, such as rankings. Although macro- and meso-sociological takes on competition are more or less well established, micro-sociological approaches are less so. What does it mean to be in competition from the perspective of everyday social relationships and interactions? A possible answer is provided by the concept of rivalry. In this paper, I examine the evolution of the concept of rivalry and its development in the sociological tradition in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially in the work of Georg Simmel, Leopold von Wiese, Karl Mannheim, but also, later, Erving Goffman. I argue that a micro-sociological focus on rivalrous social relationships and interactions is able to address at least some of the issues concerning a micro-sociology of competition. Grounded in an examination of this tradition, I discuss how rivalry relates to sociological notions such as social knowledge, action, worth, and evaluation. I distinguish two intersecting logics of competition, namely, the logic of action and the logic of observation. I argue that a typology of rivalries cutting across various domains of social life can be worked out according to this intersection. A micro-sociology of rivalries can make a genuine contribution to the sociological investigation of competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to 'geographies of education' (Holloway, S., and H. Jöns. 2012. "Geographies of Education and Learning." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (4): 482–488), as it presents the typical school careers of students stigmatized in educational institutions because of their disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Drawing on qualitative research with male residents of one disadvantaged neighbourhood in Łódź (Poland), I identify their typical careers as 'doomed-to-fail school careers'. The paper has three aims. First, it highlights the significance of stigma-based spatially embedded school practices on the educational failure and low-paid employment of students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Second, it uncovers forms of school control over stigmatized students and the students' resistance to these. Finally, I argue that Erving Goffman's theory of stigma in human geography (Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma. Notes on Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall) offers a unique language to describe and explain the spatially embedded educational experiences of marginalized students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a talk in 2013, Karin Knorr Cetina referred to 'the interaction order of algorithms', a phrase that implicitly invokes Erving Goffman's 'interaction order'. This paper explores the application of the latter notion to the interaction of automated-trading algorithms, viewing algorithms as material entities (programs running on physical machines) and conceiving of the interaction order of algorithms as the ensemble of their effects on each other. The paper identifies the main way in which trading algorithms interact (via electronic 'order books', which algorithms both 'observe' and populate) and focuses on two particularly Goffmanesque aspects of algorithmic interaction: queuing and 'spoofing', or deliberate deception. Following Goffman's injunction not to ignore the influence on interaction of matters external to it, the paper examines some prominent such matters. Empirically, the paper draws on documentary analysis and 338 interviews conducted by the author with high-frequency traders and others involved in automated trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's interest in spies and espionage is widely recognized in commentary on his work. Where did this interest come from? While the context of Cold War America provided the broad cultural horizon of this work, deeper roots may be found. Goffman's contact with two University of Chicago professors, Edward A. Shils and Douglas Waples, both of whom served in U.S. intelligence organizations during World War II, also shaped Goffman's interest in the subject. This paper explores these relationships and their connection to Goffman's writings on spies, secrecy, and information control in postwar America. Goffman's view of spies and espionage as analogues to American postwar lives is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining Mikhail Bakhtin's (1990) theoretical position on Architectonics and Erving Goffman's (1979) writings on visual content analysis, the aim of this paper is to explore how female athletes are caught in a complex matrix of power, post – feminist neoliberalism, and self – presentation. The visual images they choose to portray are, therefore, perfect for determining how this cohort of women negotiates social discourses around identity and femininity. Appropriating the Bakhtinian notion of architectonic unity, not only provides an alternative theoretical lens for enquiries concerning the body, identity, and selfhood, but also initiates some thought provoking questions around neoliberal feminism and 'new femininity.' This paper advances on previous research by exemplifying how Serena Williams (considered the greatest female tennis player of all time) combines both her femininity and strong physicality to self – shape a myth – like persona, setting her apart from traditional stereotypes of femininity and 'femaleness.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Not much has been written about Erving Goffman's conception of "deviance". The little that exists often mistakenly reduces it either to what I refer to in this paper as "Stigma and Mental Illness", or diminishes its novelty by rendering it a variant of "interactionist" view of deviance. The argument of this paper is that he had a broader and novel conception of deviance. In fact, he distinguished between six interrelated types of deviance: (1) Deviance related to presentation of "self" in social interactions; (2) Deviance as lack of self-control and violation of interactional scripts; (3) Deviation from assigned social roles in the system of social stratification; (4) Social deviance, i.e., willful and unabashed violation of social order; (5) Deviation from "identity values"; (6) Deviation due to a search for excitement [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper aims to understand how young people manage the dramaturgical dilemmas related to drinking alcohol and performing multiple identities.Design/methodology/approach Drawing on qualitative data collected with 16-18-year olds, the authors adopt Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective to examine youth alcohol consumption in relation to multiple identities.Findings Young people continuously and skilfully juggle multiple identities across multiple contexts, where identities overflow and audiences and interactions overlap. Techniques of audience segregation, mystification and misrepresentation and justification are used to perform and manage multiple identities in a risky health behaviour context.Research limitations/implications The approach may facilitate some over- and under-claiming. Future studies could observe young people’s performances of self across multiple contexts, paying particular attention to how alcohol features in these performances.Practical implications Social marketing campaigns should demonstrate an understanding of how alcohol relates to the contexts of youth lives beyond the “night out” and engage more directly with young peoples’ navigation between different identities, contexts and audiences. Campaigns could tap into the secretive nature of youth alcohol consumption and discourage youth from prioritising audience segregation and mystification above their own safety.Originality/value Extant work has argued that consumers find multiplicity unmanageable or manage multiple identities through internal dialogue. Instead, this paper demonstrates how young people manage multiple identities through interaction and performance. This study challenges the neat compartmentalisation of identities identified in prior literature and Goffman’s clear-cut division of performances into front and back stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'stigma' was introduced into the social sciences by sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic monograph "Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity" (1963). Goffman identified various forms of stigmata, both visible and invisible ("hidden"), examined the process of stigmatization in everyday social interactions, and analyzed the consequences of stigmatization on the identity of individuals. Stigmatization describes the process through which actual or potential negative characteristics are ascribed to a person and thus this person is assigned to certain social groups. At the same time, stigmatization involves the association to the person concerned of the prejudices and stereotypes connected to the assigned devaluating characteristic, as well as an underlying, context-dependent process of differentiation, control and discrimination. Stigmatized individuals and groups experience multiple forms of discrimination and are going through different crises. This paper addresses the stigmatization process, the varied types of stigmata, and the coping strategies most commonly used by those who are stigmatized. The paper also highlights the most important approaches and types of intervention that can be used to combat stigmatization and promote destigmatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discretion and irreverence are two generally recurrent features when one refers to Erving Goffman. Even if their juxtaposition seems unlikely, both characteristics are strictly connected: they reveal the distinguishing trait of Goffman's sociological gaze. The aim of this paper is to consider discretion and irreverence not only as hallmarks of the public presentation of Goffman's self, but as methodological choices in developing his unique ethnographic writing style. Comparing Goffman's way of writing to classical ethnographic writings, one will realize that they are very different: Goffman's ethnographies are definitely more discreet, but his discretion actually underlies an irreverent, critical and desecrating eye. Staying in the shadows and 'watching how people snore', Goffman leads an attack both on the taken for granted assumptions of traditional ethnography, and on hierarchies and legitimate boundaries between social worlds. He violates the boundaries between highbrow culture and lowbrow culture, between sociology and literature; but what is most disquieting, is his violation of the borderline that divides reality from fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The stigmatisation of COVID-19 patients or suspected cases is a matter of grave concern across the world, including India. Today, COVID-19 patients or suspected cases are being stigmatised or labelled as "corona carrier" and "corona spreader" because of which they are facing social rejection, mental torture, abusive behaviour and violence in the society. The objectives of the present study are to examine the nature of stigma construction in Indian society during COVID-19 pandemic and to explore its outcome on the well-being of corona-affected people. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses content analysis method to explain the COVID-19 stigma. The data have been collected from various Indian newspapers and magazines. The researchers have analysed the content of the news items related to social stigma which were collected from March to September 2020. Findings: The study finds that COVID-19 patients or suspected cases are insulted and discriminated rudely by their family members and neighbours, and in many cases, they are not allowed to enter the house or the neighbourhood. The study has also pointed out that many COVID-19 patients or suspected cases have committed suicide as a result of being stigmatisation. Finally, the study explores that this social stigma is spreading due to fake news, lack of awareness and fear of corona infection. Originality/value: This is an original paper which is based on content analysis. The present study focuses on the social stigma in Indian society during COVID-19. Basically, the present study has applied the theory of Erving Goffman which is based on stigma to examine the nature and problem of social stigma during COVID-19. The study has found that there are three types of social stigma during the corona pandemic: self-made stigma, family-made stigma and society-made stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person's private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how new networked technologies, such as facial recognition (FR), challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper highlights two problematic tendencies in the burgeoning literature on organizational stigma. The first tendency is conceptual, where stigma is treated at the organizational level, thereby neglecting social encounters at the micro-level. As a way of remedying this, we enroll the seminal writings of Erving Goffman to situate organizational stigma in the interaction order. The second tendency is empirical, where the inclusion of actors performing stigma management is limited to managerial and organizational actors, thus neglecting many of those faced with managing organizational stigma. We report from an explorative study of ordinary wage laborers in the Swedish arms and pornography industries situated toward the bottom of their organizations and referred to as 'normal deviants'. The paper shows how and why the organizational stigma literature could be more sensitive and inclusive toward whom, how, when, and where organizational stigma is managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by Goffman’s influential essay on ‘The neglected situation’ this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman’s participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and enacted as social occasions. It considers assessment as a shared focus of social activity, located in time and space, involving an assemblage of artefacts and actors. The paper presents ethnographic examples of adult literacy and numeracy assessment in Mongolia. The first part provides ethnographic description of a testing situation. The second part looks in detail at how linguistic interaction influences assessment performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When leaders meet in person, they perform a wide range of interaction rituals. They dress for the occasion, greet each other and shake hands, exchange pleasantries and gifts, arrive at the meeting venue and have themselves seated according to protocol, and so on. What do they make of the performance of such rituals? In this paper, I argue that leaders often take advantage of or outright flout what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls the prevailing 'ceremonial idiom' of an interaction – that is the intersubjective understanding they share on what rituals to perform and how to perform them – to realize a number of political and personal objectives, with larger international consequences. The 'ceremonial idiom' is deliberately transgressed and a counterpart's 'face' threatened – overtly but more often subtly – to achieve what are commonly known as 'one-upmanship' and 'putdowns' in interpersonal contact. Empirically, I demonstrate my argument with over two dozen episodes of face-to-face diplomacy across six categories of interaction rituals: the identity of leaders, gestural, spatial–physical, task-embedded, linguistic, and communication rules. I also outline several directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology—and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences—and, especially, his writings. Anecdotal evidence of his "enigmatic" personality (Lemert, 2003), or "bad-boy outrageousness" (Berger, 1986), works as a derailing tactic, leading to unwarranted appraisals of Goffman's personality—and, more importantly, to the neglect of crucial aspects of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, Simmel's treatment of "the stranger" as a social relationship, and Merton's concept of "moral alchemy", are used here to try to make some sense of the mixture of celebration and neglect still surrounding "Goffman". Historical data was gathered in part from the "Erving Goffman Archives'' (Shalin, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to outline an analytic perspective on the notion of statehood, state authorities' performance in situations of exceptionality, and to present some insights from ethnographic research in the context of migration in contemporary Greece. Following Timothy Mitchell's thesis on the 'effect of state', taking into account Giorgio Agamben's and Michel Foucault's theories regarding the 'state of exception' and 'exceptionalised institutions', as well as Erving Goffman's 'dramaturgical perspective' on the studies of social interactions, it is argued that 1. the ongoing cases of illegal and unsanctioned practices carried out by police and army officers in the Greek migration context should be interpreted, first and foremost, as mere practices of statehood enactment; 2. the 'state of exception' is not merely a useful spatialised device used by state authorities for mobility-control purposes, but rather an essential trait of statehood enactment itself. In order to reconcile the internal ambiguities inherent in the convoluted ensemble of perceived notions about what 'a state' is and how 'a state' does what it is supposed to do, it will be argued that, statehood enactment, by its very definition and constitution, frequently requires recurring to an 'institutionalised state of exception'. From a broader viewpoint, these arguments question some supposedly non-problematic assumptions about the (concrete or abstract) nature of the state, while at the same time proposing an examination of the epistemological status of migranthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain the trajectory and unusual outcome of this courtroom encounter by applying Erving Goffman's approach to interaction. It employs his notions of frame and footing, plus those of face, ritual deference and demeanour when they are useful. This perspective shows that, as well as the socially constituted power asymmetry, the participants create an interactive asymmetry in which the accused, Penelope Soto, although a canonically ratified participant, is sometimes effectively 'de-ratified'. However, as the encounter progresses, Soto and the judge shift their footings back and forth such that into the court-hearing frame, another frame, that of the social encounter, is insinuated. This clash of frames is shown to be a major cause of the trajectory taken by the encounter. The Goffmanian perspective also points up the effect of the use of a video link for this encounter. This application of Goffman's framework functions as a test of some of his concepts and the paper concludes with some comments and suggested elaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses oral history to consider the relative merits of symbolic interactionism in revealing new insights regarding the Irish immigration experience in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a variety of rubrics attributed to Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, I critically examine the nature of identity work performed by Irish men and women when in their new host country. The paper highlights the interface between citizenship and sociocultural identity epitomised by both the use props (corporeal modifications) and the power of sign vehicles, notably Irish accents in shaping the nature of social interactions. The extent to which Goffman neglects sensory driven constructs of identity is highlighted. The way in Irish immigrants negotiated two simultaneous worlds front and back stage in response to the anticipated reaction of the given audience evokes the metaphor of a revolving door of identity fluid and chameleon like in nature. Actions were at times driven the anticipated reactions of others following presentation but then reclaimed elsewhere manifested by front and back stage behaviours. The Irish men and women worked inside and alongside systems of control where their identities were contested, ambiguous, or problematised to create a fluid sense of self (selves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 21 qualitative interviews with gay identifying men (ages 18-23), this paper explores how gay men navigate hyper-masculinity and "mascing" culture online.1 Mascing is a pattern of behavior amongst gay men online where men will exaggerate one's masculine traits and suppressing one's feminine traits. I extend Erving Goffman's dramaturgical framework to analyze how these gay men manage their online (front stage) and offline (back stage) presentations and, furthermore, how these gay men view their own authenticity online. These interviews reveal the overwhelming recognition of mascing culture online, the persistence of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the strategies that gay men use to navigate mascing culture online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broadly defined field of stigma research has made enormous advances since the watershed moment created by the publication of Goffman's (1963) influential essay. Advances have been made in the conceptualization of what stigma is, how stigmatizing circumstances differ one from another and what the origins of stigma are thought to be. Beyond this useful expansion of concepts has been a robust development of methods aimed at operationalizing important stigma dimensions. In this commentary I point out how several of the papers in this special issue further elaborate and deepen the concepts and measures that have developed since Goffman. But this special issue goes further by bringing an intergroup relations orientation to bear in a focused way. Like other major advances such as concepts and theories associated with 'minority stress' and 'structural stigma' the current project portends a new set of lenses for further understanding the origins and consequences of stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. These qualities drew him into the orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he remained always his own man, as much a critics as anything else. From first to last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation. It can be seen in his first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing network of sociolinguistic activity. The paper, The Neglected Situation, was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, and was published the next year in a special number of the American Anthropologist. In this paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it. States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not reducible to partial correlation.

ABSTRACT Often known as cynical, contentious, and exhibiting a complicated approach to objectivity, Erving Goffman could also be generous, civil, insightful, open to feminist ideas, and surprisingly political. A 1977 collective feminist writing project led to my conversation with Goffman in 1980 about his ideas on gender, sexism, and feminism. A summary of that conversation is presented, together with my formal reflections then (1980) and now (2013). While documenting the sociological practice of an earlier era, this paper concludes that feminist sociological theory must move beyond its locations in the past and the present into the liberating knowledge of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is one of the elements that create reality. The following paper aims at showing the role of particular languages in constructing the image of disability. Speaking in a particular way, people portray different items, persons etc. The process of the construction may result in shaping varied attitudes and emerging different labels. The paper is a comparison of words used in the field of disability in two countries: Poland and the United States. The vocabulary comes from two sources: in the case of Poland it is the website niepelnosprawni.pl while in the case of the United States - the resources of Disability History Museum, which are available online. There are two reference points for the analysis. The first one is the Stigma concept by Erving Goffman. It implies stereotyping and labeling. On the other side there is the Other - the idea by Emmanuel Levinas. In turn, the basis of his approach are respect and love. The paper aims at demonstrating in which country the vocabulary used is closer to the Levinas` theory. It is also a try to show where the usage of words may be more challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critique of false privacy, the proposition that privacy's protective remit should extend to information that is entirely false. It argues that there are conceptual as well as doctrinal problems associated with such an action in tort law. First, drawing on the work of the American sociologist, Erving Goffman, the paper challenges the idea that the authentic self can be recognised in law. Second, the paper argues that false privacy sits uneasily with tort law's doctrinal framework. While the paper focuses on English tort law, it pursues its lines of argument in a comparative context, exploring how German and US law give expression to false privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Erving Goffman's work has increasingly made an impact in International Relations. This paper consults Erving Goffman's work and scholarly sensibility for insights into humour. Sociologists have begun to reconsider Goffman for such purposes, and I draw out three contributions from his studies for our special issue theme. First, Goffman's dramaturgical approach proves useful for understanding the performative aspects of humour and how those might be drawn out in both "high politics" and everyday settings of international relations. Second, Goffman's engagement of jokes and embarrassment proves useful for drawing out the power dynamics of humour. The third contribution of Goffman's work is that it can also serve as a model for the vocational possibilities of humour for the social scientist. I conclude with several Goffmanian "venues" where scholars might and indeed do engage in tension-relieving humour, with the hope that those might be reinforced, protected, and enlivened in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police community support officers (PCSOs) in England and Wales have become an integral part of neighbourhood policing since their national roll-out in 2008. The research reported here is based on the first-hand accounts of PCSOs from a four-month ethnographic study in a northern police force. Using Erving Goffman's theoretical framework and concept of performances, this paper argues that PCSOs still face ongoing pressures from inside the organisation to defend their position to police colleagues. PCSOs are still experiencing negative and bullying attitudes toward their existence and document the difficulties they face in being accepted. In response to this, some PCSOs have been known to conceal their status by modifying their uniform and using a current desire for increased visibility to enable presentational strategies in image management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The talaab, or a 'pond', has been an integral part of the Indian life and landscape for centuries. Primarily for collecting rainwater, it acts as a rich venue for multiple activities, the complexity of which defies its simple design elements. While landscape architects are primarily concerned with understanding these design elements, a study limited to the physical design of a talaab will not enable a complete envisioning of its multiple roles. The concept of "frames," put forth by the sociologist Erving Goffman as cultural definitions of reality, is used to address this gap and to examine, through a historical analysis, the change in ownership and management of water in India. Based on linguist Stef Slembrouck's discussion of frames as spatial metaphors, this paper speculates that the talaab landscape acts simultaneously as a space for normative or expected/typical activities and as a situational/ interactional entity. The paper further characterizes the land-water interface of a talaab as a "laminate" hosting normative activities and acting as a situational/interactional space determined by culturally governed temporal and ideological principles. The use of this model to interpret space as a physical and socio-cultural construct allows a better understanding of the possibilities for creating multifunctional landscapes embedded with social and spiritual meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estonian Journal of Archaeology is the property of Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Building upon the work of Thomas Gieryn and Erving Goffman, this paper will explore how the concepts of stigma and boundary work can be usefully applied to history of population science. Having been closely aligned to eugenics in the early 20th century, from the 1930s both demographers and geneticists began to establish a boundary between their own disciplines and eugenic ideology. The eugenics movement responded to this process of stigmatization. Through strategies defined by Goffman as 'disclosure' and 'concealment', stigma was managed, and a limited space for eugenics was retained in science and policy. Yet by the 1960s, a revitalized eugenics movement was bringing leading social and biological scientists together through the study of the genetic demography of characteristics such as intelligence. The success of this programme of 'stigma transformation' resulted from its ability to allow geneticists and demographers to conceive of eugenic improvement in ways that seemed consistent with the ideals of individuality, diversity and liberty. In doing so, it provided them with an alternative, and a challenge, to more radical and controversial programmes to realize an optimal genotype and population. The processes of stigma attribution and management are, however, ongoing, and since the rise of the nature-nurture controversy in the 1970s, the use of eugenics as a 'stigma symbol' has prevailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore what characterizes cyberbullying when it is performed in digital space and in an increasingly boundary blurred working life context. Design/methodology/approach: Cyberbullying is explored through the lens of Erving Goffman's theories on everyday life interaction and social media scholars understanding of social life on the internet today. The empirical material for the study is grounded in eight in-depth interviews with individuals who have been subjected to cyberbullying behavior in their professional life. The interview data were analyzed by means of thematic analysis. Findings: Three key themes were identified: spatial interconnectedness, colliding identities and the role of the audience. The empirical data indicate that in order to understand cyberbullying in working life, it is necessary to consider the specific context that emerges with social network sites and blogs. Moreover, this study shows how social network sites tend to blur boundaries between the private and the professional for the targeted individual. Originality/value: Cyberbullying in working life is a relatively under-researched area. Most existing research on cyberbullying follows the tradition of face-to-face bullying by addressing the phenomenon with quantitative methods. Given the limited potential of this approach to uncover new and unique features, this study makes an important contribution by exploring cyberbullying with a qualitative approach that provides in-depth understanding of the new situations that emerge when bullying is performed online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Civilisations is the property of Institut de Sociologie - ULB and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)