Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology

Philip Manning

Cleveland State University

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) As You Like it Act II Scene VII lines 139-42

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

Almost, at times, the Fool.

T.S. Eliot. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917).

1
1. Introduction

Jaques’s memorable speech in As You Like It anticipated many of the themes that

occupied Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel and a wide range of dramaturgical theorists.

In As You Like It the central characters are thoroughly deceptive – and to makes matters

more complicated some of their sexual identities are unclear. Against this backdrop,

Jaques argued that we must accept the conventional roles we are asked to play. By

contrast, T.S. Eliot presented Prufrock to us as someone who had shed his own self-

deceptions: his self-identity and his social role are finally one and the same: the Fool.

And although Prufrock began by recognizing that there would not be a Shakespearean

starring role for him, his recognition that he might ‘at times’ be the Fool suggests that he

is not even the ambiguous Fool of the theater but just an ordinary fool of the non-theatric

variety.

Sociology does not have its own Shakespeare or Eliot – although few deny that Erving

Goffman was a fine wordsmith. However, sociologists have embraced the concept of

role and to a lesser extent the metaphor of the theater. After the Chicago School moved

away from case studies of criminals and delinquents in the late 1920s, and inspired by

George Herbert Mead’s somewhat quirky use of role to describe broad, community

standards, role as a concept became embedded in sociologists’ understanding of social

structure. In the early 1950s, Talcott Parsons had developed his own role analysis (as had

Robert Merton) that was conventional perhaps in the way prescribed by Jaques in As You

Like It. By the mid 1950s, Erving Goffman had offered his own more existential, more

2
deceptive, alternative version of impression management - one that Jaques had been

eager to disavow.

This unpacking of the theatrical metaphor has taken dramaturgical sociology down three

roads. The first assumes its destination to be a theory of personal identity; the second

more modestly assumes its destination to be a theory of communication; the third a

rational choice explanation of the costs and benefits to performers as they signal their

intentions to others. In my view, Goffman advanced all three positions without clarifying

what he was doing – an omission that was bound to lead to confusion.

Philosophers who have responded to Goffman’s sociology have generally found his

dramaturgy to presuppose an inadequate theory of identity rather than a theory of

communication. Philosophers often think that this theory is worth considering, even if

ultimately they find it lacking. A version of this response to Goffman can be found the

work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Jonathan Glover, Bruce Wilshire, Jurgen Habermas and

others. Alasdair MacIntyre has complained that Goffman ‘liquidated the self into its role-

playing’ and that he made the social world ‘everything’ – leaving us with only a ‘ghostly

“I” and hence almost no selfhood’ (1982:31). For sociologists, this might suggest that

Goffman favored Mead at the expense of Cooley. Jonathan Glover has portrayed

Goffman in similar terms, complaining that Goffman’s tendency to see ‘the things we do

which seem to escape from social roles …[as] refinements to these roles’ (1988:171)

leaves us with ‘no inner story’ (1988:175). This is reminiscent of Richard Sennett’s

insightful observation that Goffman’s descriptions of the social world contain scenes but

3
no plots (1970:36). Bruce Wilshire makes a similar point to Glover when he rejects

Goffman’s distinction between ‘who the self really is and the sense it gives others of who

is behind the “roles” it is playing (1991:279 [1982]).

Jurgen Habermas emphasized that dramaturgical action and strategic action are not the

same. Habermas distinguished presentations of self that contain beliefs from those that

contain desires or feelings. When we think about the beliefs that people express, we often

wonder whether people mean what they say or are simply feigning. However, when

presentations of self reveal desires, we wonder instead about whether people are being

sincere or are inauthentic. Because dramaturgical action presupposes ‘two worlds’ – an

internal and an external – Habermas suggested that there is always the risk that audiences

will be transformed into opponents, to be handled only strategically. However,

dramaturgical action is never identical to strategic action and whenever dramaturgical

action is understood strategically, it must fail. This is because dramaturgical action

requires both purposive-rational action and subjective expressions to be combined – it has

to be more than just a calculated decision (1984:93-4).

I think that it is wise to assume that Goffman did not have a well-worked out

philosophical view of selfhood and personal identity, although he certainly made

comments and asides about the nature of selfhood throughout his work. In a way,

philosophers have successfully blown up a building but it turns out that Goffman rarely

lived there. Goffman’s work is primarily a set of tentative generalizations about aspects

of ordinary social interaction. These tentative generalizations and conceptual schemes

4
are there to facilitate case studies of the social world, not to settle age-old philosophical

disputes. I therefore doubt that Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis is a powerful

contribution to a broader understanding of personal identity. Its strength lies in its

contribution to our understanding of communicative conduct and strategic interaction,

terms that were near and dear to Goffman throughout his career. If we understand

dramaturgical sociology to be about strategic interaction and communication, we can

skate on the thick ice of Goffman’s writing, rather than on the thin ice of his

philosophical asides. Goffman often indicated that this was what he was primarily

interested in and it is the version of dramaturgy that I believe has the most promise. It

also connects Goffman’s most explicitly dramaturgical work – The Presentation of Self

In Everyday Life (hereafter PSEL) (1956, 1959) – to his dissertation, Communication

Conduct in an Island Community (1953). The dissertation is dramaturgical avant la

lettre while PSEL is implicitly a theory of communication. In the end, it is easy to

understand why the two projects are often mistakenly thought to be one and the same (see

Smith 2013:59 for a discussion of this common confusion). Goffman, influenced by

Thomas Schelling, later analyzed social interaction in game theoretic terms, and the

intersection of game theory and dramaturgy is one pathway into the contemporary

signaling theory associated with Diego Gambetta (see Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz

2013:28).

In Goffman’s hands, dramaturgical analysis was, in the language of its time (the 1950s), a

‘conceptual scheme’. For Goffman this conceptual scheme was one of many possible

schemes, each with its own vocabulary. In his day, of course, Talcott Parsons (1949

5
[1937]; 1951a; 1951b) was working hard to develop the conceptual scheme for sociology

as an offshoot of existing economic theory. Goffman’s dramaturgy might therefore have

been doubly challenging for Parsons, as Goffman proposed both a rival sociological

vocabulary and a rival philosophy of social science, in which there can never be a final

victor in the war of conceptual schemes.

From the 1960s onwards, Goffman’s many dramaturgical concepts have found their way

into the language and structure of a vast number of sociological projects, many of which

are only incidentally dramaturgical. The same can be said of Parsons’ work. But

beyond this general appropriation, signaling theory has adopted a clear dramaturgical

approach in its own theory of rational, communicative action. The success of signaling

theory supports the idea that the value of dramaturgical analysis is linked more to our

understanding of communication that to our understanding of identity. Rational choice

has its roots in economic theory and signaling theory is specifically and consciously

linked to micro-economic theory. I want to emphasize that an intellectual history of

dramaturgy has to locate it in the context of sociology’s own attempt to emerge from the

domination of neo-Classical economic theory. The recent successes of signaling theorists

to show the continuing vitality of dramaturgical sociology reassert this traditional link

between sociological and economic theory.

Even though Goffman understood that his dramaturgy was a conceptual scheme that

could not be tested by case studies, he believed that they could vindicate it. That is, case

studies could show that dramaturgical ideas had practical applications. However, the

6
many ways by which actors in their everyday roles signal information to their audiences

can only be shown by intricate description. This will require a shift from Goffman’s

general focus on the vocabulary of impression management to the micro-sociological

concentration on the precise techniques used to signal information. This transition will

often involve what sociologists understand as an ethnomethodological appropriation of a

dramaturgical framework.

A useful – albeit controversial – test case for this transition is Harold Garfinkel’s (1967)

study of Agnes’ efforts to pass in her everyday interactions as an unremarkable woman

despite her upbringing as an unremarkable boy. Influenced by James Coleman’s (1968)

scathing critique of Garfinkel’s methodological mistakes, sociologists often overlook a

telling criticism of this project: Garfinkel failed to describe with any precision they ways

in which Agnes successfully portrayed gender. Coleman emphasized Garfinkel’s

sociological rather than his ethnomethodological failings. From my point of view, the

missing part of Coleman’s critique is the recognition that Garfinkel did not move our

understanding of gendered performances very far beyond Goffman’s earlier

dramaturgical conceptual scheme. In part, Garfinkel failed because he switched out a

dramaturgical metaphor and put in a game metaphor without offering a detailed empirical

description of Agnes’ passing practices. Thus, Garfinkel left the necessary, detailed,

ethnomethodological analysis largely untouched.

2. Intellectual Context

7
Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis was a product of its own time, with its own post World

War II intellectual history. The world of American sociology in the 1950s was heavily

influenced by Talcott Parsons’ grand theoretical ambitions and so perhaps this is the

clearest intellectual context for PSEL. Goffman had already indicated this in the second

chapter of his 1953 dissertation, Communication Conduct in an Island Community,

where he indicated that his understanding of social order and social interaction had been

heavily influenced by Parsons’ The Social System (1951b). Greg Smith has an excellent

summary of the steps by which Goffman incorporated Parsons’ framework into his

dissertation (2006:25-7).

Although Parsons’ early work, culminating in The Structure of Social Action (1949,

[1937]) was framed as a corrective to some of the limitations in neo-Classical economic

theory, The Social System (1951b) gave a prominent place to role analysis. In Parsons’

increasingly equilibrium-centric analysis, roles were constitutive: they consisted of

behavioral expectations that were useful to their social systems. By contrast, for

Goffman, roles were performances that were communicative actions. In the language of

rational choice theory, his dramaturgy is a set of signaling devices. In this sense,

performances claim to authenticate underlying competences and/or memberships. And as

a result, dramaturgy and signaling theory (unlike Parsons’ action theory) are very much

concerned with both trust and deception. Goffman’s immersion in game theory came

later, in large part through his friendship with Thomas Schelling. However, in the 1950s

he was more influenced by existentialism - and Sartre in particular (1959:42; 81-2). This

claim is supported directly by the telling references to Sartre in PSEL and indirectly by

8
our knowledge that Goffman spent most of 1952 living in Paris, then a hotbed for

existential thought (Burns 1992).

One thread running through these different influences and extensions is a concern for

motive. Goffman’s dramaturgy was a way of explaining behavior. Dramaturgy is a form

of communication and signaling: it is therefore goal-directed. As he put it later in Frame

Analysis (1974), we offer both benign and exploitative fabrications for our audiences,

each of which presupposes that planned, strategic, rational action has been carried out

with particular time horizons and audiences in mind.

In the 1950s academics of all persuasions were affected by Sigmund Freud’s accounts of

a person’s inner conflicts. Goffman was no exception to this trend. The title, The

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life resonated more clearly then than now with Freud’s

popular and accessible, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Even before his

ethnographic project at Saint Elizabeth’s hospital, Goffman had been close friends with

Elizabeth Bott, who was to become a prominent psychoanalyst in the object-relations

tradition (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz 2013:7). Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis – and

his sociology as a whole – can be profitably read as a knowledgeable response and a

reasoned alternative to Freud. However, reading PSEL with Freud in mind is likely to

lead to the conclusion (false by my account) that Goffman is primarily a theorist of the

self rather than a theorist of social interaction. To safeguard against this, it is helpful to

think of Goffman’s sociology as an attempt to develop conceptual schemes to be used in

ethnographic studies not in clinical cases.

9
Goffman was personally influenced by his advisors in graduate school, some of whom

were impressed by Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic approach with its ‘perspective by

incongruity’ (P.K. Manning 1980:262; Smith 2006:21). Other advisors, such as Everett

Hughes, emphasized the power of fieldwork legitimized by the earlier German influences

on the first generation of Chicago sociologists. This connected Goffman directly to Georg

Simmel and indirectly to Max Weber. It is also likely to have influenced his neo-

Kantianism that led him to believe that sociology has to develop its own model of

science. It is clear from PSEL that Goffman claimed Georg Simmel as an important

precursor and source of legitimation for his project. Although sociology was perhaps not

the major focus of Simmel’s work, his account (1949) of sociation, his view of the city

as a laboratory and of money as a metaphor for contemporary relationships allowed

Goffman to present his work as a continuation of the work of someone who was highly

respected in the American sociology of the 1950s. In this Simmelian vein, Goffman

described dramaturgical analysis as a framework (presumably just one among many) to

be valued because of (though not validated by) its usefulness to empirical researchers and

their case studies. Although Goffman’s inclination was always to approach

methodological and philosophical ‘sideways’ rather than head-on – his approach implied

the kind of neo-Kantian and ideal-typical approach that we now associate with Max

Weber (see Williams 1988, Manning 1992, Smith 2006).

It is also true that Goffman was influenced by the ordinary language philosophy of

Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle and Grice. Throughout Goffman’s work there is an

10
appreciation for this approach, perhaps most clearly in his (sometimes jokey) references

to Austin’s examination of everyday language use. In the 1960s, Goffman team-taught a

class at Berkeley with John Searle. The preface to Frame Analysis (1974) shows the great

extent to which his thinking was influenced by this tradition, as of course does the

posthumously published ‘Felicity’s Condition’ (1983), with its veiled reference to Austin.

3. The emergence, specification and re-emergence of Dramaturgy in Goffman’s

work

Although we often associate Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis with just one of

his books, PSEL (1956 and 1959), the underlying idea was in his work before then and,

after a respite, it made a significant reappearance in his later work, most noticeably

Frame Analysis (1974) and Gender Advertisements (1976). It’s possible therefore, to see

– textually – how Goffman initially developed dramaturgical analysis and then how he

came to re-evaluate it later. Jason Ditton (1980) has pointed out that the first indication

of Goffman’s interest in dramaturgical sociology occurs in chapter 10 of his 1949 M.A.

thesis concerning a radio soap opera. Despite this unlikely starting point, dramaturgy

continued to have an influence on all of his future work.

The beauty of dramaturgical analysis is that everyone understands it immediately: people

in their everyday lives play roles, follow scripts, live on and off stage and manage the

impressions that they give to others while decoding the impression management of

others. The limitations of dramaturgical analysis are the limitations of the metaphor

itself. Theatrical performances are make believe and therefore require their audience to

11
suspend disbelief, thereby treating a performance as something real while knowing that it

is not. By contrast, our everyday performances are often quite real because what people

do is either constitutive of the performance itself or an accurate symbolization of an

underlying competence or legitimacy.

Analytically, as Alan Ryan has pointed out (2012 [1978]), there is an important

difference between ‘depicting’ and ‘pretending’. When I depict something I do it as it

should be done and the doing has real consequences. When I pretend to do something I

do something else that only looks like the thing it copies and either has no real

consequences or different consequences. Thus, saying ‘I do’ in front of a priest in a

wedding ceremony depicts getting married in a way that a play with a marriage scene

only pretends to do.

In our different spheres of activity, we must all learn to display competence in myriad

ways. Early in any socialization process we will likely not be good at these activities, but

that is different from saying that initially we only pretend to do them and then later we

just do them. Consider Alan Ryan’s example of a surgeon. Someone who pretends to

be a surgeon is claiming two separate things: (1) a medical credential and (2) a medical

competence. They are separate in that you could have one and not the other: a member of

American Medical Association could be an incompetent surgeon and a carpenter who has

watched a lot of YouTube videos of surgeries could be able to do a surgical procedure.

The carpenter is pretending to be a surgeon but is depicting surgical skills.

12
In ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1949) Georg Simmel discussed the role of the Parisian

‘quatorzieme’ who dresses for dinner every night in order to fill in for a missing dinner

guest. The quatorzieme pretends to be a dinner guest (he or she is actually a paid

employee) while accurately and successfully depicting a dinner guest. And yesterday’s

quatorzieme is the structural forerunner of today’s shill (Goffman 1959, 1967), who both

pretends to be and also depicts a casino gambler.

So, the challenge for dramaturgical analysis is to recognize that the legitimate and the

illegitimate portrayer of a role depict a role in the same way even though one may also be

pretending to do so. The depiction is both material and skill based whereas the pretense

occurs because the role player either lacks an external credential and/or the requisite

skills demanded of the role. However, this description suggests that the signaling and

authenticating mechanisms that are the subject matter of dramaturgical analysis are, in a

way that sounds paradoxical, sometimes identical to the real thing without being the real

thing (if the missing element is an external credential).

Goffman alternated between accounts of everyday interaction that emphasized trust and

ritual accommodation and those that emphasized deception. This alternation makes good

sense once we accept that the signaling mechanisms are the same for both. When

Goffman emphasized the ways in which dramaturgy is deceptive he contributed to what

Ricoeur (1970:30) called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. This was clearly present in his

writings before PSEL. For example, in one of his early papers, ‘Symbols of Class Status’

(1951), Goffman analyzed the ways in which symbols can be misused. Goffman argued

13
that class symbols represent a ‘complex of social qualifications’ (1951:296) that are often

hard to substantiate and therefore particularly vulnerable to misuse. As a result,

legitimate holders of status have to find ways to authenticate the symbols they rely on in

order to distinguish bona fide members of their group from imposters. Goffman outlined

six devices that are intended to prevent a person from misrepresenting his or her class

(1951:297-301). He also described the role of ‘curator groups’ that maintain the

‘machinery’ of status. However, as Goffman emphasized, imposters can use the same

devices that legitimate stakeholders use to maintain class symbols. As a result, the

‘circulation of symbols’ (1951:303) cannot be stopped and a ‘sign which is expressive for

the class in which it originates comes to be employed by a different class – a class for

which the symbol can signify status but ill express it’ (1951:304).

Deception is also integral to the world of the confidence trickster, as explored by

Goffman in ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’ (1952). This paper took the structure of the

confidence trick and showed that it can be applied to any situation in which a person

suffers a loss of status. In this sense the paper is an introduction to the sociology of

failure. The ‘mark’ is robbed of something and in return is given ‘instruction in the

philosophy of taking a loss’ (1952:452). Michael Pettit explained this in a memorable

phrase as the ‘normalization of insincerity’ (2011:147) and tracks Goffman’s arguments

back to the work of David Maurer (2011:147-9).

As suggested earlier, in Communication Conduct in an Island Community (1953)

Goffman did not use dramaturgical language explicitly. Rather, he analyzed the

14
communicative resources and social norms that preserved an inter-subjective sense of

social order. However, some of the elements of dramaturgical analysis are in the

dissertation and it is easy to see how Goffman could build PSEL out of the dissertation.

For example, in the conclusion to the dissertation Goffman identified three ‘inhibitory

norms’ that contribute to a continuing sense of social order: considerateness, self-control

and projective circumspection. For the last of these, Goffman commented that ‘the

individual is obliged to conduct himself so that the impression he initially gives of

himself, and which others use in building up a framework of response to him, will not be

discredited later…’ (1953:352). Here Goffman has a fully dramaturgical view without

deploying the dramaturgical concept.

Insofar as PSEL emphasized pretense over depiction (to return to Ryan’s helpful

distinction) it could more appropriately have been titled The Misrepresentation of Self in

Everyday Life. Understood in this way, Goffman wrote a how-to textbook of deception.

Particularly in the chapter on ‘Performances’, Goffman’s descriptions of the techniques

for the ‘dramatic realization’ of presentations of self are built out of impressions and

fronts that are intentionally meant to mislead. Goffman defined a performance as ‘all the

activity of a given participant, on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way

any of the other participants’ (1959:15). He showed this using, among others, the

example of a baseball umpire who must make his decisions immediately in order to give

the impression that he is sure of them, thereby forgoing the moment he needs to confirm

his judgments to himself (1959:40). What is true of the individual performer is also true

of the ‘team’ that has the ‘character of a secret society’. Team members share the ‘sweet

15
guilt of conspirators’ (1959:108). This conspiracy is confirmed in the back regions away

from public view where the team members’ front stage performances are ‘knowingly

contradicted’ (1959:114).

PSEL was first published by the University of Edinburgh in 1956 and later expanded in

readiness for publication in the United States in 1959. The two versions are substantially

the same but there are two notable additions to the 1959 version: a new section to the

‘Performances’ chapter and a revised conclusion.

Both versions of the book investigate six dramaturgical principles. The first principle is

the performance. There is usually a shared ‘belief in the performance’, as both performers

and their audiences believe that what is being staged is the ‘real reality’ (1959:28). This

belief is bolstered by appropriate ‘fronts’, consisting of ‘settings’, ‘expressive equipment’

and ‘manner’ (1959:32). Collectively, fronts present and preserve our ‘abstract

stereotyped expectations’ for particular performances (1959:37). Fronts must be capable

of ‘dramatic realization’. This involved a paradox in that making something appear

spontaneous and relaxed is usually quite demanding. Goffman gave the example of a

Vogue model whose efforts to appear cultivated left little time for reading (1959:42).

Performances are also idealizations of themselves, requiring the maintenance of

expressive control in order to protect our often fragile impressions of reality (1959:63).

Idealizations are distinguishable from ‘misrepresentations’ because performers have a

legitimate claim to the performances that they idealize but not to the ones that they

misrepresent (1959:66). Goffman’s formula here is the same as Ryan’s distinction

16
discussed earlier between depiction and pretense. Goffman also discussed the ways in

which performances undergo ‘mystification’. This is achieved by keeping audiences at a

distance, from which vantage point they can give credit where credit is not due. As an

example, Goffman mentioned the advice given to the King of Norway: keep the ‘people’

at a distance or they will be disappointed. The mystery, it turns out, is only that there is

no mystery; the dramaturgical challenge is to keep this fact a secret (1959:75-6).

The 1956 ‘Performances’ chapter ends here – but the 1959 edition contains a new section

called ‘Reality and Contrivance’ (1959:76-82). Goffman begins by rejecting our intuitive

sense of what I have previously called the ‘two selves thesis’ (Manning 1992). What

Goffman wants to reject is the strict split between a ‘real, sincere’ performance and a

false one (1959:77). In its place Goffman suggests that because we approach all our

performances with what Merton called ‘anticipatory socialization’ we play our roles not

sincerely or falsely but by coloring in pre-existing outlines of appropriate performances.

To show this, Goffman pointed out that although stage acting is highly skilled and takes

years of training, amateur actors with limited rehearsal time can often produce a passable

‘Hamlet’ or ‘King Lear’. That they can do so suggests that ‘ordinary social intercourse is

put together as a scene is put together’ (1959:78). As a result we are not choosing

between real and false performances. Instead we are watching blended performances with

both real (practiced) and false (imagined) elements. And by extension, stage acting

works in the same way.

In a second response to what I’ve called the two selves thesis, Goffman rejects it by

17
suggesting that we are often unaware of elements of our own performances. He gave the

following instructive example: ‘And when we observe a young American middle-class

girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boyfriend, we are ready to point to items of guile

in her behavior. But like herself and her boyfriend, we accept as an unperformed fact that

the performer is a young, American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the

greater part of her performance’ (1959:81). It is instructive to remember Goffman’s

comment here, as Garfinkel (1967) later claimed that Goffman’s downfall was his

inability to analyze the ‘nine-tenths’ (1967:173) of interaction that is not instrumentally

rational. Here we can see that between the 1956 and 1959 editions of PSEL Goffman was

wrestling with exactly this issue.

Goffman then introduces the concept is the ‘team’, which he uses to show that

performances are cooperative endeavors. The team has ‘something of the character of a

secret society’ (1959:108) because its members know what is hidden from their

audiences. This information is often kept in the ‘back regions’ or ‘backstage’ where

‘front stage performances are knowingly contradicted’ (1959:114). These places must be

protected from people holding ‘discrepant roles’ who are in a position to discover and

expose backstage secrets. Goffman identified five types of secret (1959: 141-3):

1. Dark secrets: Secrets are incompatible with a team’s image. They are

‘double secrets’ because they are both hidden and not

admitted as possible by the team;

2. Strategic secrets: Information about what the team plans to do;

3. Entrusted secrets: Facts kept as a demonstration of trustworthiness;

18
4. Inside secrets: Facts which, when known, identify a person as a team

member;

5. Free secrets: Facts that can be disclosed by a person without discrediting

his or her performance.

Goffman identified nine discrepant roles, the occupiers of which are in positions to

discover these secrets. They are: the informer, the shill, spotters, shoppers (members of

rival teams), mediators, ‘non-people’ (such as servants), service-specialists (such as

hairdressers), confidants and colleagues (1959:145-59). Most of these roles suggest some

legitimate access to a team’s backstage. Very concisely, then, Goffman presented a

conceptual scheme to be used in many empirical case studies of the ways in which we

protect and destroy both highly consequential and almost inconsequential performances.

We all practice ‘impression management’ in order to protect the integrity of our

performances. This is an umbrella term from his dissertation, which covers a very wide

range of activities. Goffman approached it by considering occasions when impression

management fails. This can occur because the performer commits an embarrassing ‘faux

pas’ that reveals something that the performer wanted to keep hidden. Impression

management can also break down because an audience member decides to create a

disruptive ‘scene’ (1959:205). At these moments, the ‘whole dramaturgical structure of

social interaction is suddenly and poignantly laid bare’ before performers rapidly retreat

into their ‘appointed characters’ (1959:227).

19
The 1956 version of PSEL concludes with a very cynical view of performances. In 1956

Goffman suggested that we only appear to be living in a ‘moral world’ when in fact we

are largely concerned with the ‘amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that

these standards are being realized’ (1956:162; 1959:243). The implication here is that

these standards are not being realized and audiences are only duped into thinking that

they are.

The 1959 version of PSEL has an additional conclusion called ‘Staging and the Self’

(1959:244-7). This section contains some of the wording that Goffman’s detractors have

seized upon to criticize his account of the self, most notably his phrase suggesting that the

‘self is a peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung’ (1959:245).

What can be missed in a rush to judgment against Goffman’s homo sociologicus is that

he says later on the same page that the individual really is a reflexive being, capable of

learning, with fantasies, dreams, anxiety and dread; someone who is often in need of

supportive team mates, who can be tactful and who can be shamed. But Goffman

immediately adds that such a view of the self is ‘psychobiological’ and hence is

something that is true without being a sociological concern. Goffman’s sociological view

has nothing to say about this, as it is limited to the ‘contingencies of staging

performances’ (1959:246).

I take away from this clarification added to the 1959 edition of PSEL that Goffman’s

dramaturgical model is primarily a theory of communication, as it plainly was in his 1953

dissertation. We are misled when we think that Goffman has a theory of the self that is

20
anything more than something we can find in Cooley or Mead (more so the latter).

Goffman certainly thought that we act intentionally but he did not want to find a way of

combining psychoanalytic and sociological theory (Manning, 2005). He was, however,

very happy to think of his work as a contribution to the study of strategic interaction.

Greg Smith (2013) is certainly right when he claims that after the publication of PSEL in

1959 it had a ‘shadowy existence’ (2013:67) in his writings for a decade and a half until

the publication of his intended magnum opus, Frame Analysis (1974). Smith suggests

that, after a long hiatus, Goffman’s frame analytic ideas contribute to what he calls

‘Dramaturgy2’ (2013). The goal of Dramaturgy2 in this new book was not very different

from the goal of PSEL: Goffman wanted to understand how we decide ‘what is going on

here?’ in our everyday encounters (1974:8). His answer, roughly, was that we put a

frame around a strip of interaction and then interpret whatever is inside the frame in such

a way as to make both the frame and the strip of interaction consistent. Goffman had

often used espionage examples to show the significance of getting the answer right about

what is going on and frame analysis was the end product of those reflections. In

Encounters (1961) he had argued that successful spies have an uncanny ability to identify

seemingly irrelevant facts that actually cast doubt on the prevailing definition of the

situation.

However, Goffman did not introduce the concept of frame in Dramaturgy2 by retelling

World War II espionage stories but by describing the behavior of otters at Fleishacker

zoo. Goffman had throughout his career made it clear that he was impressed by the

21
detailed observations of animal behavior made by ethologists (see Smith 2006:52 for a

useful commentary on this). In this instance he drew on the work of Gregory Bateson but

it is worth noting that George Herbert Mead had also been drawn to the studies of animal

behavior by his former student, John Watson. In Frame Analysis, Goffman develops an

elaborate conceptual scheme out of Bateson’s observation that otters in the zoo both fight

and pretend to fight in ways which are very similar but not quite the same and that they

can transfer the meaning of one situation to another (1974:40).

Switching to human behavior, Goffman argued that we make sense of any strip of

interaction by using ‘primary frameworks’. These are either ‘natural’ or ‘social’. The

first assumes that what is happening is unguided by human hands and the second assumes

human intervention (1974:22). Primary frameworks can also be ‘keyed’. This occurs

whenever the meanings of a primary framework are transformed into something that is

patterned on, but independent of that framework. Keyings take at least five forms

(1974:40-82):

(1) Make-believe: We transform a serious frame into a non-serious one

(2) Contests: We transform danger into manageable conflict

(3) Ceremonials: We transform an event into a representation of an event

(4) Technical redoings: We simulate future interaction, as in a rehearsal

(5) Regroundings: We substitute one motive for another.

Keyings can themselves by re-keyed or ‘laminated’. Our basic answer to the question

22
‘what is going on here?’ is provided by the outermost lamination (essentially, the rim of

the frame). Nevertheless, keyed and re-keyed frames are likely to cause people to doubt

that they fully understand what is happening. This is further complicated because frames

can be ‘fabricated’; that is, constructed in such a way that participants will have the

wrong idea about what is going on. Fabrications can be ‘benign’ – that is, when they

exist for the benefit of the audience, or ‘exploitative’, when they benefit the fabricator.

The first encourages, for example, a well-meaning but struggling musician by giving

applause normally reserved for virtuoso performers; the latter exploits a targeted mark in

a carefully rehearsed confidence trick (1974:87-109).

Given these vulnerabilities, Goffman argued that people have developed ways to ‘anchor’

frames in order to ensure that a frame’s purported meaning is also its actual meaning

(1974:247-51). His analysis of the anchoring of frames anticipated the work of signaling

theorists who want explore how actors demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims by

showing how expensive it was for them to signal them. And the receivers of signals count

this cost when deciding whether to believe performers. However, it is also true that there

is a cost to determining the cost. This means that people will often opt to believe that a

frame is heavily anchored so that they can experience a strip of interaction as something

uneventful, routine and predictable. Goffman identified five such anchors, with varying

degrees of heaviness (1974:260):

1. Bracketing devices: Marking devices for the beginning and end of a frame

2. Roles: Identification of roles defines the frames

23
3. Resource Continuity: Existence of traces of the activity confirm the frame

4. Unconnectedness: Identification of the key elements of the frame

5. Assumptions about

human nature: Assumption of the enduring nature of personal identity

Although frames are routinely anchored by these five devices that is not to say that

frames are invulnerable. The reasons why we believe that we know what is really going

on are also the means whereby we are deceived. Goffman defined deception as

consisting of the work done to ensure that ‘incorrect assumptions are initially made’

(1974:440). In a manner reminiscent of PSEL, Frame Analysis contains a structural and

almost textbook-like account of the resources available to those wishing to deceive. As

he put it: ‘whatever we use as a means of checking up on claims provides a detailed

recipe for those inclined to cook up reality’ (1974:445).

Goffman’s idea that we ‘cook up reality’ reconciles the apparent differences between his

analyses of trust and deception by showing that both make use of the same mechanisms

in order to succeed. The same resources whereby we appear trustworthy are the ones

used when we betray. Elsewhere (Manning 2000) I have suggested that Goffman was not

primarily interested in trust, ritual accommodation or deception; rather, he was interested

in developing a theory of credibility. Put differently, Goffman analyzed the ways in

which people make their performances convincingly real. In this sense, Goffman’s work

attempted to understand the resources by which we maintain a shared sense of what the

world is like – even if that sense of the world is wrong.

24
4. Signaling theory: Reconnecting Goffman’s work to Rational Choice Theory

After the French Revolution, British aristocrats were understandably anxious to distance

themselves from their French counterparts (Murray 1998:7-8). The British aristocracy

were alarmed by the prospect of similarly dire class warfare on their own soil. As a result,

and as their own inverted version of Marx and Engels’ 1848 declaration that there is a

simple ‘us and them’ class division, aristocrats wanted to be sure that they knew who was

really part of the ‘us’. In 1826, the first publication of Burke’s Peerage offered the

landed well-to-do with near definitive proof of membership. However, there are many

situations when it is not practical to do a full background check on a recent acquaintance.

As a result, extraordinarily elaborate clothing serves as a symbolic stand-in for Burke’s

Peerage. Meeting someone by chance and without introduction, an aristocrat could

quickly evaluate the likelihood that this person was one of his own by recognizing the cut

and quality of his clothes. Getting dressed became so elaborate that it required costume

changes during the day and full-time help. What better way to keep both the riff-raff and

the revolutionaries out?

There is no doubt that clothing then as now was also motivated by fashion, by class and

gendered expectations, by aesthetics, practicality, conspicuous consumption and vanity.

However, for my purposes, what was critical about the aristocracy’s 19th century use of

clothing and fashion was its role as a signaling and authenticating mechanism.

25
Of course, any signaling and authenticating mechanism, like any code, can be broken or

hacked. Today’s high-priced designer dresses are reproduced for the mass market with

impressive speed. This counterfeit is possible because of an economy of scale: many

people want to buy a knock-off of a dress that someone famous wore to the Oscars. To

defend against this possibility, a reliable authentication mechanism has to present a high

cost of entry for would-be copiers. In this sense, Burke’s Peerage is the gold standard: to

get in you have to marry your way into a titled family and that will likely cost a lot of

dowry dollars. But expensive clothing that someone could not easily have put on alone

(such as a corset) is an approximation of this process.

The development of signaling theory in the last twenty years has extended dramaturgical

analysis by considering the structure of the situation that troubled these 19th century

aristocrats. In particular, Diego Gambetta has studied signaling theory in a manner that is

reminiscent of Goffman at his very best. Like Goffman, Gambetta is able to generate a

conceptual scheme and a vocabulary with which we are able to compare signaling

strategies of apparently very different groups. Gambetta is able to move easily between

examples of the behavior of mafia foot soldiers, taxi cab drivers, prostitutes, kidnap

victims and Internet child pornographers. Although he makes only occasional references

to Goffman, it is difficult to read him without being reminded of both the style and the

content of Goffman’s work. Just as Goffman’s own debt to Everett Hughes went largely

unacknowledged, Gambetta has traced the origins of his own work to sources away from

sociology – despite his own graduate training at the University of Cambridge where he

worked with one of Goffman’s greatest admirers, Anthony Giddens. Also, like Goffman,

26
Gambetta has taken inspiration for his work from both the detailed observations of

animal behavior carried out by ethologists and from Thomas Schelling’s quirky,

insightful analyses of strategic interaction.

However, in an overview of signaling theory, Gambetta downplayed Goffman’s

significance in both his own thinking and in the development of signaling theory more

generally. In fact, Gambetta has dismissed the link as more or less a phantom that (only)

sociologists think of whenever signaling theory is mentioned (2009a:191). However, it

may be that he is less sure than he seems, as elsewhere he has praised Goffman’s work,

suggesting that Goffman has cleverly explored the ‘fine line’ between intended messages

and those given off inadvertently (2009b:xvi). Gambetta goes on to distinguish his work

from Goffman’s on the narrow grounds that his approach concerns only intended signals.

This latter statement of Gambetta’s is very helpful. I want to suggest broadly that

signaling theory is concerned with the same dramaturgical communication issues that

Goffman emphasized in Communication Conduct in an Island Community, PSEL and

Frame Analysis. That is, how can signalers and receivers of signals be confident that

they have understood what is going on and have not been misled? In some instances, the

dramaturgical problem is that signalers must demonstrate to the satisfaction of their

audiences that a specific signal really does symbolize what it claims to symbolize. In

other instances, the dramaturgical problem is for the receiver of the signal to smell a rat.

27
Gambetta distinguishes a signal from a sign. Signals are purposive communication,

usually but not always directed to a particular person or audience. Signs are anything in

the environment that can be perceived and by being perceived might modify someone’s

beliefs, and as such they will normally not be directed to a particular person or audience

(2009a:170). I take signs to be equivalent to fronts in PSEL.

Gambetta argues that the main discovery of signaling theory is that we should usually

believe a signal if both (a) the emission cost to a legitimate signaler is low enough,

relative to benefit, to make it rational to send it and (b) the emission cost to an

illegitimate signaler is high enough, relative to benefit, that it is irrational to send it

(2009a:173). Or, put more simply, signals that we judge to be ‘too costly to fake’ should

be taken as genuine. To revert back to PSEL for a moment, I take Gambetta to mean that

a presentation of self is real if the cost of faking that presentation of self to an imposter is

judged to be too high for that given actor.

In Codes of the Underworld (2009b) Gambetta presents two separate but interrelated

theories. The first considers ‘costly signals’, the second ‘conventional signals’. In the

first case, Gambetta argues that there are many instances in which signalers want to

signal the fact that it is in their best interests to be truthful and/or that even if the signalers

wanted to deceive, their hands are now tied and so they cannot deceive despite

themselves (2009b:xvi-xvii). This describes the ‘too costly to fake’ scenarios mentioned

earlier. Under ideal conditions, the prohibitive cost of a signal makes it discriminating,

separating and sorting. This means that the receiver of a signal can have absolute

28
confidence that the signaler is the real deal. For example, when the leader of the opposing

army drinks the wine first, the rival leader can believe that the chalice is not poisoned.

However, most situations contain signals that are not discriminating, separating and

sorting but are only ‘pooling’. These ‘semi-sorting’ signals are evidence that the signaler

is credible but the signal itself is not conclusive evidence. In the criminal underworld, the

stakes are high enough that signalers will go to extraordinary lengths to convince people

that what they claim is true. Gambetta showed this by discussing the conclusion reached

by a former CIA operative that it is all but impossible to fake the signals needed to

infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups (2009b:25). By contrast, in the everyday world

described by Goffman, the stakes are normally much lower and therefore it is necessary

to evaluate the less than ideal semi-sorted signals that are both routinely encountered and

routinely fabricated.

It is the structure of too costly to fake performances that underpins the decisions that

people make in assessing what to be believe and what to discount. Goffman had

emphasized that receivers of signals are trying to determine if particular elements of a

performance have been ‘given off’ – and hence credible – or ‘given’ but in such a way as

to create the illusion of being given off. These performances, of course, should be

discounted. Gambetta makes the same observation very clearly: ‘What is ultimately being

mimicked is a certain property, k, that the mimic does not possess. What is being lied

about, imitated, copied or forged along the way are signs associated with k, which leave

the impression of possessing k’ (2009b:xvii).

29
Of course, sometimes the sincerity of the performance or the truth of the signal is not at

issue. The problem instead is the mundane one that we all face: we would like to signal

something to someone in such a way that only the intended recipient can understand the

transmission. In the everyday world, a transmission error might cause someone

embarrassment, in the criminal world it may cause someone to be arrested, or worse.

Gambetta distinguished three problems to be solved by what he calls ‘conventional

symbols’ (2009:149-50): (1) the communication problem, (2) the identification problem

and (3) the advertising problem. For the first, the solution is to make sure that only

accredited team members can receive and understand the signal. For the second, the

solution is to signal something that will enable the signaler to identify accredited but

unknown team members while not alerting third parties to the transmission. For the third,

the solution is to signal the availability of goods and services to an undifferentiated pool

of potential consumers in such a way that people who are not potential consumers will

either not receive the signal or not be able to understand it.

Contingent signals are attractive because they are only arbitrarily connected to their

signifieds and are therefore usually cheap to emit because the meaning of the signal is

settled by private agreement. Contingent signals are also efficient as long as the receiver

can detect the signal from background noise, discriminate one signal from another and

memorize the signal’s meaning easily (2009:153).

30
5. Ethnomethodological applications: Agnes

Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) intended his case study of Agnes to introduce

ethnomethodological thinking with an appealing empirical demonstration of its approach.

In so doing, Garfinkel was anxious to show the ways in which his approach improved

upon Goffman’s dramaturgical theory. However, many of Garfinkel’s early critics, such

as James Coleman (1968), were less interested in these nuances and more concerned to

highlight what they saw as gross errors. In particular, Coleman was memorably

uncharitable, concluding that Garfinkel’s labored writing and methodological naivety

amount to a travesty of professional social science. Later evaluations by sympathetic

readers have stayed clear of what we might think of as a ‘forensic’ response to Garfinkel.

Instead they have stressed Garfinkel’s insightful analysis of Agnes’ accomplishments as a

practical methodologist.

I would like to begin by presenting a summary and timeline of the Agnes case study

before considering Garfinkel’s attempt to distinguish ethnomethodology from

dramaturgy.

Agnes was treated at UCLA medical center between November 1958 and August 1959.

Agnes had been raised as a boy but as a teenager had developed secondary sex

characteristics. She told the staff at UCLA that she was not seeking a sex change

operation because she was already female. Rather, she had a penis – which she likened to

a wart – that she wanted the surgeons to remove. Following castration, Agnes wanted the

31
surgeons to harvest skin from her penis and scrotum to be used to make an artificial

vagina.

Her family physician had contacted Dr. Robert Stoller, seeking assistance with the case.

At that time Dr. Stoller was a junior researcher at UCLA. When he first met Agnes he

was thirty-four years old and beginning his professional career in clinical psychology. Dr.

Stoller referred Agnes to his colleague, the psychiatrist Alexander Rosen. Dr. Rosen was

himself at the beginning of a successful career at UCLA as a specialist in alcoholism and

gender issues. He was thirty-five years old. Harold Garfinkel joined his two colleagues

for a series of Saturday morning interviews, during which Agnes was interviewed

extensively by them. Garfinkel was the most junior of the three but actually the oldest

(he was forty one). These weekly sessions lasted from November 1958 to August 1959.

Garfinkel reported that Agnes was not always cooperative during these sessions

(1967:175). This may have been because she thought that she was on trial, and any wrong

answer could lead the hospital to deny her request for surgery. It is also possible that she

resented being used as a guinea pig for Stoller, Rosen and Garfinkel, all of whom wanted

to use her experiences to help them theorize about the acquisition of gender. However, it

was paramount for Agnes to obtain the surgery at no or little cost, and she seemed to

accept that the Saturday morning interviews were part payment for the surgery

(1967:175).

It is possible to construct a timeline for the events described in Garfinkel’s case study of

Agnes:

32
 1939 Agnes is born and issued a birth certificate as a male

June 1956 As a seventeen year old (boy), drops out of High School

Aug 1956 Visits her grandmother in the Midwest, arriving dressed as a

boy and leaving dressed as a girl – the emergence of Agnes

Dec 1956 Starts work in her hometown as a typist

Aug 1957 Moves to Los Angeles with girlfriends. Lives in the suburbs

while working downtown

Dec 1957 Moves downtown to be close to work

Feb 1958 Starts dating Bill

Mar 1958 Quits her job

Apr 1958 Moves to the San Fernando Valley to be close to Bill

Apr 1958 Visits home and meets with her family physician

33
Jun 1958 Tells Bill ‘everything’ about her condition

Nov 1958 First appointment at UCLA Medical Center. At some point

she is diagnosed as suffering from ‘testicular feminization

syndrome’.

Nov 1958 Starts Saturday morning interview sessions with Dr. Stoller

(Clinical Psychologist), Dr. Rosen (Psychiatrist) and Harold

Garfinkel (Sociologist)

Mar 1959 Castration operation

Aug 1959 Saturday morning interview sessions end

Oct 1966 Agnes visits Dr. Stoller and tells him that her secondary sex

characteristics were the result of her decision to take Stilbestrol -

an estrogen replacement drug that had been prescribed to her

mother. The initial diagnosis of testicular feminization syndrome

was therefore wrong.

Feb 1967 Stoller reports his meeting with Agnes to Garfinkel

34
1967 Garfinkel writes a short appendix to chapter 5 for his soon to be

published Studies in Ethnomethodology where he briefly considers

the implications of Agnes’ revelations for his argument.

For non-ethnomethodologists, the decisive finding of this timeline is that it shows that

three highly regarded researchers could be duped by a nineteen year who had barely

graduated High School and who worked as a typist. In fact, it shows that Agnes was able

to hide the truth from them for about ten months, answering their many questions every

Saturday morning in a manner which protected her presentation of self as an unfortunate

young woman in need of a pro bono surgery to correct a rare congenital disorder. Upon

learning that Agnes’ condition was actually caused by a medication, Stilbestrol, that she

had stolen from her mother, Stoller commented: ‘My chagrin at learning this was

matched by my amusement that she could have pulled off this coup with such skill’

(reported by Garfinkel, 1967:288).

Many sociologists have not shared in Stoller’s amusement – instead they have been

bewildered. How could Agnes have got away with so grandiose a deception? Were the

three researchers just incompetent? It is now clear that they certainly accepted Agnes’

accounts as factual readouts of the world rather than as just a plausible account of it. Had

Stoller, Rosen and Garfinkel thought clearly about the case, I think it is obvious that they

should have been concerned about the lack of corroboration for Agnes’ account.

Significantly, Agnes forbade them from talking to her mother or her three older siblings.

(Ironically, after her ‘confession’ to Stoller in 1966, one of the first she offered to do was

35
to introduce him to her mother). There is also no evidence that Garfinkel or his

colleagues interviewed Bill, even though he was on hand and figured heavily in their

deliberations. As the case study made clear, Garfinkel considered Bill to be an

unremarkable working class boyfriend who just wanted to have sex with Agnes as a

natural part of their relationship. Apparently, on discovering in June 1958 that his

girlfriend had a penis and had grown up as an unremarkable boy, Bill, we are led to

believe, was willing to wait and be supportive of Agnes, all the while training her in the

finer arts of womanly behavior. Could Bill have existed as Agnes described him? Was he

an accomplice, a mentor, a fiction Agnes invented to explain the need for expedited

surgery? Garfinkel does reveal that in his interviews with Agnes, ‘Bill was discussed in

every conversation’ (1967:157). However, Garfinkel’s lack of first hand knowledge of

Bill was revealed when he commented: ‘Following the operation we obtained an account

of Bill’s appearance and manner from the urological intern and resident who had attended

her case. The resident had encountered Bill one day when Bill was leaving her hospital

room’ (1967:160). Tellingly, the resident had objected to the surgery, claiming that it

was neither necessary nor ethical, since Agnes’ physical condition had likely been caused

by an exogenous source of estrogens (1967:160). At least with regard to the cause, the

resident was right.

Ethnomethodologists have generally been much more impressed by Garfinkel’s account

of Agnes. For example, John Heritage’s (1984) well-known assessment downplayed the

research team’s mistakes and emphasized the ways in which Garfinkel showed the

importance of studying the details whereby a gendered identity is made ‘accountable’

36
(i.e. intelligible). Heritage accurately conveys Agnes as a practical methodologist who

learned to portray herself to her audiences as an unremarkable woman. Heritage therefore

emphasized Garfinkel’s accounts of Agnes’ passing strategies: she learned how to act

during group dates, how to live with a roommate, how to act demurely during physical

exams, how to appear as a future daughter-in-law and so on (1967:137-46). Critically,

passing for Agnes was an ongoing accomplishment involving a delicate combination of

doing and learning to do: ‘Agnes was required to live up to the standards of conduct,

appearance, skills, feelings, motives and aspirations while simultaneously learning what

these standards were’ (1967:147).

Garfinkel emphasized that these passing strategies could not be accounted for by

Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis. Goffman’s weakness, according to Garfinkel, was that

he could only analyze the social world episodically. This allows people to have time-outs

during which they can think about their actions and reconstruct them using an ‘inner

time’ (1967:166). However, in real time, there are no time-outs with which to produce

the masterful performances implied by Goffman’s dramaturgy. For Garfinkel, Goffman is

a sociologist who always assumed that we are performing in a calculated, pre-planned

way. Garfinkel suggested, rather awkwardly as it turned out, that Goffman is always

there, interviewing his subjects by asking ‘Why don’t you confess?’ (1967:174).

Why didn’t Garfinkel question whether Agnes had anything to confess? It is true that he

often commented that her appearance was ‘convincingly female’ and this perhaps left

him wanting to believe her story. Interestingly, it is also true that he recognized that

37
Agnes was an ‘accomplished liar’ (1967:174) while still believing that Agnes wasn’t

lying to him. However, the analytic reason why he didn’t push for a confession is that

Garfinkel believed that in our everyday behavior we are less self-aware than Goffman

suggested. Hence Garfinkel did not believe that people can confess to impression

management because much of what they do is part of a taken for granted substrate of

practical knowledge. Impression management is not usually pure, strategic interaction but

a blend of taken-for-granted knowledge and intentional behavior. But not so for Agnes:

as Garfinkel put it, she was ‘not afforded that luxury’ (1967:175).

Although Garfinkel presented himself as the antidote to Parsonsian sociology (although

Parsons had been his dissertation advisor), his account of the limitations of dramaturgical

analysis owes a lot to Parsons’ argument in The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]).

Garfinkel argued that the tip of the iceberg of the conduct of everyday affairs is the ‘one-

tenth’ of our behavior that is instrumentally rational, while the nine-tenths that remain

invisible consist of ‘unquestioned’ and ‘unquestionable’ background assumptions

(1967:173). These background assumptions are relevant to strategic action without ever

being noticed. Like Parsons before him, Garfinkel invoked Durkheim’s view that non-

contractual elements of a contract are essential because the terms of a ‘binding contract’

are ‘essentially unstatable’. As a result, if there was no recourse to solidifying general

assumptions, all contracts would be constantly litigated. Garfinkel’s argument, made

with explicit appeal to Durkheim and Weber, mirrored Parsons’ own view that the neo-

Classical economics found in Alfred Marshall’s work underestimated the pre-structuring

role of norms and values in otherwise instrumentally rational decision-making.

38
The appendix to chapter five must have been very awkward for Garfinkel to write. Stoller

could have helped him out by informing him of Agnes’ retraction in October 1966 rather

than waiting until February 1967 to give him the bad news. By then, Studies In

Ethnomethdology was going to press and it was presumably impossible to rewrite the

seventy or so pages of the case study of Agnes. Instead, Garfinkel added a four page

appendix, drawing heavily on Stoller’s account of Agnes. He then added his own take

away lessons. The first of these lessons was a reiteration of a theme of the chapter – that

our performances are practical, ongoing accomplishments. The second was written in

near impenetrable prose. However, a free translation of Garfinkel at his obscurest is as

follows: in order to deceive people we have to identify those features of the social world

that they believe are stable and objective – and then manipulate those features to create a

desired illusion (1967:288). That does appear to be what Agnes did and that is what she

had to confess. And her confession left Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology much closer to the

action theory of Parsons and the dramaturgy of Goffman than he wanted it to be.

However, perhaps Garfinkel’s criticisms of Goffman were wrong from the beginning –

and wrong for a reason. Goffman, like Parsons, built conceptual schemes that implied an

analytic dualism between concept and application (see Manning 2016). Goffman’s

dramaturgy was attractive because it was a pattern elaborative theory (what I have

elsewhere called ‘PET proof’). That is, Goffman’s dramaturgical concepts – the

performance, the front, impression management, the front stage, backstage and guarded

passageway, etc. – are all off the shelf concepts that can be slotted into many sociological

39
studies. Other sociologists can elaborate and exemplify Goffman’s conceptual scheme.

What ethnomethodology brought to social science could be another conceptual scheme,

more or less like action theory and dramaturgy – but it could be something very different.

What I mean by this is that Garfinkel alerted social scientists to the possibility of doing

highly detailed observational studies of the practical accomplishment of all aspects of

everyday life. However, although he alerted social scientists to the need for this kind of

research, he didn’t do it very well. His account of Agnes contains many thin descriptions

of Agnes managing different social settings but his did not analyze any of these examples

in any detail. How could he? He had no data other than Agnes’ own carefully constructed

verbal accounts of her own behavior. But Garfinkel did point us in the direction to

advance dramaturgical analysis: by the close observation of the real time realizations of

the concepts that Goffman developed.

This is the argument developed by Emanuel Schegloff (1988), who argues that

Goffman’s dramaturgy and his sociology in general appear to be empirical when, on

closer inspection, they turn out to contain little more than hundreds of clippings and

‘darting’ observations. These are used to convince us that his many conceptual

distinctions are important and useful (1988:101). And, Schegloff adds, if a particular

example fails to convince, we simply move on to the next one. Schegloff has correctly

placed Goffman with the theorists instead of with the ethnographers.

I think Schegloff is right in detail but wrong in implication. He is right in detail because

one way to develop dramaturgical analysis is to use it in very detailed case studies. This

40
is what I think Garfinkel had an opportunity to do but fell short. It is what Schegloff and

his colleagues have done so well in their work as part of the second wave of

ethnomethodology. However, I believe that we should not conclude that we can proceed

without conceptual schemes – and my concern is that Schegloff’s insistence on detailed

empirical description can be taken to mean that conceptual schemes are useless. This is

not the case: they are important sets of tentative generalizations and tellable stories that

can be subjected to intense empirical investigation. Imagine trying to do ethnography

without conceptual schemes: there would be no procedure for fact elimination and so all

details of all observed occasions could be judged to be equally relevant. However, a

dramaturgical conceptual scheme that is used in the empirical investigation of Agnes will

need detailed descriptions of, for example, the impression management needed to display

gender during cooking lessons with a possible future mother-in-law. In turn, this can lead

to a reconstruction of dramaturgy.

However, it is also possible that a smart theorist will reconstruct the conceptual scheme

of dramaturgy in exactly the same way that Goffman initially constructed it. Garfinkel

failed to deliver the first of these options, Gambetta on the second.

6. After Goffman

I have argued that as a result of Parsons’ centrality in the development of sociological

theory, our understanding of sociological theory began as a response to the limitations of

economic thought. Famously, in Parsons’ view, an agent’s norms and values decisively

intervene to prevent ruthless instrumental rationality. Parsons later developed his own

41
role analysis and soon after Goffman offered an edgier version of role analysis himself,

one that was more firmly embedded in a theatrical understanding of everyday behavior.

Economists have traditionally been quite willing to develop conceptual schemes and as

long as their central claims can be presented mathematically. More recently, economic-

like conceptual schemes that owe a lot to Thomas Schelling have emerged that pose

questions and conundrums without a sophisticated mathematical underbelly. Diego

Gambetta, George Ainslie and Jon Elster are three fine examples of this trend, as is the

collective work of the members of the Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School.

Assuming varying degrees of rationality, these approaches have investigated instrumental

and strategic decision-making under various time horizons. Their work often shows that

a variety of factors or mechanisms intervene to prevent agents from maximizing their

utility.

Goffman’s own conceptual scheme – his dramaturgy - can be understood against this

backcloth. Its development was consciously allied with Parsons’ work. Goffman wanted

to analyze the strategic uses of performances to bring about certain preferred outcomes.

That remained true whether the performances in question were sincere or cynical, their

frames benign or exploitative. When understood dramaturgically, the social world

contains many semiotically rich scenes in which agents signal to each other in order to

bring about preferred outcomes. Those people who like to remember Goffman as a

streetwise existentialist point out that dramaturgical performances can be deceptive and

inauthentic. But the dramaturgical machinery that leads audiences to misinterpret some

42
signs and signals turns out to be the same machinery that is used to inform them in a

legitimate and true way.

Since signaling theorists have been more impressed by rational choice ideas than by

dramaturgical ones, they have been more drawn to the investigation of the payoffs of

sincere and cynical performances. They have often concluded that, given a longer time

horizon, it is often rational for agents to signal true information and to act honorably. Had

they been more impressed by dramaturgical theory, they may have been more interested

in the detailed examination of the techniques whereby signals and signs are circulated in

environments containing very different audiences. In this chapter I have suggested that

this detailed examination involves more than just a conceptual scheme: it requires

detailed, often ethnographic and ethnomethodological observations. I suggested that for

all its interest, Garfinkel’s pioneering ethnomethodological investigation of Agnes’

passing techniques, was surprisingly short of finely observed descriptions of the many

ways by which Agnes persuaded her diverse audiences that she really was an

unremarkable woman. Garfinkel’s case study is therefore very important because it

indicated one promising direction for sociological research beyond Goffman’s

dramaturgical conceptual scheme. But critically it fell short because it only indicated the

direction: it did not demonstrate what ethnomethodologists could discover. That task fell

to the ethnomethodologists who came after Garfinkel. For example, Max Atkinson’s Our

Masters’ Voices (1985) is an ethnomethological masterpiece that reveals the performance

mechanisms of political speeches. Atkinson shows us – step-by-step - the theatrical nuts

and bolts that are needed to produce an applause-generating political speech.

43
There is a sentimental view that Goffman was a one of a kind genius. This is a risky

thing, as it can lead to theoretical defeatism. One of the things that is refreshing about

reading Gambetta, someone I take to be a reluctant dramaturgical theorist, is that he has

advanced our understanding of dramaturgy by working in a very similar way to the way

Goffman worked himself: he developed a conceptual scheme, a vocabulary and a rich set

of suggestive examples that are now being subjected to detailed examination. Gambetta’s

work has the added benefit of reconnecting sociological and dramaturgical theory to its

beginnings in economic theory. After Goffman, therefore, we should find greater

specification of the conceptual scheme of dramaturgy, an improved sense of the

ethnomethodological specification of dramaturgical performances and a grasp of the

signaling mechanisms whereby dramaturgical communication is evaluated.

References

Atkinn M. 1985. Our Masters’ Voices. London: Routledge.

Bulmer M. 1984. The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Burns T.1992. Erving Goffman London:Routledge.

Ditton J. (Ed.) 1980. The View From Goffman, London and Basingstoke

44
Drew P. & A.Wootten (Eds.) 1988. Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order

Cambridge: Polity.

Fine G. (Ed.) 1995. A Second Chicago School? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fine G. &. 2000. ‘Erving Goffman: Shifting Impressions and Tight Frames’

P. Manning In George Ritzer (Ed.) Blackwell Companion to Major Social

Theorists. Oxford: Blackwells.

Freud S. 1926. On the Question of Lay Analysis. In The Standard Edition

Of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. And tr. J. Strachey

Et al. 24 volumes. London: Hogarth Press. Vol.20: 177-258.

Freud S. 1956. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In The Standard Edition

Of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. And tr. J. Strachey

Et al. 24 volumes. London: Hogarth Press. Vol. 6.

Gambetta D. 2009a ‘Signaling’ in The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology

edited by Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

45
Gambetta D. 2009b. Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Garfinkel H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs; Prentice Hall.

Giddens A.1984. The Constitution of Society Cambridge: Polity.

Giddens A. 1987. Sociology and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge:Polity

Glover J. 1988. I: The Philosophy and Pychology of Personal Identity.

London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.

Goffman E. 1951. ‘Symbols of Class Status,’ British Journal of Sociology

(11):294-304.

Goffman E.1952. ‘On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation

to Failure’ in Psychiatry Vol.15 No.4 (Nov.) pp.451-63.

Goffman E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books.

Goffman E. 1961. Asylums Harmondsworth: Penguin.

46
Goffman E. 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction.

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Goffman E. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of

Gatherings New York: The Free Press.

Goffman E. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior

Anchor, New York.

Goffman E.1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order

Basic Books: New York.

Goffman E.1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience,

Harper and Row, New York.

Goffman E. 1983a. ‘Felicity’s Condition’ American Journal of Sociology 89(1):1-53.

Goffman E.1983b. ‘The Interaction Order’ American Sociological Review

Vol.48, pp.1-17.

47
Gronfein W. 1999. ‘Sundered selves: mental illness and the interaction order in the

work of Erving Goffman’ in G.Smith (Ed.) Goffman and Social

Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy. London and New

York: Routledge.

Jaworski G. 2000. Erving Goffman: The Reluctant Apprentice’ Symbolic Interaction

(forthcoming)

Lyman S. & 1970. A Sociology of the Absurd. New York: Meredith

Scott M. Corporation.

Lyman S. & 1975. The Drama of Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scott M.

MacIntyre A. 1982. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.

Manning P.D. 1991. ‘Drama as Life: The Significance of Goffman’s Changing Use

of the Dramaturgical Metaphor’ Sociological Theory

Vol.9 No.1 pp.71-86.

Manning P.D. 1992. Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology Stanford: Stanford

48
 University Press.

Manning P.D. 1998. ‘Procedure, Reflexivity and Social Constructionism’ in

The Politics of Constructivism edited by Irving Velody

& Robin Williams. London: Sage.

Manning P.D. 1999a. ‘The Deinstitionalization and Deinstitutionalization of the

Mentally Ill: Lessons from Goffman’ to appear in James Chriss

(Ed.) Counseling and Therapeutic State. New York: Aldine de

Gruyter

Manning P.D. 1999b. ‘Ethnographic Coats and Tents’ in Goffman and Social

Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy edited by Greg

Smith. London: Routledge Press.

Manning P.D. 2000. ‘Credibility, Agency and the Interaction Order’ Symbolic

Interaction Vol. 23 (3):283-97.

Manning P.D. 2005. Freud and American Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Manning P.D. 2016. ‘Goffman and Empirical Research’ Symbolic Interaction

Manning P.K. 1980. ‘Goffman’s Framing Order: Style as Structure’ in Ditton J. (Ed.)

49
 The View From Goffman, London and Basingstoke

Marx G. 1984. ‘Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving

Goffman’ Theory and Society. Vol.13 No.5 pp.649-62.

Murray V. 1998. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England.

Penguin Books.

Parsons, T. 1951b. Toward a General Theory of Action. New York: The Free Press

Parsons, T. 1951b. The Social System. New York: The Free Press.

Pettit M. 2011. ‘The con man as model organism: the methodological roots of

Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical self’ History of the Human

Sciences 24(2):138-54.

Prager J. 1998. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of

Remembering. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Ricoeur P. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press.

50
Ryan A. 2012. ‘Maximizing, Moralizing and Dramatizing’ in his The Making of

Modern Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schegloff E. 1988. ‘Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation’ in

Drew P. & A.Wootten (eds) 1988. Erving Goffman: Exploring the

Interaction Order Cambridge: Polity.

Schegloff E. 1990. ‘Betwen macro and micro: contexts and other connections’ in

Alexander J. (et al.) (Eds.) The Micro-Macro Link.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schegloff E. 1992. ‘Introduction’ to Sacks H. Lectures on Conversation

(edited by Gail Jefferson) Oxford: Blackwell.

Searle J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.

Searle J. 1998. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Books.

Sennett R. 1970. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Free Press.

Smith G. 1997. ‘Incivil Attention and Everyday Intolerance: Vicissitudes of

Exercising in Public Places’ Perspectives on Social Problems

Vol. 9 (57-79).

51
Smith G. (Ed.). 1999. Goffman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological

Legacy. London and New York: Routledge.

Smith G. 1999. ‘”The Proprieties of Persondom”: The Individual in the Writings of

Erving Goffman’. Unpublished paper.

Smith G. 2006. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge.

Smith G. 2013. ‘The Dramaturgical Legacy of Erving Goffman’ in The Drama of

Social Life: An Interactionist Handbook Burlington VT: Ashgate.

Verhoeven J. 1993. ‘An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980’ Research on

Language and Social Interaction 26(3):317-48

Williams R. 1998. ‘Erving Goffman’ in R. Stones (Ed.) Key Sociological Thinkers.

New York: New York University Press.

52