Erving Goffman's Dramaturgical Approach

According to Goffman, social interactions are very similar to the interactions involved in theatre. For example, he compares people in everyday life to actors onstage, acting out their designated role, or cluster of duties, rights, and obligations associated with a particular social position or status. The audience consists of individuals observe the performers and critique their performance. In social interaction, like in theatre, there is the front region where actors perform for their audience, and then there is the backstage stage, where individuals are not seen by the audience and can truly be themselves.

In theatrical terms, front stage is where the performing actor is in the front and has most of the audience’s attention. It’s also important that when the actor is at the front of the stage that it conveys their character properly as all the attention is on them. Well, in sociological terms, Goffman is saying the same thing. Goffman is basically saying that we act differently when in social settings than when we are alone (Goffman, 1959:114). By this, he means that the individual wants to give off a certain image, or is institutionalized to act in a certain way, to the others in front of them when in specific situations. “When an actor takes on an established social role, usually he finds that a particular front has already been established for it” (Goffman, 1959:37). A specific situation, for example, being, when one has an interview for their dream job. This individual will present themselves differently than they would do when they are just being with their friends and portray themselves differently when alone. They would accept everything that comes their way, the colleagues, the boss, the workload etc. whether bad or good. Goffman describes this as actors wearing masks and playing a range of parts. In everyday life we wear masks and we adapt who and what we are depending with who we are interacting with (Goffman, 1959:30). For example, when bumping into someone from different social groups one might want to hide a part of their life but might also want to emphasize another part of their life. When we are in social settings, this is the front stage. One might say they enjoy going to museums just to give the impression that they’re intellectual and smart when actually they don’t enjoy going to museums, they do that to impress the person they’re with for them to like them. Therefore, Goffman believes that there’s no true self as we’re constantly being someone we’re not. That a

Goffman refers to the act of an individual presenting themselves in front of an audience or a specific set of observers a ‘performance’. The performers convey impressions and information to others in order to support the identity they are presenting, some of the factors engrained in the performance are an appropriate setting, manners, appearance, and front. Goffman refers to a front stage, back stage, as well as an off stage, these regions are meant to reflect how an ‘actor’ may act when in front of different audiences or no audience at all. Goffman touches upon how an

Functionalist Erving Goffman studies the sociological approach of Dramaturgy in his book ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ (Goffman, 1959), he built his theory based on earlier work completed by Kenneth Burke. However there are distinct differences in features of the theory between Burke and Goffman as Burke believed that life was in fact a literal

In his book Frame Analysis, Goffman continued his discussion on dramaturgical analysis. He wrote, "What is important is the sense he provides them through his dealing with them of what sort

Goffman studied society and didn’t think what the future can hold as the world today is different to the one he lived in. People are more accepting and embrace originality and uniqueness. There are groups where individuals can be part of and be themselves because they’re surrounded by people like them, so they feel accepted. There’s this big problem where in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” Goffman doesn’t explore the fact that many people have trouble discovering who they truly are, because of limitations. Limitations being that they don’t have the resources to do and discover things and hence, are stuck in this bubble, that Goffman calls a stage. What Goffman also doesn’t explore are the individuals that are marginalized or individuals

Erving Goffman developed the concept that made us understand that life is like play(drama) which has a never-ending and it involves entities of actors, props, writers etc. which involve scripts where individual acts. He further made us understands that our socialization is full of learning how to play a role that has been assigned from other people. In fact, he has brought to our understanding of a life where people act and socialize which consist of our assigned role from other people. Goffman believes that whatever we do, we are playing out some role on the on the stage of life and that comprises of behind the scenes actions and how people are being guided and directed by other individual and he named it front stage and back stage.

In his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) focuses on the self as a staged production in which people actively present themselves to different audiences one encounters. To bolster his conceptualization, Goffman used an interesting metaphor of “all the world’s a stage” (1959, 254). This, he terms as a “dramaturgical approach” (Goffman 1959, 240) in which an actor puts on a show for others; drawing analogies between human behaviors and the theater. Goffman (1959) likens the individual to an actor on stage performing for and with other individuals involved in the situation. Three types of space exist for the actor to perform on, to enact the self, and to interact with others: the front stage, the backstage, the outer region. Goffman (1959) utilizes specific dramaturgical terms such as performance, teams, front and back regions, sign-vehicles, and highlights the process of dramatic realization. These terms will be discussed in the following sections.

Referred to as the “dramaturgical approach to social life and the self,” Goffman’s theory on human interaction hinges on the concept that the “self” does not inherently exist within a person, but instead is actively performed (Goffman, Appelrouth & Edles, 2010, p. 479). In his piece “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to the presentation of self is multifaceted. In order to convey information about the self to others, Goffman argues that people commonly use what he refers to as sign vehicles: setting, appearance, and manner. As the name suggests, the setting is the environment where human action occurs. Appearance refers to how the individual looks and manner is characterized by the way an individual acts. Generally, an individual’s performance provides an opportunity to present to others an “impression that is idealized in several different ways” (Goffman, 1956, p. 22). Goffman also addresses the structure of face-to-face engagements in his piece “Behavior in Public Places.” Since these interactions are social in nature, Goffman explains that “in

Goffman was the first to introduce the topic of dramaturgy in his work. Dramaturgy is his idea that life is a play. The people are actors and the every day world around us is our stage. (1959, p.13) He uses the image of a theatre performance to express the behaviour of people in everyday social interactions. Although not always aware of it, every individual in a social situation is assigned a role in the performance. Every individual obtains a role in social interaction and the audience observes and reacts to the performance. Goffman discussed the three different regions of performance as the front stage, the back stage and off stage. Each region has a particular impact on one’s performance.

Finally the last element which Burke discusses is agency which is the theoretical points, he claims that the whole lot is realised through language. From these elements Goffman then went on to develop his own ‘dramaturgical’ investigations based on six themes: the performance, the team, the region, discrepant roles, communication out of the character and impression management. Nothing of Goffman’s dramaturgical world is quite what it seems. Rather, people are all portrayed as performers enacting rehearsed lines and roles in places that are carefully constructed in order to maximise the potential of deception. He then goes on to suggest that as performers people both ‘give’ and ‘give off’ impressions. It has been suggested that Goffman’s dramaturgical world is thus one of misdirection in which general suspicion is necessary; he developed an interest in espionage practices mainly because he recognised these as extensions of everyday behaviour. Goffman then went on to identify five moves in social interaction which are the ‘unwitting’, the ‘naïve’, the ‘covering’, the ‘uncovering’ and finally the ‘counter uncovering’ move (1959: 11-27). Each of these moves is designed either to achieve some advantage directly, or to reveal the strategies of other players. These moves are used in social worlds, or as Goffman called them, ‘situated activity systems’. Each is regulated by adopted norms known by system’s members. Rather than concentrating on the production of meanings, the

In “Presentations of Self in Everyday Life,” Goffman is constantly explaining how everyday life is a dramaturgy. A dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and essentially the production of a theatrical play. A social situation is much like a play. Every play has a stage, actors, a script, a set, rehearsals, and practices. In a social situation, the stage is where the encounter takes place, the actors are the people involved in the encounter, the script is the social norms of the social encounter, and the set is the environment where the encounter takes place. It takes practices and

Erving Goffman revolves his view of the human life around the belief that we are all actors who have both a front stage behavior and a back stage behavior. From an early age we have become skilled actors and move in and out of roles with precision such as with our family and friends. We follow the formal societal rules when we are on the front stage reciting a script, playing a role. This would include going to work, presenting ourselves as the person we should uphold to take part in society. On the other side, Goffman says our back stage behavior is informal, as we'd act when we are

Erving Goffman sees self-presentation in six aspects, which are all related to the idea of life as a drama; persona, performance, staging, teams, role, personal style. According to Goffman, a persona is when someone wears various personality ‘masks’ depending on which roles they are undertaking, for example, when someone is with their friends the mask they wear defines them as a kind, friendly person whereas when they are with the family the mask will come off and their personality will change. I wear a mask when I’m with my friends and this portrays me as a friendly, outgoing character, whereas the mask I wear at home is loud, moody and unproductive.

Ever since I took drama classes in high school I felt that we always put on an act. A show almost, that we put out for the people we interact with daily. Erving Goffman, “Canadian-American Sociologist” (Encyclopedia In., 2017) also believed this, he compared social interactions to the theater, where individuals take a particular role. According to Goffman this “theatrical metaphor consists of a stage, actors, and an audience” (Crossman, 2014). It also consists of the onstage, backstage and offstage. These three stages show different behavior on a person.