On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction
The paper that turns face into an analytical concept for social science, and the source Edmondson (1999) reaches for when establishing that speaking up carries a cost to image. Goffman is explicit that he is formalising an existing idea rather than inventing one, following Chinese usage for giving face and citing it directly. Goffman defines face as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact, and locates it not in the person but diffusely in the flow of events, manifest only when those events are read for the appraisals expressed in them.
The mechanism matters more than the definition. By saying something, a speaker opens himself to the possibility that the recipients will affront him by not listening, or will think him forward, foolish or offensive in what he has said. Fear of losing face therefore stops people initiating contacts in which important information could be transmitted, and Goffman follows this to its conclusion: a person cooperates to save face, finding that there is much to be gained from venturing nothing. Silence is analysed as rational face-preservation rather than as a deficit in whoever stays quiet.
Two further strands do work here. The power gradient sits inside the mechanism rather than beside it: a ranking participant is somewhat independent of the good opinion of the others and finds it practical to be arrogant, sticking to a face regardless of whether the encounter supports it, while those in the power of a fellow participant are very much concerned with the evaluation being made of them and find it difficult to hold a slightly wrong face without becoming embarrassed and apologetic. A footnote quoting Dale on the British civil service is blunter, observing that the importance of feelings varies in close correspondence with the importance of the person who feels. Separately, the analysis of hinting accounts for indirect speech: hinted communication is deniable communication, which lets someone be warned that their current line is leading to loss of face without the warning itself becoming an incident.
Limits: theory built on ethnographic illustration and secondary sources, with no data in the sense an empirical study would supply, and its sources on China and on race read as very much of 1955. The copy read here is the 1972 Penguin reprint in Interaction Ritual; the citation is to the 1955 Psychiatry original.
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