The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
The dramaturgical framework, and the account of ordinary interaction as staged performance that the vocabulary of front stage, back stage and impression management comes from. Within a social establishment a team of performers cooperates to present a definition of the situation to an audience; there is a division into back region, where the performance is prepared, and front region, where it is presented; access between them is controlled, and among team members familiarity prevails and secrets that could give the show away are shared and kept.
Three strands bear directly on psychological safety. The working consensus describes agreement that is not agreement: participants do not say candidly what they feel but suppress their immediate heartfelt feelings and convey a view the others can find temporarily acceptable, concealing their own wants behind statements asserting values everyone will give lip service to. Goffman adds a division of definitional labour, in which each participant gets the official ruling on matters vital to them and unimportant to others, and in exchange stays silent or non-committal on matters important to others but not to them. Reciprocal silence is described as the ordinary working of interaction rather than as a pathology.
Second, the rule against correcting a colleague in front of the audience. When a team member makes a mistake before an audience, the others suppress the desire to punish and instruct until the audience has gone, and in authoritarian organisations, where a team of superordinates maintains a show of being right every time, one superordinate must not show hostility or disrespect toward another in front of a subordinate. The examples are army officers before enlisted men, teachers before students, managers before workers, nurses before patients, and a consultant careful never to say anything in front of a patient that would embarrass the impression of competence the patient's own doctor is maintaining.
Third, performers are concerned not with the moral issue of realising the standards by which they are judged but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that those standards are being realised: as performers, in Goffman's phrase, we are merchants of morality. Solidarity is analysed as concealment as readily as trust, the example being a patrolling pair of police officers who witness each other's illegal and semi-illegal acts, are well placed to discredit each other, and instead possess heroic solidarity and stick to each other's story whatever it covers up.
Limits: no data and no method, with claims illustrated rather than tested, and a 1956 sensibility throughout, including the gendered examples. The copy read and verified here is the 1956 Edinburgh monograph, Social Sciences Research Centre Monograph No. 2, which is repaginated differently from the 1959 Doubleday Anchor edition that later work cites.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →