The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Goffman · Voice & Silence, Culture & Context, Origins · University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre (Monograph No. 2) · 1956 · Open access

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The dramaturgical framework, in which Goffman sets out the terms front region, back region and impression management. He offers it as a handbook for studying social life organised within a building or plant, and as an account of how the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself to others. Within an establishment a team of performers cooperates to present a definition of the situation to an audience: the performance is prepared in a back region and presented in a front one, and secrets that could give the show away are kept.

Three strands bear on psychological safety. The working consensus is agreement that is not agreement: each participant suppresses his immediate heartfelt feelings and conveys a view the others can find temporarily acceptable, and in exchange for the tentative official ruling on matters vital to himself he stays silent or non-committal on matters important to others. Goffman treats reciprocal silence as the ordinary working of interaction, not a pathology.

Second, the concealment of error. Mistakes are often corrected before the performance and the signs that they were made are hidden, sustaining an impression of infallibility; officials would correct their reports before a stenographer, let alone a superior, saw them. When a team member errs in front of the audience, the others hold back correction until it has gone, and in authoritarian organisations there is often a strict rule that one superordinate must not show hostility or disrespect toward another before a subordinate. The examples include managers before workers and a consultant careful never to embarrass the impression of competence the patient's own doctor is maintaining.

Third, people as performers are concerned not with realising the standards by which they are judged but with engineering a convincing impression that those standards are being realised; in Goffman's phrase, we are merchants of morality. Solidarity is analysed as concealment as readily as trust: two patrolling police officers who witness each other's illegal and semi-illegal acts stick to each other's story whatever it covers up.

Limits: Goffman calls his illustrations of mixed status, from respectable research to informal memoirs by colourful people, and the claims are illustrated rather than tested. He says the framework is not culture-free, and it carries a 1956 sensibility, including the gendered examples. The copy read is the 1956 Edinburgh monograph, Monograph No. 2, repaginated differently from the 1959 Doubleday Anchor edition.

Goffman, E. (1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre (Monograph No. 2).

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