Framing Social Interaction

Continuities and Cracks in Goffman's Frame Analysis

Anders Persson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317133537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315582931, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book is about Erving Goffman's frame analysis as it, on the one hand, was presented in his 1974 book Frame Analysis and, on the other, was actually conducted in a number of preceding substantial analyses of different aspects of social interaction such as face-work, impression management, fun in games, behavior in public places and stigmatization. There was, in other words, a frame analytic continuity in Goffman's work. In an article published after his death in 1982, Goffman also maintained that he throughout his career had been studying the same object: the interaction order. In this book, the author states that Goffman also applied an overarching perspective on social interaction: the dynamic relation between ritualization, vulnerability and working consensus. However, there were also cracks in Goffman´s work and one is shown here with reference to the leading question in Frame Analysis – what is it that's going on here? While framed on a "microsocial" level, that question ties in with "the interaction order" and frame analysis as a method. If, however, it is framed on a societal level, it mirrors metareflective and metasocial manifestations of changes and unrest in the interaction order that, in some ways, herald the emphasis on contingency, uncertainty and risk in later sociology. Through analyses of social media as a possible new interaction order – where frame disputes are frequent – and of interactional power, the applicability of Goffman's frame analysis is illustrated. As such, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social theory, classical sociology and social interaction.

1 Introduction

In the autumn of 2016 two prominent American men caused dismay by violating the norms of social interaction. One of them was a Republican presidential candidate who with his populist bluster transformed – and continues to transform – American politics into a theatre of the absurd. The second was a musician and poet whose Nobel Prize in literature had just been made public, and who for this reason did nothing other than remain silent. A discussion in the media is underway about the message of the presidential candidate and about whether the old protest singer is a worthy prizewinner. It is, however, interesting that the discussion is also about how these two men create disorder by breaking the frame of what the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–82) called the interaction order, and then primarily with respect to ceremonial rules of behaviour or, to use another word, etiquette. As such, violations against frames are analysed by Goffman in his book Frame Analysis, and in the case of the Nobel prizewinner we may perhaps understand his actions in the following way: ‘every celebration of a person gives power to that person to misbehave unmanageably’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 431). However, the actions of the presidential candidate can hardly be understood in this way.

Trump, Dylan, and frame-breaking

In an article in Washington Post the presidential candidate’s lack of self-discipline is emphasised: ‘Again and again he couldn’t help himself’, and ‘temperament matters’. Trump crowns his contempt for women as independent individuals with the words, ‘such a nasty woman’ instead of even trying to conduct a political conversation with his female combatant (Hohmann, 2016). In a comment in the leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Hillary Clinton is described as ‘normal’ and Trump as ‘childish’ (Björling, 2016a). In addition, Trump committed another crime against democratic etiquette by saying that he will only recognise the election results if he himself wins, which made an editorial writer call this ‘the most shameful statement made by a presidential candidate in a hundred and sixty years’. A year later the infantilisation continues, but now it’s Trumps staff that are the educators and the White House is being compared to an adult day care centre where the staff treats Trump as an ‘undernapped toddler on the verge of a tantrum’ (Graham, 2017). Lack of self-discipline, temperament, normal, childish, shameful, undernapped toddler – it is as if the political stage has become a school. In Sweden we have to go back to the beginning of the 1990s and the political party Ny Demokrati (New Democracy) to find even the hint of a political analogue. What the message of the party – ‘drag under galoscherna’ (‘giving it some welly’) – meant politically, other than a kind of general expression of populist dissatisfaction directed against an allegedly unwieldy bureaucracy, taxes, and rules for entrepreneurs, was probably not very important. It was the belittling of political culture, the violation of etiquette in itself, that was the message and which on that occasion brought the party into the Swedish Parliament.

It is the same way with Trump: the violation of etiquette is his message, not the content, if there even is one. When Trump commits violations of etiquette in debates on prime-time television, it is possible that they are unplanned, which I find hard to believe, but they become his message when voters who have been hit hard by economic crises and competition for low-income jobs receive it. These voters probably do not put their trust in the traditional political elite but are attracted to ‘an otherness’ that does not respect the rules that usually, even in times of crisis, regulate political discourse. So Trump does not have to know very much about politics in order to place himself right in ‘his’ socio-political field. It is enough for him to mutter ‘wrong’ and accuse Clinton of cheating, threaten to put her in jail, and drag her husband’s womanising into the discussion. All this is neither here nor there but that is the very point: Trump’s populism means that he displays a lack of respect for the etiquette of politics. The day after the debate in which a presidential candidate had done the most shameful thing in 160 years we heard his supporters review the debate: ‘Trump hit exactly the right note. He managed to explain what he wants to do on particular issues’ (Björling, 2016b). For those of us who in some sense belong to the system – educated people with jobs and all the things appurtenant to this, and thus with a more or less committed faith in the political system that has to do with acquiring the support of voters for administrating or changing things – this statement is incomprehensible and the right and the left can suddenly be united in their condemnation of Trump’s lack of respect for etiquette. ‘Chaos is also a system, but it is the system of the others’, to borrow the words of Imre Kertész (2015).

Erving Goffman, whose sociology forms the topic of this book, developed a number of concepts in order to understand the order of social interaction. For instance, he made a useful analytic differentiation between various kinds of verbal and corporeal expressions that we communicate with when we interact with other people: expressions given, over which the sender has relatively much control, and expressions given off, over which the receiver has greater control because they are the result of the receiver’s interpretations of what the sender communicates. Trump’s expressions given strike the right chord in certain voters, but it seems to be their interpretation of the expressions given off that provides substance to Trump’s message, and the violation of etiquette then acquires great importance. When Trump burns his bridges, socially speaking, not least when he refuses to recognise the metapolitics that secure the regulations and etiquette of politics across party lines, his voters appear to interpret this as his being serious about his politics. After Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017, a kind of organised division into two of the expressions was made that makes it possible for Trump to continue violating etiquette in his Twitter messages, while the official presidency is, to a great extent, separated from these. He thus communicates his messages over two different channels, the one being more of a channel for voters and the other more of a channel for the presidency. Once in a while the division between these two is not upheld; e.g., when Trump in March of 2017 refused to shake hands in public with Angela Merkel, but the two channels are mainly kept separate. Role distance, to use another of Goffman’s concepts, is thus created – perhaps even a double role distance, where Trump as a populist distances himself in his Twitter messages from the political etiquette of the presidency while as the president he simultaneously assumes the role of a realist politician who, in opposition to his populist messages during the election campaign, bombs Syria and IS in Afghanistan, lowers taxes for high income earners, and celebrates NATO. Five months into his presidency an editorial in The Economist summed it up as follows (‘Donald Trump’s Washington is Paralysed,’ 2017): ‘As harmful as what Mr Trump does is the way he does it.’ A Swedish columnist adds to this: ‘Never before has the United States had a president so utterly devoid of style and dignity, a vulgar, ostentatious billionaire who never reads books and who occasionally encourages his followers to use violence’ (Ohlsson, 2017).

But what about Dylan? His violation of etiquette vis-à-vis the Nobel prize institution is his silence, and this seems to upset some people as much as Trump’s talk, and also here a kind of pedagogical discourse develops. In a column we can read the following: ‘Why the hell doesn’t the man say anything? What is it he’s brooding over? How hard can it be to pick up the phone and say “YES, PLEASE”…’. And a few paragraphs later: ‘Perhaps Bob Dylan is silent because he quite simply hasn’t learned how to behave properly. Maybe he just needs some help getting on the right track’ (Hilton, 2016). Many other people, soon enough an entire village, wanted to participate in the education of this 75-year-old rascal who was now also described as ‘impolite and arrogant’ by one of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy, but the etiquette expert Magdalena Ribbing offers a completely different analysis: ‘He’s been awarded this prize for being a person of genius, and one has to allow geniuses to have their peculiarities. He may not have been awarded it at all if he had been a well-groomed person in a grey suit who replied to invitations within a week’ (Jones, 2016). To return to the expressions given and given off, we never really know what expressions given off really means, and they thus invite interpretation. Perhaps in this case the silence is Dylan’s almost inscrutable expression, left to others to interpret.

What is it that’s going on here?

This introductory exercise shows that Goffman’s perspective on social interaction is still useful, in spite of its foundations being laid down in the 1950s. When Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959 and partly based on his doctoral dissertation from 1953, develops a dramaturgical perspective on social interaction in organisations and institutions, he justifies this strategy as a complement to four other perspectives used at that time and still found frequently in social science studies: the technical one, which emphasises efficiency; the political one, which largely has to do with the exercise of power; the structural one, which focuses on social status and relationships in networks; and the cultural one, which deals with moral values (Goffman, 1959, p. 239ff). The dramaturgical perspective emphasises what Goffman called impression management, which in part means that both individual and collective actors to a lesser or greater extent attempt to act or make it appear as if they are acting largely in accordance with community and social norms for how actors should be, act, and interact in different contexts, and in part means that actors attempt to influence other people so that they will embrace the actors’ own definition of a common social situation. In a way it can be said that a dramaturgical perspective represents a combination of the political and cultural perspectives, because it combines an exercise of power in the form of influence (albeit, on a level of social interaction rather than on a societal level) with values, or, in Goffman’s version, norms.

Concretely, the dramaturgical perspective means two things: first, that Goffman strongly emphasises the expressive aspect of social action, by which it should be understood that not only do we act, but we also think about how our actions are perceived by other people, or, in other words, the impressions our actions give rise to in other people. Secondly, it means that Goffman is using quite a few concepts from the world of the theatre in order to emphasise precisely the expressive aspect of action; e.g., role, performance, stage, frontstage, and backstage. This perspective could probably have been perceived as superficial when the book was published, but if we see it as a prophecy it has been extremely successful. Returning to Trump, one may well ask what he is other than a product of a certain setting, not least because he is completely ignorant, politically speaking. His thing is impression management! – not least through the expression ‘You’re fired!’, Trump’s stock line in the reality show The Apprentice earlier and which now also appears to have become his stock line in the White House. The dramaturgical perspective has also surfed the neoliberal tsunami of marketisation, which has not only fragmented the only real existing alternative to capitalism as a system, but also, with the help of new public management, transformed almost all the institutions in society that are not actors in the market into actors in politically constructed markets, where they are forced to sell something that previously was not a commodity and thus implement impression management. Since 1959 the marketisation of society as a whole has increased, and impression management now describes a completely central aspect of the actions of market actors, whether they are individuals or organisations. Impression management in the form of inflated real estate values and share prices, doped-up performances, and rigged CVs, has thus been entered into the annals of history with names like Fannie Mae, Kaupthing Bank, Justin Gatlin, and Paolo Macchiarini. Goffman’s perspective – which in addition consists of so much more than a dramaturgical perspective – is in many ways more alive than ever before.

If by way of introduction I should attempt to summarise my view of Goffman’s sociology, I would like to emphasise that Goffman has a kind of generic perspective, which in Chapter 3 is presented as the dynamic relation between ritualisation, vulnerability, and a temporarily working consensus. This is a kind of metaperspective on social interaction that to a great extent decides how Goffman interprets and understands the object of study that links his texts: the social interaction order. Within the framework of this object of study, three themes stand out in Goffman’s sociology. First, a theme of politeness and respect, which was expressed clearly in his investigations of rituals in the 1950s and of social interaction in the 1960s. Second, the theme of social illusion, which is pervasive because of Goffman’s particular interest in the construction of social illusions that follows from expectations of normality and that is created by us all under the cover of the rituals of everyday life when we engage in impression management but also by social imposters of different kinds, and that is given significant expression in, e.g., the books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Stigma around 1960 and Frame Analysis from the 1970s. Third, and finally, a theme of crisis in the 1970s within whose framework an investigation of the crisis of the social interaction order can be discerned, not least in the books Relations in Public 1971 and Frame Analysis. At the same time that there is a frame analytic continuity in Goffman’s studies of the interaction order, we can also, on a different level, see a kind of break that first becomes clear in the book Relations in Public (1971). While the texts preceding this book were to a great extent characterised by assumptions about order and accounts that suggested order, Goffman slips in a dissonant chord in Relations in Public that may be called contingency. Contingency also becomes a powerful theme in the book that followed three years later, Frame Analysis, something that can be illustrated not least by the question that gives meaning to his frame analysis itself: What is it that’s going on here?

Part I
Goffman and the interaction order

2 Goffman style: Outsider on the inside

Erving Goffman was born in 1922 into a Russian-Jewish family in Canada.¹ His parents had immigrated from the Ukraine just before and during World War I and lived at first in the small community of Mannville, where they ran a shop, and later in Dauphin. When Goffman was 15 years old, his family moved to Winnipeg, a city that at this time had around a quarter of a million inhabitants. According to Winkin (2010), Goffman was not particularly good at school, but he was very interested in his chemistry set, with which he experimented when at home. Goffman was described by a classmate from St. John’s Technical High School in Winnipeg as being ‘in a different world: encapsulated, aloof and remote’. He was one of the gang, but according to Winkin (2010, p. 56f) he was different because Goffman’s family differed socially, politically, and culturally to some extent from many other families in the area: they lived in a slightly better area, were not politically active, and did not go to synagogue.

Goffman began his undergraduate studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1939, and his major was chemistry. After a break spent working at the National Film Board of Canada, he continued his studies and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 with a major in sociology. In the same year he was admitted as a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago, received his Master’s degree from there in 1949, and in 1953 defended his doctoral dissertation ‘Communication Conduct in an Island Community’, which had its origins in fieldwork conducted on the Shetland island of Unst. He was a teacher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 1949–51 and worked as a research assistant from 1952 to 1954 at the University of Chicago in two different research projects, whose leaders were Edward A. Shils and E. C. Banfield, respectively. The following year he was employed as a guest researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States and, among other things, spent one year of participant observation in a mental health institution. In 1958, Herbert Blumer invited Goffman to the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1962. During a period in the 1960s he worked as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Las Vegas, and also advanced to become a so-called pit boss.² It is said that his stay at the casino was a participant observation, and it is mentioned in passing in the publications where Goffman writes about gambling (1967 and 1970 [1969]). Goffman often played blackjack in Las Vegas and was reported to the police for card counting in the mid 1960s, something that was also reported to the management of UC Berkeley. Furthermore, Goffman spent the year 1966 at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, and was in 1968 appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the double disciplines perhaps mirroring that he empirically worked as an anthropologist, and theoretically as a sociologist, where he stayed until his death in 1982. In his obituary in Time Magazine (6 December 1982), Goffman is described as an ‘unorthodox sociologist whose provocative books […] developed his somewhat mordant theories of contemporary ritual, based upon the overlooked small print of daily life’.

In a brief memoir, Thomas Schelling (2015), winner of the 2005 Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the person who invited Goffman to be a guest researcher at the Harvard Center for International Affair, writes: ‘I consider him one of the two or three greatest social scientists of his century. I’ve often remarked that if there were a Nobel Prize for sociology and/or social psychology he’d deserve to be the first one considered. He was endlessly creative’. Today many people, but far from everyone, agree with Fine and Manning’s (2003, p. 58) description of Goffman as

the most significant American social theorist of the twentieth century; his work is widely read and remains capable of redirecting disciplinary thought. His unique ability to generate innovative and apt metaphors, coupled with the ability to name cogent regularities of social behavior, has provided him an important position in the sociological canon. Further, his sardonic, outsider stance has made Goffman a revered figure – an outlaw theorist who came to exemplify the best of the sociological imagination.

As has already been mentioned, Goffman published his first book – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – in 1959, and he thereafter published an additional ten books and collections of essays, the last one in 1981 with the title Forms of Talk. At the time of writing, all of Goffman’s eleven books are still in print, including Gender Advertisements, which was long out of print and now has a new cover that really illustrates Goffman’s words on the last page of the book that advertisers ‘make frivolous use of what is already something considerably cut off from contextual controls’. Goffman’s first article had the title ‘Symbols of Class Status’ and was published in the British Journal of Sociology in 1951. In total, he published twenty-three articles in scholarly jour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Goffman and the interaction order
• Part II: Frame and framing
• Part III: Framing social media, online chess, and power
• Part IV: Conclusions
• Epilogue: framed boundlessness – action and everyday life in Las Vegas
• Complete bibliography: Erving Goffman’s writings
• References
• Index