Goffman - The Interaction Order

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) is the most widely read sociologist of the twentieth century and the hardest to classify. He founded no school, wrote no methods textbook, refused most labels applied to him, and produced eleven books that changed how the discipline looks at the smallest units of social life.

Lesson 2.4.2 introduced dramaturgy as vocabulary. This lesson takes his whole programme, and its central claim: that the face-to-face encounter is a domain of social organisation in its own right, with its own rules, its own violations and its own sanctions — not a place where larger structures are merely enacted.

Watch someone leave a lift.

Two strangers are in a lift. It stops at the wrong floor; the doors open on an empty corridor; the doors close. Neither has spoken.

And in that four seconds, something happened. One of them made a small noise — a breath, an "mm," an eyebrow. Not to communicate information. To acknowledge that the two of them had just shared a minor absurdity, and that they are the kind of people who notice.

Now watch what happens when someone trips on a flat pavement.

They almost never simply continue walking. They look back at the ground, as though to identify the obstacle. Or they perform a small skip, converting the stumble into something intentional. Or they check their shoe.

Nobody is watching. Or if someone is, they are a stranger who will never be seen again. And still, almost universally, the performance occurs.

Goffman's question: why?

Not "why are people vain" — that is a psychological answer to a sociological question. His answer is that the encounter itself makes demands. To be present among others is to be committed to sustaining a working definition of the situation and of oneself within it, and a stumble momentarily threatens the definition — of oneself as a competent adult in control of their body. The look at the pavement is a repair, and it is addressed less to the audience than to the situation.

And the fact that we do it when alone with strangers, or effectively alone, is the evidence that this is not manipulation of an audience. It is the maintenance of an order.

Goffman's central claim, argued across thirty years and stated most directly in his 1982 presidential address to the American Sociological Association — delivered posthumously, as he died before he could give it:

"The interaction order" is a substantive domain in its own right.

Not a level at which macro forces are expressed. Not a residual category for what structural analysis cannot reach. A distinct domain of social organisation, with its own regularities, its own normative demands, and its own kinds of violation and repair.

The argument for this: whenever people are in one another's immediate physical presence, a set of requirements comes into force that are not derivable from their statuses, their interests, or the institutions around them. How close to stand. Where to look and for how long. When to speak. How to enter and leave. What to notice and what to studiously not notice. How to help someone who has failed at any of these without making it worse.

These requirements are remarkably stable across settings and cultures in form, even where their content varies. And they are enforced by sanctions — embarrassment, awkwardness, the small horror of a violation — that are among the most powerful in social life, despite carrying no formal penalty whatsoever.

Goffman's whole career is the study of this domain. And his relationship to the rest of sociology is a claim about division of labour: the interaction order has a "loose coupling" with institutions — they influence each other, and neither reduces to the other.

Dramaturgy

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, 1959) is the most famous work, and the metaphor is more disciplined than its popular use suggests.

The premise: when a person appears before others, they inevitably project a definition of the situation and a claim about who they are. Others, in turn, must decide how to treat them, and they do so on the basis of that projection.

Front stage — where the performance is given, before an audience. Back stage — where the performance is prepared, props are stored, and the performer can drop the front. Front — the standardised expressive equipment: setting (the physical scene), appearance (what one's dress and manner say about status), and manner (what they say about the interaction role one expects to play).

Impression management — the techniques by which a performance is sustained. Dramaturgical loyalty, discipline and circumspection — the requirements on team members: not to betray the show, to maintain composure while performing, and to choose settings and audiences carefully. Teams — the crucial and under-noticed concept: most performances are collective, and a team's members are bound by mutual dependence on each other's discretion. Every team member can wreck the show.

The misreading that ruins the concept, and Goffman's own correction.

The popular reading is cynical: everyone is faking, life is manipulation, the self is a con.

Goffman explicitly rejects this. His performers are frequently sincere — they believe in the impression they foster — and he distinguishes them from the cynical performer only as two ends of a continuum along which people move.

And more importantly: the performance is not optional and not a deviation from some authentic alternative. There is no unperformed way of being present among others. Even sincerity is performed, because the appearance of sincerity has to be produced. The choice is not between performing and being genuine; it is between performances.

His famous conclusion about the self:

"The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location... the self is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented."

That is not cynicism. It is a sociological theory of the self, and it is Mead's (2.3.3) pushed one step further: the self is not merely formed in interaction but produced by each interaction, as an effect.

Face-work and the ritual order

Goffman's deepest contribution, and the one that connects him to Durkheim (4.2.6).

Face — "the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact."

Face is not a possession. It is on loan from the encounter, and it is lost, saved, given and threatened moment by moment.

Face-work — the actions taken to make what one is doing consistent with face. It has two forms: the avoidance process (staying away from topics and situations that would threaten face) and the corrective process (the ritual sequence by which an offence is repaired).

The corrective interchange has four moves, and Goffman's specification of them is exact:

Challenge — attention is called to the misconduct. Offering — the offender is given a chance to correct it: an apology, an account, a joke, a re-framing. Acceptance — the offering is accepted. Thanks — the offender expresses gratitude for being let off.

Watch this happen after any minor social accident. It runs in seconds, it follows the sequence, and it is almost never varied.

The person as a sacred object.

Goffman's essay "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor" (1956) makes the move that ties his whole programme to Durkheim.

Durkheim argued that societies set apart sacred objects, surround them with prohibitions, and perform rituals towards them (4.2.6). Goffman's claim is that in modern society the sacred object is the individual person, and that the small rituals of everyday interaction are the rites protecting it.

Deference — the ceremonial activity by which appreciation is conveyed to a recipient. It has two forms: presentational rituals (greetings, invitations, compliments, small services) and avoidance rituals (the respect shown by keeping a distance — not asking, not looking, not intruding).

Demeanour — the ceremonial conduct by which a person presents themselves as someone of desirable qualities: composure, poise, self-control.

And the two are reciprocal: I maintain my demeanour so that you can offer me deference; my deference confirms your standing. Each of us is dependent on others for the sacred character of our own self.

Which yields the sentence that is Goffman's answer to what holds modern society together: "the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts."

This is the cult of the individual (4.2.5) observed at the scale of a conversation, and it is a genuine unification of Durkheim's macro-sociology of religion with the micro-study of interaction.

Stigma

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) is his most widely used book outside sociology.

Stigma is not an attribute. It is a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype — a discrepancy between a person's virtual social identity (what we anticipate them to be) and their actual social identity (what they prove to be).

Three types: abominations of the body (physical deformities); blemishes of individual character (addiction, imprisonment, mental illness, unemployment); and tribal stigma of race, nation and religion, transmitted through lineages.

The crucial distinction: the discredited (whose stigma is visible or known) versus the discreditable (whose stigma is not yet known). Their problems are different. The discredited must manage tension in encounters; the discreditable must manage information — passing, covering, disclosing, and deciding to whom, when and how.

Passing — concealing the stigma entirely. Covering — acknowledging it while minimising its obtrusiveness. The own — others with the same stigma, who provide instruction and moral support. The wise — normals who are accepted as honorary members, usually through work or family.

The move that makes Stigma more than a study of a special population comes near the end, and it is easy to miss.

Goffman lists the requirements for being fully unstigmatised in mid-century America, and the list is deliberately absurd: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and with a recent record in sports.

"Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself... as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior."

And the conclusion: "the normal and the stigmatised are not persons but rather perspectives." Everyone is stigmatised in some settings and normal in others. Stigma is a general feature of social life, not a property of a minority.

Which reframes the whole subject. The question is not "what is wrong with stigmatised people?" but "what work does everyone do, all the time, to manage the discrepancy between what they are taken to be and what they are?"

And its practical afterlife is enormous. Stigma is one of the most cited works in medical sociology, disability studies, mental health research and the sociology of sexuality — and the discredited/discreditable distinction is the single most useful analytical tool in any of them, because it identifies that concealment is itself continuous labour with its own costs.

Frames

Frame Analysis (1974) is his longest and most difficult book, and its central concept has travelled further than any other.

A frame is the answer to the question "what is it that's going on here?" — the organising principle that governs how an event is defined and how one is to participate in it.

Primary frameworks are the basic schemes by which we make sense of raw occurrences: natural (unguided physical events) and social (guided by intelligence and subject to standards).

Keying — the transformation of an activity into something patterned on it but understood as something else. A fight becomes play-fighting; an operation becomes a demonstration; a threat becomes a joke. Keyings can be layered: a rehearsal of a play about a rehearsal.

Fabrication — an intentional effort to induce a false belief about what is going on. Cons, stings, surprise parties, experiments with deception.

And frame breaks — the moments when the definition collapses. The actor who forgets a line; the joke that lands as an insult; the funeral where someone laughs. Goffman's method throughout is to study the breaks, because a frame is invisible while working.

And frame analysis's afterlife outside sociology is substantial: framing in media studies and political communication; frame alignment in social movement research (Snow and Benford, 11.2), which is one of the most productive concepts in that field; and framing effects in behavioural economics, arrived at independently by Kahneman and Tversky.

Go deeper

The method, and the objection to it

Goffman's method is his most criticised feature. He used ethnography (Asylums), participant observation (his Shetland fieldwork underlying Presentation of Self), and an enormous, eclectic archive of newspaper stories, etiquette manuals, memoirs, novels, con artists' autobiographies and observed fragments.

He rarely specified sampling, made no reliability claims, and did not tell the reader how he knew. His advice to students, in a late lecture on fieldwork, was essentially to go and be there, get into the setting, and stay long enough to become insensitive to it.

The objection: this is unverifiable. The examples are selected; the categories are the analyst's; a contrary case would not be visible in the text. Goffman's writing persuades by recognition — the reader thinks "yes, that is exactly what happens" — and recognition is not evidence.

The reply: the concepts have proved enormously generative, have been operationalised and tested by others, and have survived. Conversation analysis (5.3.1) supplied the rigour Goffman lacked and confirmed a great deal of what he claimed about the sequential organisation of interaction.

The fair position: Goffman was a conceptual innovator of the first rank whose evidentiary practice would not pass a modern review, and whose concepts have been validated by people using better methods. Both halves.

The political criticism

Alvin Gouldner's attack (1970) is the sharpest: Goffman's sociology is one of "the cocktail party," concerned with the presentation of self among people who have selves to present, and systematically silent about the institutional and economic order that determines who gets to perform what.

The partial defence: Asylums is about the destruction of the self by an institution; Stigma is about people excluded from full participation; and Goffman's late work on gender advertisements (1979) and on the "arrangement between the sexes" analyses how gender inequality is produced in the smallest gestures — the ritual subordination visible in advertising's poses, the licensed familiarity, the "function ranking" in which men are shown instructing women.

And Goffman's own answer, in his 1982 address: "loose coupling." The interaction order and the institutional order influence one another and neither determines the other, and studying the first is not a claim that the second does not exist.

Whether that is a defence or a concession is a fair question, and it depends on whether one thinks the encounter can be understood without the structure. Bourdieu (5.10) thought not, and his habitus is substantially an attempt to explain what people bring to Goffman's encounters and why they bring different things.

The reach

Sociology: total institutions (2.3.7), stigma, the sociology of mental health, medical sociology, the sociology of gender, and the entire study of face-to-face interaction.

Beyond it: framing in political communication and media studies; face and politeness theory in linguistics (Brown and Levinson's politeness theory is built directly on Goffman's face); conversation analysis; human-computer interaction and interface design; performance studies; and management writing on impression management, usually in a debased form.

And in ordinary language: front stage and back stage, face-saving, stigma, and framing are all Goffman's, and are used daily by people who have never heard of him — obliteration by incorporation (5.1.2), operating again.

"Dramaturgy means everyone is fake." Goffman's performers are frequently sincere, and there is no unperformed way of being present among others. The choice is between performances.

"The self is an illusion." His claim is that the self is a dramatic effect produced by scenes, not that there is nobody there. That is a theory of the self's mode of existence.

"Stigma is about disabled or marginalised people." Goffman's conclusion is that "the normal and the stigmatised are not persons but rather perspectives," and that everyone is both, in different settings.

"Goffman was a symbolic interactionist." He was trained at Chicago and shaped by it, and he resisted the label, claiming the interaction order as a domain rather than a level. His debt to Durkheim is at least as large as his debt to Mead.

"His method was rigorous." It was not, by modern standards, and the concepts nonetheless survived because others tested them with better methods.

"Goffman ignored power." Asylums, Stigma and Gender Advertisements are all about it. The fair charge is that he studied its enactment in encounters and not its distribution.

Why it matters

It establishes a domain. The claim that the face-to-face encounter has its own organisation, not derivable from institutions, is Goffman's central contribution — and it is why the study of interaction is a field rather than a footnote.

It supplies the most transferable set of concepts in this Part. Front and back stage, face and face-work, deference and demeanour, stigma and the discredited/discreditable distinction, framing and keying. Every one of them can be applied this afternoon, to anything.

It unifies Durkheim's sociology of religion with the study of conversation. The person as sacred object, protected by everyday ritual, is a genuine theoretical achievement — the cult of the individual (4.2.5) observed at the scale where it actually operates.

And it demonstrates that the small is not the trivial. A discipline that studies revolutions and class structures might reasonably think a stumble on a pavement beneath its notice. Goffman showed that the rules governing that stumble are as systematic, as consequential and as strictly enforced as any law — and that most of what happens to most people, most of the time, happens at that scale.

The interaction order is Goffman's central claim: the face-to-face encounter is a substantive domain in its own right, with its own regularities, demands and sanctions — "loosely coupled" with institutions, not reducible to them.

Dramaturgy: front stage and back stage; front as setting, appearance and manner; impression management; teams bound by mutual dependence on each other's discretion. And the conclusion — "the self is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented" — is a theory of the self, not cynicism. There is no unperformed way of being present among others.

Face is "the positive social value a person effectively claims" — held on loan from the encounter. Face-work runs through avoidance and correction, and the corrective interchange has four moves: challenge, offering, acceptance, thanks.

Deference and demeanour: the person as sacred object, protected by presentational and avoidance rituals — Durkheim's cult of the individual at the scale of a conversation. "The individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts."

Stigma is a relationship between attribute and stereotype, not an attribute — a discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. The discredited manage tension; the discreditable manage information, through passing and covering. And "the normal and the stigmatised are not persons but rather perspectives."

Frames answer "what is it that's going on here?", with keying, fabrication, and frame breaks as the method of study — and an afterlife in media framing, movement frame alignment, and behavioural economics.

The objections: an evidentiary practice that would not pass modern review, though the concepts were later validated by conversation analysis; and Gouldner's charge of a sociology of the cocktail party, answered partly by Asylums, Stigma and Gender Advertisements, and partly by the concession of loose coupling.

Interaction order — the domain of social organisation constituted by face-to-face co-presence.

Front stage / back stage — where a performance is given, and where it is prepared.

Front — setting, appearance and manner: the expressive equipment of a performance.

Impression management — the techniques by which a definition of the situation is sustained.

Face — the positive social value claimed by a person in an encounter.

Face-work — action taken to keep conduct consistent with face; avoidance and correction.

Corrective interchange — the four-move ritual of challenge, offering, acceptance and thanks.

Deference / demeanour — appreciation conveyed to another, and the qualities one presents in oneself.

Stigma — a discrediting discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity.

Discredited / discreditable — whether the stigma is known; the difference between managing tension and managing information.

Passing / covering — concealing a stigma entirely, or minimising its obtrusiveness.

Frame — the organising principle answering "what is it that's going on here?"

Keying / fabrication — transformation of an activity into a patterned alternative, and the induction of false belief about what is occurring.

One — catalogue a corrective interchange. After the next minor social accident you witness, write down the four moves. They will be there, in order, in under ten seconds.

Two — find your back stage. Identify the places where you drop a front, and who is permitted there. Then ask what happens when someone from the front stage appears in one.

Three — apply discredited/discreditable. Take any concealable attribute and list the specific labour of managing information about it: whom to tell, when, how, and what each disclosure costs. That labour is invisible from outside and constant from inside.

Four — break a frame gently. Answer a rhetorical question literally, or treat a joke as a proposal. Note how quickly the repair machinery engages. (Nothing that would distress anyone — 2.4.3's ethics apply.)

Five — read the Shetland chapter. The opening of Presentation of Self is freely available in most libraries and is among the most enjoyable forty pages in the discipline.