Breaking down the question
The question is directed at a specific framework — Erving Goffman's dramaturgy — and asks how it illuminates everyday life. The verb enable signals that you must show the analytical payoff: what this perspective lets us see that we might otherwise miss.
A strong answer therefore does two things. It explains the theatrical metaphor and its key concepts — performance, front and back stage, impression management, face-work — and then demonstrates their explanatory power by applying them to ordinary situations: a job interview, a classroom, a shop counter. The emphasis should fall on everyday, face-to-face interaction, since that is Goffman's domain.
At 10 marks, keep the exposition tight and reserve space to show the perspective actually at work.
How to approach it
Open by placing Goffman within the interactionist tradition and stating his central metaphor: social life is like a theatre, and the individual is a performer managing the impression they give to an audience.
Then unfold the core concepts. In the presentation of self, individuals engage in impression management, using a front — setting, appearance and manner — to convey a desired self. Goffman distinguishes the front stage, where the performance is staged for others, from the back stage, where the performer relaxes and prepares away from the audience. Bring in face-work, the effort to maintain one's own and others' dignity in interaction, and the way teams cooperate to sustain a shared definition of the situation. You can consult our Mead and self notes for the interactionist background from which Goffman departs.
Conclude by drawing out what the perspective enables: it renders the taken-for-granted order of daily encounters visible and shows how the self is constituted in interaction.
Model answer
The dramaturgical perspective, developed by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, treats social interaction as a kind of theatre. The individual is a performer, others are the audience, and each encounter is a performance in which the actor seeks to project a particular impression of self and to have it accepted.
Its central concept is impression management: in every situation people work, consciously or not, to control the image others form of them. To do so they deploy a front — the physical setting, their dress and appearance, and their manner. Goffman's most fertile distinction is between front stage and back stage. Front stage is where the performance is enacted before an audience and the actor keeps to the expected role; back stage is the private region where the mask can drop, where one prepares, rehearses and relaxes out of sight. A waiter who is deferential at the customer's table but casual and candid in the kitchen exemplifies the shift between the two regions. Goffman adds the idea of face-work — the small courtesies, tact and repair with which people protect their own and others' dignity — and of teams, whose members cooperate to sustain a common definition of the situation, as a family might present a united front to a guest.
The perspective enables understanding in several ways. It makes the invisible orderliness of everyday life visible, showing that even the most routine encounters — a job interview, a classroom lesson, a first date, a transaction at a counter — are delicately staged accomplishments. It reveals the self not as a fixed inner essence but as something produced and negotiated through interaction, an effect of successful performance rather than its cause. And it exposes the moral texture of ordinary conduct, the constant, tacit cooperation by which people help one another save face and keep interaction running smoothly. In these ways dramaturgy gives sociology a precise vocabulary for the micro-order of social life that grander theories overlook.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner wants to see the framework explained and applied. Scripts that merely list Goffman's terms without showing them at work in recognisable situations answer only half the question, since the word enable calls for demonstrated explanatory value.
The strongest answers deploy the front stage and back stage distinction with a concrete everyday illustration and draw the deeper conclusion that the self is constituted in interaction rather than pre-given. Locating Goffman within micro-sociology and interactionism, and noting that dramaturgy illuminates precisely the routine order that macro theories neglect, signals the analytical grasp examiners look for at this level.