Erving Goffman Social Interaction Theory

Erving Goffman is considered as “one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable practitioners of social science” (Smith, 2006:1), and is known worldwide for his works, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”. This publication pioneered his perspective on social interaction and the concept of self, and throughout these works, he aimed to outline the way that he believed social life works and essentially how it is made up. Moreover, these works presented ideas in which had not been previously proposed, or even mentioned, before by other sociologists such as Marx, Weber or Durkheim. Goffman received copious amounts of both criticism and praise for this writing, but it is most certainly one of great interest and has sparked much debate over …show more content…
There are most definitely criticisms to his work’s that suggest otherwise. Goffman’s writings were published many years before computers, tablets and phones were considered as a normal and important part within society. His findings were focused on that of “face to face interaction” (Manning, 1992,4). Many of Goffman’s theories were certainly applicable to real-life, everyday situations, and explaining motivations behind said every day behaviours. Although there are most certainly similar aspects of social interaction both face-to-face and through the use of technology there are in fact some unparalleled theories. Furthermore, at the time in which Goffman was writing, in 1959, society was a very different place to what it is like today and thus the way in which individuals engage with each other has also inevitably changed also. Secondly, a criticism in which Goffman received off of a number of fellow sociologists is that his ideas and conceptions can be considered as somewhat simplistic- making it difficult to apply fully to modern sociology. It has been said that “his concepulizations were always based on empirical exemplars”, gathered from questionable sources and his works lacked organization (Psathas:1996:1). Moreover, another criticism which Goffman received in terms of whether it is relevant to today’s society is that his findings can only be generalised to a small population, particularly white, Western and middle class- a fact that he himself proclaims, “my own experience has been mainly with middle-class conduct in a few regions of America, and it is to this most of my comments apply”. This is undeniably bound to receive some criticism