Interactions over structural inequalities Flashcards
Who is the most important person in your notes with regard to the Interactions of Structural Inequalities?
What was his study called?
Date of his book
Erving Goffman
Interaction Order
1983 – quite modern for this text almost Orwellian
List the main principles of Erving Goffmans Interaction Order from 1983.
• Two or more people are physically in the same space.
• They therefore have the potential to interact with each other.
• Actions are not chaotic, but ordered and contain rules
• These interactions are part of the domain of social life and therefore an important art of society’s culture.
Does Goffman agrees with Marxism or Feminism?
No to both.
Rather than some sociologists seeing the interaction order as simply the effects of wider structures and relationships (such as class in Marxism or gender in feminism), Goffman argues that the interaction order is a distinctive sphere of social life in its own right, with its rules that exist independently of other social divisions.
How does Goffman analyse the interaction of people?
This involves the analysis of the immediate presence of other people’s body language, body movement, expressions, emotions, moods etc. The interaction order also requires people to collaborate and co-ordinate their movements and actions. Individuals need to understand and characterise the other individuals with whom they come into contact in order anticipate and understand their actions.
Goffman has two definitions for identification of people, known and unknown. What are these?
Individual Identification
In our interactions, Goffman notes that if we know the person we are interacting with, this is known as ‘individual identification’.
Categoric Identification
Where we do not know the person, then Categoric Identification takes place whereby we categorise individuals according to age, ethnicity, gender, class, appearance etc. The culture of a society influences the way these categorisations are made, but this culture is itself built up through everyday encounters with different people.
List Goffman’s important dates (three):
- Argues that interaction is basically a form of role-playing.
1961: How powerful is a label – A study into mental hospital patients’ behaviour.
- Discovered that everyday life situations were governed by a set of informal rules
1983 Interaction Order
Describe Goffman’s Civil Inattention
Date
Goffman (1972) discovered that everyday life situations were governed by a set of informal rules, for example when walking down a busy high street we don’t constantly bump into each other, we avoid staring at strangers and we avoid acting meaningfully. This is known as ‘civil inattention’. However, as we know, it is considered polite to glance at others as you pass them, and we coordinate our movements with theirs, so we avoid collisions. These informal rules are characteristic of large societies rather than small scale societies that don’t need these rules.
Describe Goffman’s Impression Management
Date
Goffman (1959) argues that interaction is basically a form of role-playing. We are all actors engaged in a drama of everyday life. Goffman argues that our social identity that we display in public is a ‘performance’ which is designed to give a particular image of who we are. We change this according to who we are interacting with, for example our social identity will be different with friends in comparison to parents or teachers. We ‘manage’ our performance according to who we are with. This is known as ‘impression management’. Goffman also argues that our social identity is like acting on a ‘front stage’ where we can use physical props, such as computers, or clothing to give the impression of who we are which then allows us to distance ourselves from other groups, such as teachers wearing a suit to distance themselves from students wearing a uniform.
