Goffman's Interaction Order at the Margins: Stigma, Role, and Normalization in the Outreach Encounter

Abstract

This article considers Goffman's conceptualization of interaction order at the margins of society in encounters between urban welfare workers and their clients. Observations from these encounters demonstrate practices relating to the situated management of stigma and identity, and the accomplishment of role within these service encounters. A reading of Goffman's theoretical contribution lies in revealing how social actors and social structures are realized in situ within the constraints of the interaction order sui generis. The article discusses three aspects of the outreach encounter, namely, (1) the accomplishment of role and motive, (2) the sequential phases of the outreach encounter, and (3) “the normalization ritual,” and introduces the concept of willful disattention.

Experiencing Stigma and Exclusion: The Influence of Neoliberal Perspectives, Practices, and Policies on Living with Chronic Illness and Disability

“…Perhaps ironically, functionaries who disallow disability benefits may use similar techniques of normalizing their applicants' disabling attributes by overlooking their disabilities—which is what Robin James Smith () found outreach workers doing in their encounters with homeless clients. However, these workers aimed to give their discredited clients' dignity, rather than to deny their struggles to survive.…”

Professional helping as negotiation in motion: social work as work on the move

“…Following Goffman, here the car acts as a kind of mobile "backstage" where the performer can "prepare" themselves for the next encounter and also recover from the last performance. This has similarities with how outreach workers use their van as a backstage in work with homeless people (Smith 2011). Were the social worker headed in a different direction and her destination was the office or home the contained noise of the music could be used to help her to acknowledge her emotions and self regulate by offloading at least some of them in the car.…”

Pedestrian circulations: urban ethnography, the mobilities paradigm and outreach work

“…As Rowe (1999) has ably demonstrated, encounters between outreach workers and their homeless clients can involve some hard bargaining and careful moves as each party looks to secure a possible advantage or gain; in this and other ways the homeless are not best imagined as simply 'acted upon' by those tasked to help them (Keil, 2013: 394). Encounters and interaction between homeless clients and outreach workers reward close examination, and we have pursued this elsewhere (Smith, 2011). 4 We have concentrated our attention here on the first two terms in what is actually a three-part typology.…”