2011
DOI: 10.1177/0952695111398828
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The con man as model organism: the methodological roots of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical self

Abstract: This article offers a historical analysis of the relationship between the practice of participant-observation among American sociologists and Erving Goffman's dramaturgical model of the self. He was a social scientist who privileged ethnography in the field over the laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the mental test. His goal was a natural history of communication among humans. Rather than rely upon standardizing technologies for measurement, Goffman tried to obtain accurate recordings of huma… Show more

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Cited by 14 publications
(8 citation statements)
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“…Erving Goffman’s (1959) metaphor of the dramaturgical “performance” is sometimes invoked to explain how different social formations, including fake news (Robertson & Mourão, 2020), give and give off different meanings and impressions. Often left under-appreciated, though, is that Goffman’s framework originated in his analysis of the “plays” that con men make on their marks (Goffman, 1952; see Pettit, 2011). Indeed, one important aspect of Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is that performance need not be sincerely felt by the performer, as with a con game; what matters is simply putting in sufficient effort to ensure that the performance is plausible enough to continue.…”
Section: Fake News and The Web Of Plausibilitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Erving Goffman’s (1959) metaphor of the dramaturgical “performance” is sometimes invoked to explain how different social formations, including fake news (Robertson & Mourão, 2020), give and give off different meanings and impressions. Often left under-appreciated, though, is that Goffman’s framework originated in his analysis of the “plays” that con men make on their marks (Goffman, 1952; see Pettit, 2011). Indeed, one important aspect of Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is that performance need not be sincerely felt by the performer, as with a con game; what matters is simply putting in sufficient effort to ensure that the performance is plausible enough to continue.…”
Section: Fake News and The Web Of Plausibilitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Goffman’s conceptual distancing and epistemological cynicism have generated accusations that he was a con man (Pettit, 2011). That is a serious misinterpretation.…”
Section: Cynicism and Vocational Commitmentmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies. (Goffman, 1967, p. 113) Erving Goffman (1922Goffman ( -1982 was one of the most cited (Tyler, 2018;Pettit, 2011) and "influential American sociologists of the twentieth century" (Fine & Manning, 2003, p. 34). Born in Canadian and influenced by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, he is best known for his social action rituals, "dramaturgical" approach, and "interaction orders" of face-to-face encounters in our heterogeneous world where different settings call for different forms of communication and activity, rather like a theater performance (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2017).…”
Section: Goffman's Dramaturgical Analysismentioning
confidence: 99%