Framing Atmospheres: Goffman,Space, and Music in Everyday Life

In this article, we synthesize Goffman's microsociology with recent developments in fields such as aesthetics, geography, and urban studies labeled “atmosphere theory.” Our central rationale is if microsociology is to deepen its account of embodiment and the noncognitive it needs a theory of spatialized moods. In the second half, we develop our synthesis with respect to musical atmospheres and conclude by drawing on our own research regarding how social actors use music to shape “involvements” and “disinvolvements” in the spatial ambiances of public transportation, the street, the workplace, and the home.     

The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction

The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologies allow the selfie to be distributed to a wide audience in close to real time. Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s approach to the study of face-to-face social interaction, this article presents a discussion of the production and consumption of the selfie. We draw upon Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, to explore how the ‘presentation of self’ occurs in the context of a selfie. Next, we consider how the selfie as a form of visual communication holds critical implications for mediated life online as individuals go about doing privacy. We conclude by reflecting on the role of the selfie and its impact on the boundaries between public and private domains in contemporary social life.     

Parts and Wholes: Goffman and Cooley

This essay begins with an outline of the part‐whole method, a way of relating particular instances to general concepts or propositions. This method is illustrated by seven propositions extracted from Cooley’s work that seem to be illustrated by concrete examples from Goffman’s writing. This method weds qualitative study with theory in a preliminary way, and ultimately, qualitative and quantitative methods. Since Goffman’s examples breathe life into our enterprise, it may be fruitful to use every one of them, connecting them not only with Cooley’s theses, but generating others as well.     

The Growing Up in Cities Project

SUMMARY

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child contains a set of “participation clauses” which are leading members of development agencies, municipal offices, and community organizations to incorporate children and youth into community planning. The Growing Up in Cities project of UNESCO provides a model for doing this, with a focus on low-income areas of special concern for urban policy-makers. The authors describe a case study of this project in Bangalore, India, explore the complexities of implementation of youth participation, and discuss the lessons learned.     

A Guide to Training Your Own Horses: The Flaneur Appproach and Erving Goffman's Uninhibited Research Practices in Sociology

While Erving Goffman's sociology has enjoyed great popularity and is cited often, the career of his work has been largely confined to other scholars reaping, adapting, and utilizing his concepts. Goffman was opposed to science that just reproduces and orders concepts, and opposed to his students using his concepts as easy tools. Instead, he recommended they train their own horses: While there is much to use in Goffman's work, there is little scholarship that continues the genius of his practical approach. As valuable as Goffman's categories are, his collection practice and his analytical scheme may be even more valuable. On the one hand, they offer an intricate framework for research that is as open as it is directed; on the other hand, they allow researchers to argue freedom from the ever more imposing bad imitations of natural scientific method that threaten to overgrow the social sciences. Together, they allow Goffmanesque work without merely parroting his concepts. This article attempts to outline Goffman's eclectic way of collecting material and his technique for fashioning this material into analyses, reordering this material around different metaphors that make Goffman's contribution distinct. I call Goffman's practical research a flaneur approach, and outline it. The paper then makes an argument for its continuation.     

Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience

By originating and developing the sociological investigation of human experience, Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman have shifted social phenomena at the edge of awareness to the center of attention, and have legitimated their study for contemporary sociologists. Both Simmel and Goffman describe these subtle social phenomena by distinguishing their perceptual boundaries and crossover elements, pointing out their common features when their statuses differ, and reversing their traditional location in means-end and cause-effect chains. But Durkheim's influence on Goffman's basic conceptions of interaction, individual, and society differentiated his interpretation of these social phenomena from Simmel's. Moreover, Simmel's and Goffman's explanations of these social phenomena evolve in different directions, revealing the antithetical goals toward which spiritual transcendental Simmelians and cynical reductive Goffmanians would lead sociology.     

Responsibility‐Shifting in a Gambling Environment

Using data that was collected by observing and speaking with customers and members of staff in betting shops in Dublin, Ireland, this article provides a consideration of how regular customers of betting shops explain their bet related failures to themselves and to those around them. It is suggested in this article that a process of self‐reparation of self‐esteem occurs in betting shops after customers experience monetary losses and that this process is facilitated by shifting responsibility for the losses incurred to factors external to and beyond the control of customers.     

Goffman's sociology: An inspiring resource for developing public relations theory

This article introduces key concepts in Erving Goffman's sociology, which are advocated to be important to our understanding of social interaction and the study of interpersonal relationships with internal and external publics. The concepts of impression management, framing, footing and face have bearing upon essential notions in public relations: relationships, identification and image. Thus, it is predicted that development of these concepts in public relations research will deepen our understanding of communication processes that have important implications for the relation of publics in public relations.     

Assault on Self: Intimate Partner Abuse and the Contestation of Identity

The complexities of intimate partner abuse and violence have been studied from a range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives. It is argued here that symbolic interactionist analyses offer specific and powerful insights into this particular interactional domain. This article is based on data generated by a topical life‐history case study of a well‐educated, middle‐class, middle‐aged man, whose wife subjected him to sustained unilateral violence and abuse, resulting in deleterious consequences for his health and well‐being. Data were gathered via a series of in‐depth interviews and a personal diary. The analysis draws on Goffman's conceptualization of “possessional territory” as one of the “territories of the self,” in order to examine the role of possessions in the interactional routines of intimate partner abuse.     

Gendered Movement: Negotiating Youth,Sex and Harm in the US Carceral State

Exempt from the current bipartisan reassessment of the US carceral state are people with convictions for sex offenses. While movements against public registries for sex offenders are scant, a grassroots movement is underway. This article offers a preliminary analysis of the complex consequence of women's political work to extract their sons from the US carceral state. This gendered advocacy is mapped against shifts in the racialised US criminal justice system, where the fluid category of child/juvenile is often unavailable to youth of colour and/or queer youth, and criminalisation is offered to regulate sexuality, consent, age and potential harm.     

Morality,Relationality, and Listening Pedagogy in Language Education

Listening pedagogy in language education treats listening proficiency almost exclusively as a function or skill, the purpose of which is to generate products or outcomes desired by language users. Though listening is rhetorically acknowledged to be an active and complex process of making meanings within contexts and relationships, in practice teacher education and pedagogical discourse treat listening simply as a linguistic transaction and listening pedagogy as a technical and instrumental process of skill building, with the goal of enabling learners fluently to perform such transactions. Such a means-to-ends orientation, however, is inadequate or insufficient to encompass holistic moral and relational dimensions inherent in listening. These dimensions might be added to language listening pedagogy by, for example, broadening the idea of “dialogue” to include more open-ended perspectives from other disciplines, contextualizing the relationality of typical coursebook listening passages, and working with metaphors such as hospitality that encourage a high attentiveness to communication accompanied by a high moral respect for persons.     

Growing by Leaps and Inches: Creative Destruction, Real Cost Reduction, and Inching Up

Most firms achieve perfective progress, incrementally improving commodities or productivity. But technological progress is concentrated in a few firms achieving metamorphic progress: forming or transforming industries with technological breakthroughs (e.g., biotechnology, lasers, semiconductors, nanotechnology). Unless congruent with incumbents' science and technology base, metamorphic progress promotes entry. Scientific breakthroughs embodied in discovering scientists, protected by natural excludability and transferred by learning-by-doing-with at the bench generally drive metamorphic progress. Embodied knowledge is rivalrous and leads to entry and industry dominance by star scientist–linked firms. Incorporating this scientific entrepreneurial process is essential to improving—if not transforming—endogenous growth models.     

Relationality and social interaction1

This paper explores Bourdieu's account of a relational social space, and his relative neglect of social interaction within this framework. Bourdieu includes social capital as one of the key relational elements of his social space, but says much less about it than economic or cultural capital, and levels of social capital are rarely measured in his work. Bourdieu is reluctant to focus on the content of social networks as part of his rejection of substantialist thinking. The neglect of substantive networks creates problems for Bourdieu's framework, because many of Bourdieu's core concepts rest upon assumptions about their interactional properties (in particular, the prevalence of homophilous differential association) which are left unexamined. It is argued here that Bourdieu's neglect of the substance of social networks is related to the criticisms that Bourdieu's framework often encounters, and that this neglect bears re‐examination, since it is helpful to think of the ways in which differentiated social networks contribute to the development of habitus, help form fields, and so constitute the intersubjective social relations within which sociality, and practice more generally, occur.     

The Haunting of Shame: Autoethnography and the Multivalent Stigma of Being Queer,Muslim, and Single

Sociology has neglected the terrain of the gay Muslim single as a sociological phenomenon. Produced and managed via meaningful social conduct, the gay Muslim single often holds negative symbolic and cultural worth, one of lacking identification and presence. The stigma of the gay Muslim single is actively reproduced through social and power relations. I examine multiple stigmas and dichotomies by using autoethnography to illustrate the human lived experience of a gay Muslim single, who is silenced, invisibilized, and embodies a social life of “emptiness.” The gay Muslim single, bringing about a “moral panic,” confronts temporal regulations, norms, and values, notably those of heterosexual ones in everyday social life. He is cast as an “outsider,” which reinforces his stigma in everyday social life.