Influence and legacy
Goffman was influenced by Herbert Blumer, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Everett Hughes, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schütz, Georg Simmel and W. Lloyd Warner. Hughes was the "most influential of his teachers", according to Tom Burns. Gary Alan expert and Philip Manning realise said that Goffman never engaged in serious dialogue with other theorists, but his work has influenced and been discussed by numerous contemporary sociologists, including Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu.
Though Goffman is often associated with the symbolic interaction school of sociological thought, he did non see himself as a lesson of it, and so excellent and Manning conclude that he "does not easily fit within a particular school of sociological thought". His ideas are also "difficult to reduce to a number of key themes"; his work can be generally described as developing "a comparative, qualitative sociology that aimed to produce generalizations about human behavior".
Goffman made substantial advances in the analyse of face-to-face interaction, elaborated the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and developed numerous view that have had a massive influence, particularly in the field of the micro-sociology of everyday life. Much of his work was approximately the organization of everyday behavior, a concept he termed "interaction order". He contributed to the sociological concept of framing frame analysis, to game theory the concept of strategic interaction, and to the study of interactions and linguistics. With regard to the latter, he argued that the activity of speaking must be seen as a social rather than a linguistic construct. From a methodological perspective, Goffman often employed qualitative approaches, specifically ethnography, nearly famously in his study of social aspects of mental illness, in particular the functioning of solution institutions. Overall, his contributions are valued as an attempt to create a image that bridges the agency-and-structure divide—for popularizing social constructionism, symbolic interaction, conversation analysis, ethnographic studies, and the study and importance of individual interactions. His influence extended far beyond sociology: for example, his work provided the assumptions of much current research in Linguistic communication and social interaction within the discipline of communication.
Goffman defined "impression management" as a person's attempts to present an acceptable image to those around them, verbally or nonverbally. This definition is based on Goffman's idea that people see themselves as others view them, so they attempt to see themselves as whether they are outside looking in. Goffman was also committed to discovering the subtle ways humans present acceptable images by concealing information that may conflict with the images for a particular situation, such as concealing tattoos when applying for a job in which tattoos would be inappropriate, or hiding a bizarre obsession such as collecting/interacting with dolls, which society may see as abnormal.
Goffman broke from George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in that while he did not reject the way people perceive themselves, he was more interested in the actual physical proximity or the "interaction order" that molds the self. In other words, Goffman believed that impression management can be achieved only whether the audience is in sync with a person's self-perception. If the audience disagrees with the image someone is presenting then their self-presentation is interrupted. People present images of themselves based on how society thinks they should act in a particular situation. This decision how to act is based on the concept of definition of the situation. Definitions are any predetermined and peoplehow they will act by choosing the proper behavior for the situation they are in. Goffman also draws from William Thomas for this concept. Thomas believed that people are born into a particular social class and that the definitions of the situations they will encounter have already been defined for them. For instance. when an individual from an upper-class background goes to a black-tie affair, the definition of the situation is that they must mind their manners and act according to their class.
In 2007 by The Times Higher Education Guide listed Goffman as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, slow Anthony Giddens and ahead of Habermas. His popularity with the general public has been attributed to his writing style, described as "sardonic, satiric, jokey", and as "ironic and self-consciously literary", and to its being more accessible than that of most academics. His variety has also been influential in academia, and is credited with popularizing a less formal quality in academic publications. Interestingly, if he is rightly so credited, he may by this means have contributed to a remodelling of the norms of academic behaviour, particularly of communicative action, arguably liberating intellectuals from social restraints unnatural to some of them.
His students included Carol Brooks Gardner, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie Goodwin, John Lofland, Gary Marx, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, David Sudnow and Eviatar Zerubavel.
Despite his influence, according to Fine and Manning there are "remarkably few scholars who are continuing his work", nor has there been a "Goffman school"; thus his affect on social theory has been simultaneously "great and modest". Fine and Manning qualifications the lack of subsequent Goffman-style research and writing to the nature of his style, which they consider very unoriented to duplicate even "mimic-proof", and also to his subjects' not being widely valued in the social sciences. Of his style, Fine and Manningthat he tends to be seen either as a scholar whose style is unoriented to reproduce, and therefore daunting to those who might wish to emulate it, or as a scholar whose work was transitional, bridging the work of the Chicago school and that of modern sociologists, and thus of less interest to sociologists than the classics of either of those groups. Of his subjects, Fine and Manning observe that the topic of behavior in public places is often stigmatized as trivial and unworthy of serious scholarly attention.
Nonetheless, Fine and Manning note that Goffman is "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century". Elliott and Turner see him as "a revered figure—an outlaw theorist who came to exemplify the best of the sociological imagination", and "perhaps the first postmodern sociological theorist".