Erving Goffman: Interaction and impression management: Playing the coaching role

Erving Goffman was born on 11 June 1922 in Alberta, Canada. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1953 from the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology and social anthropology. During an academic career which took in positions at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, he pioneered the study of face-to-face interaction, or microsociology. Many consider his greatest contribution to be his formulation of symbolic interaction in his 1959 book The presentation of self in everyday life, although other influential and insightful texts include Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity (1963), Strategic interaction (1969a) and Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience (1974). Through these and other works he developed an understanding of the way we convey social information through symbols and images, and how those images are incorporated into social expectations. He subsequently elaborated upon a ‘dramaturgical’ approach to human interaction in a detailed analysis of what he termed ‘the interaction order’. Indeed, interaction underpinned all of his work as, for Goffman, interactions were important rituals that worked to maintain moral as well as social order (Birrell & Donnelly, 2004). Consequently, his substantive contribution to social analysis (and, we would argue, sports coaching) lies in uncovering the everyday routine of social encounters, and how that impacts on personal identity (Smith, 2006). Erving Goffman died of cancer on 19 November 1982, aged sixty.