ABSTRACT
In an introduction and overview of the work and substantive contributions made by Erving Goffman to the study of social relationships (see, e.g., Goffman, 1974, 1981, 1983), Drew and Wootton (1988) observed that Goffman recurringly failed to offer details, and thus evidence, of how people actually achieve the activities they are claimed to produce. Although Goffman’s sharp and altogether intuitive insights drew constant attention to finely textured moments of human existence—most notably the practices and procedures allowing people to organize transsituational involvements and thereby order face-to-face interactions—in the end, readers were left with a conceptually rich vocabulary (e.g., rituals, frames, facework, remedial interchanges) for identifying and discerning the patterns of everyday life. However useful Goffman’s conceptual frameworks might be for understanding the unique ways humans order their affairs with one another, Drew and Wootton noted that they remain essentially underdeveloped:
Such concepts are not themselves the endpoints of analysis. Whether people share the interactional concerns identified by Goffman, and whether they orient to such concerns in the manner he suggests, are frequently questions which await further enquiry. Goffman himself rarely went down that road. He was often content simply to indicate the potential relevance and significance of the interactional parameters in question; as a result, the maps he provides of this new terrain are often akin to those one buys on holiday in certain countries—suggestive sketches rather than definitive. (p. 6)
Such a position is by no means a discounting of Goffman’s early and significant contributions to both the study of social interaction and its status as a legitimate enterprise within the social sciences. On the contrary, Goffman’s conceptualizations continue to resonate throughout contemporary interaction studies, providing useful resources when raising and fleshing out issues, and in these varied ways reveal scholars’ intellectual indebtedness to Goffman’s work.