ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses two events: a scene from a performance of 'Waiting for Godot' and an incident from a team development meeting for a group of senior managers. Dramaturgy, as a perspective on social life, has existed for several hundred years. The notion that social life resembles theatre was a cliché as early as the sixteenth century. Kenneth Burke's work made more accessible to social scientists and further developed by Hugh Duncan some thirty or so years later, but it was the publication of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman that brought the metaphor into mainstream sociology and social psychology. Goffman's early books examined the ways in which a social actor reads a situation and constructs his/her behaviour so as to make an impression upon other social actors. His work spawned a host of studies all more or less informed by the notion of theatre as dissembling.