Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was an important attempt at explaining both apparent and hidden human behaviors across social and organizational settings. The book begins as so (with pronouns changed):

When an individual enters the presence of other, they commonly seek to acquire information about them or to bring into play information about them already possessed. They will be interested in their general socio-economic status, their conception of self, their competence, their trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what they will expect of them and what they may expect of the person. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.

Erving Goffman (1959)

Goffman thus proceeds to develop a comprehensive framework using theater as the primary metaphor. He describes the roles of people as performers and members of an audience. He establishes the situation as a two-part stage (as two “regions”) consisting of a front stage where people present their “performances” and a back stage where people return to being themselves and proceed to set conditions for the next performance. Performers are both individuals and teams, like a cast or emsemble, whereby shared understandings (expressed as scripts) serve to govern and constrain one’s performances in accordance with the underlying expected script. However, as people are indeed human, sometimes the performance is unsuccessful – someone acted outside expectations or the situation was ill-defined or incompletely understood, leading to embarrassment or shame. How do others respond both to the individual and among themselves to avoid a recurrence?

Goffman relies on many examples from contemporary studies, including his own extensive studies of crofters in the remote Shetland Islands, to justify this framework. In it, he not only explains how to analyze performances in of themselves but also the audiences’ reactions to them. He asserts that individuals try to define the situation and present themselves in as favorable light as possible in order to provoke a desired reaction from others. Meanwhile, the others seek to define the situation to suit their own needs and observe the performances around themselves carefully so to spot signs of inauthenticity, deception, or errors and miscalculations.

This is not the sort of book one reads and comes away with renewed faith in humanity. Indeed, it would be easy to interpret it as the product of a cynic, but the book is very practical and explains the human condition as one of constant competition to not only outperform each other but also to write the scripts, in essence setting the rules under which the situation (“setting”) is defined and enacted. It has also become a very important book from which numerous literature streams of organization behavior have flowed, despite the book not being about formal organizations.

You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement

Read with us:

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.

To Learn More:

Barley, S. R. (2020). Work and technological change. Oxford University Press, USA.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Doubleday.

Turco, C. J. (2016). The conversational firm: Rethinking bureaucracy in the age of social media. Columbia University Press.