Alle Publikationen
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2009
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(2009): Interaktion im öffentlichen Raum. Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verl.
1983
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(1983): The Interaction Order. In: American Sociological Review 48 (1), S. 1-17. DOI: 10.2307/2095141
Abstract: [book review] Abstract of the reviewed publication: For an evening's hour, it is given to each current president of the Association to hold captive the largest audience of colleagues that sociology can provide. For an hour then, within the girdle of these walls, a wordy pageantry is reenacted. A sociologist you have selected from a very short list takes to the center of this vasty Hilton field on a hobbyhorse of his own choosing. (One is reminded that the sociologically interesting thing about Hamlet is that every year no high school in the English-speaking world has trouble finding some clown to play him.) In any case, it seems that presidents of learned societies are well enough known about something to be elected because of it. Taking office, they find a podium attached, along with encouragement to demonstrate that they are indeed obsessed by what their election proved they were already known to be obsessed by. Election winds them up and sets them loose to set their record straight: they rise above restraint and replay it. For Association presidents are led to feel that they are representative of something, and that this something is just what their intellectual community wants represented and needs representing. Preparing and then presenting their addresses, presidents come to feel that they are temporarily guardians of their discipline. However large or oddly shaped the hall, their self swells out to fill it. Nor do narrow disciplinary concerns set limits. Whatever the public issues of the day, the speaker's discipline is shown to have incisive bearing on them. Moreover, the very occasion seems to make presidential speakers dangerously at one with themselves; warmed by the celebration they give without stint, sidetracking their prepared address with parenthetical admissions, obirer dicta, ethical and- political asides and other medallions of belief. And once again there occurs that special flagrancy of high office: the indulgence of selfcongratulation in public. What this dramaturgy is supposed to bring is flesh to bones, confronting the reader's image of a person with the lively impression created when the words come from a body not a page. What this dramaturgy puts at risk is the remaining illusions listeners have concerning their profession. Take comfort, my friends, that although you are once again to witness the passion of the podium, ours is the discipline, the model of analysis, for which ceremonies are data as well as duty, for which talk provides conduct to observe as well as opinion to consider. Indeed, one might want to argue that the interesting matter for all of us here (as all of us know) is not what I will come to say, but what you are doing here listening to me saying it.
1982
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(1982): Interaction ritual. Essays on face-to-face behavior. Repr.. New York NY: Pantheon Books
Abstract: In a brilliant series of books about social behavior, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, and Stigma, Erving Goffman has exposed all that is at stake when people meet face to face. Goffman’s work, once of the great intellectual achievements of our time, is an endlessly fascinating commentary on how we enact ourselves by our responses to and our readings of other people. From the exemplary opening essay of Interaction Ritual, “On Face-Work,” —a full account of the extraordinary repertoire of maneuvers we employ in social encounters in order to “save face”—to the final, and classic, essay “Where the Action Is,”—an examination of people in risky occupations and situations: gamblers, criminals, coal miners, stock speculators—Goffman astounds us with the unexpected richness and complexity of brief encounters between people. For Goffman, as for Freud, the extreme cases are of interest because of the light they shed on the normal: The study of the trapeze artist is worthwhile because each of us is on the wire from time to time.
1981
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(1981): Forms of talk. Philadelphia Pa.: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press (University of Pennsylvania publications in conduct and communication)
Abstract: Forms of Talk extends Erving Goffman's interactional analyses of face-to-face communication to ordinary conversations and verbal exchanges. In this, his most sociolinguistic work, Goffman relates to certain forms of talk some of the issues that concerned him in his work on frame analysis. This book brings together five of Goffman's essays: "Replies and Responses," "Response Cries," "Footing," "The Lecture," and "Radio Talk." Of lasting value in Goffman's work is his insistence that behavior—verbal or nonverbal—be examined along with the context of that behavior. In all of these classic essays, there is a "topic" at hand for discussion and analysis. In addition, as those familiar with Goffman's work have come to expect, there is the wider context in which the topic can be viewed and related to other topics—a characteristic move of Goffman's that has made his work so necessary for students of interaction in many disciplines.
1972
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(1972): Relations in public. Microstudies of the public order. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (Pelican books)
Abstract: Until recently, to be in a "public place" meant to feel safe. That has changed, especially in cities. Urban dwellers sense the need to quickly react to gestural cues from persons in their immediate presence in order to establish their relationship to each other. Through this communication they hope to detect potential danger before it is too late for self-defense or flight. The ability to read accurately the "informing signs" by which strangers indicate their relationship to one another in public or semi-public places without speaking, has become as important as understanding the official written and spoken language of the country. In Relations in Public, Erving Goffman provides a grammar of the unspoken language used in public places. He shows that the way strangers relate in public is part of a design by which friends and acquaintances manage their relationship in the presence of bystanders. He argues that, taken together, this forms part of a new domain of inquiry into the rules for co-mingling, or public order. Most people give little thought to how elaborate and complex our everyday behavior in public actually is. For example, we adhere to the rules of pedestrian traffic on a busy thoroughfare, accept the usual ways of acting in a crowded elevator or subway car, grasp the delicate nuances of conversational behavior, and respond to the rich vocabulary of body gestures. We behave differently at weddings, at meals, in crowds, in couples, and when alone. Such everyday behavior, though generally below the level of awareness, embodies unspoken codes of social understandings necessary for the orderly conduct of society.
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