Goffman and social situations: Some theoretical and methodological lessons

Abstract

The aim of this article is to extract some fundamental lessons from Goffman's sociological approach both for sociology and the social sciences. We will present, then, a sociology of Goffman's sociological practice. We will try to show that Goffman's sociology is fundamentally a theory of modern social situations, and, at the same time, a sociology of some concrete social situations. Goffman's work constitutes a complex picture in which we find a central space, the common situations of everyday life, and four spaces that are related to that main space and also between them: lax social situations, situations of extreme monitoring, situations at-the-margin and total social situations.