The Anthem Companion to Erving Goffman

By Michael Hviid Jacobsen

The purpose of the volume—as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press “Companion to Sociology” series—is to provide a comprehensive overview of Erving Goffman’s continued appeal and relevance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book engages with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Goffman’s sociology. The chapters included in the volume deal with some important aspects of Goffman’s life and work that made him into the enigma that he was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839983214

Book preview

Introduction

THE LIVING LEGACY OF ERVING GOFFMAN

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Introduction

When Erving Goffman passed away and left his earthly shell in the early morning hours of November 20, 1982, something passed away with him, but something—and indeed something important—also lived on. Even though Goffman left his earthly shell, he had ignited an inextinguishable fire in the minds of those of his students and readers who saw in his work the discovery of a new realm of human and social life that needed to be charted and researched. Goffman is known to have provided a spark for new generations of scholars and researchers in their endeavor to excavate and carve out new details of what he himself had termed the interaction order—the heretofore relatively unchartered realm of face-to-face interaction. In the exploration of this realm, Goffman wanted to retain for himself and those who followed lead what he called a spirit of unfettered, unsponsored inquiry (Goffman 1983, 17), extending to all elements and areas of social life. It was this unfettered and unsponsored curiosity about a part of social life that had been so routinely overlooked—face-to-face interaction—that Goffman in his lifetime turned into a legitimate concern for sociologists.

Goffman died at the age of sixty, and we are only allowed to speculate what he could have invented and accomplished had he lived another ten or twenty years. But prior to his premature death he was a prolific writer publishing eleven monographs and a number of important journal articles. Perhaps if the quantity in itself was not impressive, the quality and originality of Goffman’s books was matched by few. Goffman was a maverick, a lone wolf, throughout his career. His books and articles were single-authored, and compared to today’s publishing patterns and strategies (sometimes with a never-ending listing of authors even for a short piece), Goffman remained a DIY-man, relying mostly on his own wit and ideas but also creatively incorporating the inspiration of many fellow social scientists, novelists, playwrights, authors of technical manuals, etiquette books, and other types of unconventional material into his own corpus of work (often meticulously mentioned in his abundant footnotes, see Jacobsen 2022b). Goffman wrote in a peculiar manner compared to many of his colleagues in sociology—at once seemingly accessible and one-dimensional but, when digging deeper into the texture of his texts, they were deceivingly constructed as a dense and layered network of ideas with each concept or perspective opening up to the next one. In this way, Goffman’s work reads as an exceptional feat that, at least in his own lifetime, represented a novel and incomparable perspective on what to study (the interaction order) and how to study it.

In some of the nominations conducted in the social sciences and humanities throughout the years, it is obvious that Goffman continues to inspire new generations of sociologists—and some who were perhaps not even alive when he wrote his work. For example, in a 1998 poll, members of the American Sociological Association voted Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) as the tenth most influential sociology book in the twentieth century. In 2007, The Times Higher Education named Goffman the sixth most cited scholar within the social sciences and humanities behind the likes of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu but ahead of Jürgen Habermas. Moreover, looking at the literature dedicated to the work in Goffman since he died and since the first edited volume by Jason Ditton (1980) about his perspective appeared a few years prior to his death, there has been an eruption of writings on Goffman’s life and work, to which we return later. Using the Google Ngram viewer—that enables the calculation of the occurrence of a phrase or name over time in the Google Books Ngram archive—it also becomes clear that Goffman’s name appears and is used at a steadily rising rate since the mid-twentieth century death and that his work is enjoying an extended posthumous spell of success (Smith 2022). To summarize, Goffman is indeed still going strong in contemporary social science research.

This year, 2022, marks the centenary of Erving Goffman’s birth in 1922 and the fortieth anniversary of his death in 1982. Despite so many years have now passed since Goffman wrote and published his work, there is still a continuous interest in what he was doing, and this volume testifies to this interest. This introductory chapter will carve out some of the main pieces of information about Goffman’s life and work. Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Goffman’s life and work, it will seek to position Goffman within the field of sociology and provide some examples of his lasting contribution to the discipline. Furthermore, it will discuss why and who Goffman has remained a favorite among students and scholars of sociology (and related disciplines) alike. Moreover, it will outline and discuss some of the continuing debates about Goffman and how to read and understand his work. Finally, the Introduction will briefly outline the content of the subsequent chapters contained in the volume.

About Goffman

There are a number of accounts of Erving Goffman’s childhood and adolescent years before he turned into Goffman—the internationally renowned sociologist (see, e.g., Cavan 2014; Winkin 1988, 2010), each account adding to the fuller picture of a boy who would later become one of the most celebrated sociologists of his time. The small Canadian town of Mannville, Alberta, is probably not known in wider circles, however, it was here Erving Goffman was born on June 11, 1922. His parents, Max and Anne, were Jewish immigrants who had moved from the Ukraine and Russia to Canada at the turn of the century (Anne arriving in 1912)—alongside thousands of others hoping to find a better and more prosperous life on North American soil. During the period from the 1880s to the outbreak of World War I, more than 150,000 Ukrainians moved to Canada. Some of these, like Max and Anne, had Jewish backgrounds, and the Jewish population in Canada more than quadrupled during the first two decades of the twentieth century (Weinfeld and Troper 1990). Goffman, however, did not openly parade or practice his Jewish creed, being a rootless Jew and seemingly did not have much fondness for his origins (Winkin 2010, 57). As Goffman once recalled in one of his very few comments about his childhood: You forget that I grew up (with Yiddish) in a town where to speak another language was to be suspect of being homosexual (Hymes 1984, 628). It seems that already early on, Goffman was acutely aware of the dangers associated with being viewed as a deviant—a topic he would many years later turn into one of his own favorite areas of research. During Goffman’s childhood years, his father ran a dry goods shop supplying the local Ukrainian farmers. The Goffmans moved from Mannville to Dauphin in Manitoba in 1926, where his father opened a successful tailoring business (Cavan 2014, 44–45). In 1937, the family moved on to Winnipeg, where Goffman attended St. John’s Technical School—at this time the topic of sociology was far away from his radar.

Goffman’s path into the world of sociology was strangely coincidental. In school, he had primarily been concerned with excelling in the natural sciences such as mathematics, physics and chemistry (Winkin 2010, 60). Goffman’s career in sociology started after he graduated in 1939, when he moved to the University of Manitoba to do his major. Initially, he did not pay any interest in sociology, his primary subject being chemistry. However, a chance meeting with the American sociologist Dennis H. Wrong at the Canadian Film Studies in Ottawa in the early 1940s, where Goffman showed interest in working in the film industry, persuaded him to change tracks. He thus enrolled at the University of Toronto in early 1944, where he in 1945 graduated with a BA in sociology and anthropology. Following this, Goffman moved to the University of Chicago from which he obtained his MA degree in sociology in 1949 based on a master’s thesis consisting of the analysis of interviews with housewives on their reception of a popular daytime radio serial (Smith 2006, 16–18). From 1949 to 1953, Goffman was writing his doctoral dissertation, which was supervised by the prominent scholars William Lloyd Warner and Anselm L. Strauss, in collaboration with the newly established anthropology department at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He completed the dissertation, which was submitted to the University of Chicago, titled Communication Conduct in an Island Community in 1953—a dissertation that was based on an extended spell of observation at the small Shetland Island of Unst for a twelve-month period between December 1949 and May 1951. Officially Goffman claimed that he was investigating the economy of the crofting community, however he was in fact engaged in an extensive ethnographic study of the interaction rituals of the island’s inhabitants. By the time Goffman completed his thesis, he published a few journal articles and reports (e.g., one for the American Petroleum Institute on the service station dealer), before accepting the job as an assistant to the athletics director at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. This position paved the way for some of Goffman’s later published work on psychiatric hospitals (Goffman 1961a).

In 1958, Goffman moved to the University of California at Berkeley after receiving an invitation from Herbert Blumer, who headed the then newly formed sociology department (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz 2013, 26), and he became a visiting assistant professor there. Blumer had himself previously been at the University of Chicago during Goffman’s postgraduate and PhD thesis years, although he, as Goffman remarked in a later interview, wasn’t much around (Verhoeven 1993, 320). Blumer (1969) became famous for coining the term symbolic interactionism in 1937—an epithet often associated also with Goffman who, however, rejected belonging to or representing any particular theoretical perspective or school of thought (Verhoeven 1993, 317, 318). At Berkeley, Goffman obtained the position of Full Professor in 1962 at the age of forty. The years at Berkeley—at that time known as an increasingly progressive academic milieu—were some of Goffman’s most productive, and he churned out one important monograph after the other during these Berkeley years: the publication of the second and most cited version of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, his first monograph, appeared in 1959 (the first issue was published in 1956), Asylums (1961a), Encounters (1961b), Behavior in Public Places (1963a), Stigma (1963b), and Interaction Ritual (1967). All these books marked a time in Goffman’s writings when he was concerned with meticulously studying and conceptualizing the multitude of interaction rituals that were being used—albeit mostly in an unacknowledged manner—in ordinary as well as extraordinary settings (such as the psychiatric hospital).

In 1968, the year before the so-called Bloody Thursday confrontation and the Battle for People’s Park near the Berkeley campus in the Spring of 1969 (Dazell 2019), it was once again time to move, and Goffman became the highest paid sociology professor in the country when accepting a position at the University of Pennsylvania. This final stop on the road also proved to be a very productive period—but also a time when Goffman began to take his interest in new directions and into new areas of research such as phenomenological sociology, conversation analysis, and gender-related issues, and in this way Goffman’s work—and the stages it can be divided into—not only reflects what he was deliberately planning to achieve but it also mirrors some of the currents in social theory and research that impacted his ideas (Collins 1981). This period saw the publication of Strategic Interaction (1969), Relations in Public (1971), Frame Analysis (1974), Gender Advertisements (1979), and the last book Forms of Talk (1981). As a result of his productivity and originality, Goffman was the recipient of a number of awards and recognitions. In 1969, Goffman was made a fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship 1977–1978. Moreover, in 1979 Goffman was awarded the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship and in 1983, after his death, he received the Mead Award.

Throughout his career, Goffman zealously guarded his personal life, sharing only as little as possible about his non-sociological life and doings. Even though he devoted his career to studying people’s self-presentations, he was, according to commentators, himself averse to self-disclosure (Shalin 2013, 2). For example, as Marshall Berman once observed about Goffman’s peculiar non-presence: Wherever [Goffman] has been, he has been virtually anonymous. He has taken no part in political or cultural affairs. He does not speak at conferences or appear on talk shows. He almost never allows himself to be photographed […] In his books, as in his life, he projects a persona of utter impersonality (Berman 1972, 1). Despite his reluctant self-presentation (David 1980) and the reserved attitude when it came to private matters, it is known that Goffman was married twice. His first wife Angelica Choate, whom he married in 1952, committed suicide in 1964—they had a son, Thomas, in 1953. Later, in 1981, Goffman married his second wife, the linguist Gillian Sankoff, and they had a daughter Alice, who would herself later venture into the world of sociology—however not without confronting some of the controversy that her father had stayed clear of (see, e.g., Campos 2015). It is also known about Goffman that he liked to play the Las Vegas casinos, that he was fond of classical music and that he was a somewhat successful stock dealer. Moreover, he was keen to stress (often in ironic manner) that he was not concerned with political or ideological issues—as opposed to many contemporary scholars—and that instead of trying to awaken the people from their deep sleep of false consciousness, his ambition was rather to watch them as they snore (Goffman 1974, 14). But besides this, there is only scarce information about Goffman as a private person. Despite being called a sociological giant (Cavan 2014), Goffman was in fact not a tall man—according to testimonies only around 5?4 (Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2015, 21). Goffman was a sociological voyeur, an incomparable observer, who relished in the opportunity to witness whatever happened when people experienced embarrassment, lost face or assisted each other in saving situations. One might speculate that this seemingly unimpressive stature provided Goffman with the golden opportunity for moving around more unnoticed, looking at those curious human creatures performing a multitude of micro-rituals in everyday life, and it has been observed how he possessed a special aptitude for noticing details of people’s interpersonal conduct (Plotz 2019, 439).

Erving Goffman’s life ended at a time when he had established himself as one of the key sociologists of his generation. Goffman passed away in Philadelphia shortly before he was expected to deliver the annual Presidential Address as the newly elected seventy-third president of the American Sociological Association—a position previously occupied by such important figures in the North American history of the discipline as Ernest W. Burgess, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Florian Znaniecki, Herbert Blumer, Everett C. Hughes, George C. Homans and Lewis A. Coser (several of whom, like Goffman, had a background at the University of Chicago). But Goffman was unable to deliver the Address due to advanced illness and he died of stomach cancer on November 20 late at night. A dramatic and ominous announcement reached the participants of the annual Presidential Address event stating: Presidential Address cancelled, Goffman dying (Collins 1986, 112). In the posthumously published version of the Presidential Address, Goffman, in typical Goffmanesque manner, teased the reader when stating that this was a speech that was actually never delivered (in fact, I wasn’t there either, as Goffman mused), and instead of an oral presentation, the reading of this text represents a vicarious participation in something that did not itself take place (Goffman 1983, 1). Even when confronted with his own imminent end, Goffman was capable of mustering enough energy and wit to tease those who were to read what turned out to be his last published piece.

The Enigmatic Allure of Erving Goffman

As mentioned above, when Erving Goffman passed away, something important stayed behind. During his own lifetime and after his death, Erving Goffman had turned into Goffman —the sociological superstar of so many of his students and followers. This status has subsequently been the motor behind many of the writings about Goffman throughout the years. One may thus wonder if everything that could or should be said about Goffman has already been said? Since no undiscovered writings from his hand are likely to appear, and since all that can factually be stated about his life and career has already been laid out, all we are left with are interpretations and applications of his work. But this will indeed suffice.

There seems to be a broad consensus on the idea that Erving Goffman was an extraordinarily gifted man—even among his critics. The notions of enigma or enigmatic have been used by several interpreters to capture Goffman’s exceptional but also mythical status (see, e.g., Fontana 1980; Wexler 1984). According to encyclopedic entries, the enigmatic refers to something that is mysterious, difficult to interpret or understand, puzzling, and perplexing but also something that has an alluring and mesmerizing attraction. In this way, the notion of enigma is very suitable for Goffman’s work as he wrote about something that was puzzling new and unexplored (the interaction order), and he wrote about it in a way that was not conventional within sociology by making use of metaphors, literary sources, irony and a generally accessible yet sophisticated style of writing (see, e.g., Smith and Jacobsen 2010). These are undoubtedly some of the main reasons for his success and recognition.

As we know, success has many fathers (not to mention many mothers). For this reason, perhaps, Goffman’s name has attracted and acquired many different labels and epithets throughout the years. For example, his personality as well as his status have been described with many superlatives and accolades such as a sociological giant (Cavan 2014), the discoverer of the infinitely small (Bourdieu 1983), a profaning jester (Delaney 2014), the Kafka of our times (Berman 1972), just to mention a few. His work—its content and perspective—has also been surrounded by a multitude of different labels often trying to colonize Goffman’s ideas or to associate them with a particular school of thought, paradigm and perspective such as: symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, postmodernism, existentialism, functionalism and even as seemingly unlikely candidates as structuralism and critical theory (see Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2010). In fact, he was—to certain degrees and at certain times—all this and so much more. His work is indeed difficult to categorize, because it in many ways sits astride the labels other used to separate ideas and theories from each other. As mentioned above, Goffman himself was opposed to this kind of pigeonholing, but the unmistakable slipperiness of his work invariably invites attempts to nail it down and to pin a specific name or label on it. Goffman seemingly regarded himself, as he once stated in an interview, as a representative of a Hughesian urban ethnography (Verhoeven 1993, 318)—after one of his early his mentors, Everett C. Hughes—but in the same interview he also admitted some kinship with symbolic interactionism as well as, undoubtedly teasingly, suggested some association with positivism. With Goffman’s fondness for role of the jester, one could never really know when he was being completely earnest and when he was just playing a game.

However, with Goffman’s undisputed genius came also a less favorable side to his personality. He was seemingly a complex man. Many of the reported experiences with Goffman—as a colleague or teacher—carry with them the double-edged sword of a brilliant man with humor and wit coupled with a shy, unpleasant, socially insensitive and at times almost rude attitude. It seems as if Goffman provoked many widely different responses among those whom he met. John Lofland’s (1984) humorous Tales of Goffman are very informative about his peculiar personality—pulling tricks on conference participants, junior colleagues or complete strangers—as are also the many testimonies from former students and colleagues, who all stress that Goffman was someone who enjoyed playing social games. For example, as remembered by Roger D. Abrahams, going out with Goffman in public was not always an unqualified pleasure. He knew how to play social games with great decorousness, but he often couldn’t resist breaking their rules to see what would happen. In fact, he was often abruptly rude (Abrahams 1984, 76). Others recall how Goffman what an eminent teacher, but also someone who liked to tease his students and sometimes appeared supercilious and demeaning. As mentioned above, Goffman wanted to keep his private life private, but he seemingly also enjoyed using private and public events as social experiments in which—one might guess—he sometimes tested some of the ideas and concepts that would find their way into his books. It has recently been suggested that the intensive focus on Goffman’s peculiar personality in some ways is perhaps disproportional and may have derailed and even damaged the appreciation of crucial aspects of his work (Ranci 2021). Rather it is my contention that the cult-like status and attention Goffman’s work has acquired is also very much due to the many circulating stories about him as a person and thus in many ways these stories are useful for explaining and understanding what he studied, how and why.

Goffman’s fondness for social situations was not only a private pastime but also ran as a methodological leitmotif throughout his work. More than anything, Goffman—despite explicitly rejecting the notion (Goffman 1983, 4) was a situationalist—or maybe even a trans-situationalist—as he was interested in what transpired in social situations more or less independent of what was otherwise happening in society at large. He was a methodological situationalist—and not an ontological situationalist believing that the world was constituted only by situations. However, he was concerned with studying situations, encounters, casual meetings, moments, episodes, gatherings, bypassings and interaction rituals in all their detail—verbal, non-verbal and spatial. In this way, his work squeezed itself in between those who were interested in long-term historical development, large-scale social structures and social organization (often called methodological holists or collectivists) on the one hand, and those interested in discovering the experiences world of the individual human being on the other (sometimes referred to as methodological individualists). He thus fathered what may be called a sociology of occasions (Wynn 2016), thereby taking a keen interest in everything that constituted part of the ritualized and ceremonial micro-order of everyday life. It was not the macro-order of the State, the Market, or Civil Society that interested Goffman, but instead all the micro-ecological detail and minutiae that—as the reading of the work of Georg Simmel had taught him (and which he quoted at length on the very first page of his PhD dissertation)—constitute society as we know and encounter it (Goffman 1953, iv). As Goffman elsewhere teasingly admitted, he was not making any bold claims whatsoever to be talking about the core maters of sociology—social organization and social structure (Goffman 1974, 13). Goffman knew that this was controversial, particular at a time when structural functionalist, Marxist and conflict theoretical perspectives on the one hand were preoccupied with producing grand theories and overarching models of society as such and behaviorist and small-group studies used experimental designs to capture the patterns of human conditioned behavior in controlled laboratory settings on the other, but he felt that he needed to rectify the gross neglect of the study of situations in and by themselves within sociology (Goffman 1964). As Goffman thus eloquently stated about his own specific focus of attention, he was concerned not with men and their moments but rather moments and their men (Goffman 1967, 3).

Besides this methodological situationism, another characteristic feature of Goffman’s way of working and writing was that he did it his own way, relatively unconcerned with the requirements or standards of the academic community in which he took part. He was in many ways a player who gambled with the stakes in the scientific game when deciding not only to study something unconventional (the interaction order) that many colleagues found strange or irrelevant but also to do so in an unconventional manner. Goffman wrote as by the grace of God—most people who have read his books will be sucked in by his many literary allusions, the quotations from possible all-sorts of material, his sophisticated irony and sarcasm, his deceivingly plain style, the eye for exemplary detail and his creative conceptual inventions—all mixed into one unmistakable Goffmanesque way of writing. As Eliot Freidson noted on Goffman’s way of doing sociology, he was employing with imagination and passion any resources that seem useful to illuminate aspects of human life that most of us overlook and to show us more of humanity there than we could otherwise see (Freidson 1983, 635). Many found his materials and methods (as well as his findings) not only unconventional and tedious but impressionistic, annoyingly undocumented and unsatisfyingly tested or verified. Goffman was therefore sometimes accused of being unscientific, not allowing colleagues to test or replicate his findings (see, e.g., Elkind 1980, 25, 26). True, Goffman seldom explicated how he had arrived at something or informed the reader about the findings that made up his data material. No time and only rarely any specific placing of the material collected was offered. Only very few direct quotes from informants (who could never be identified) appeared in his texts. No criteria for selection or sampling procedures were presented or discussed. Goffman admitted that merely a caricature of sampling was involved in some of his choice of material (Goffman 1974, 15). All in all, Goffman’s work would find it difficult to pass the tests of transparency and reliability that are often required by undergraduate students. Moreover, regarding generalizability, Goffman insisted that the examples of findings that made it into his texts did not qualify as a basis for making inferences, but insisted that what he had observed did in fact happen sometimes, sometimes even regularly, however he was not capable of specifying how often. He thus regarded the various examples he placed in his texts as clarifying depictions rather than as proof or evidence (Goffman 1974, 15). Goffman thus ironically stated that he assumed that a loose speculative approach to a fundamental area of conduct is better than a rigorous blindness to it (Goffman 1963a, 4). In a time and place when quantified and applied sociology (often desperately trying to mimic the natural sciences) was preferred particularly on the American continent as famously and critically described by C. Wright Mills (1959), Goffman’s interaction studies—often relying as such on hints, qualified guesswork, fictional examples or scattered observations than on systematically selected and documented data material—for many stood out as a sore toe. Goffman was well aware of this, which may have been the reason for his many book sub-titles stressing that his writings were merely notes, microstudies, or essays as opposed to arduously constructed academic achievements (which they in fact certainly were). Goffman himself remained critical of this natural science trend with its focus on strict variable analysis and the hypothetico-deductive method (Goffman 1971, 20, 21), and he described his own work as scholarship rather than research and as a freewheeling literary kind of thing (Verhoeven 1993, 338). Goffman’s forte (and his taste) was not for this kind of quantitative or statistical work—rather he wanted to tease out (in a socio-literary manner) the contours of a heretofore unsatisfyingly researched area of human life: face-to-face interaction and its orderliness. Despite its seemingly loose and speculative character, Goffman’s work was far from coincidental, messy or impressionistic. Everyone who has ever carefully read his writings from the early 1950s on to the early 1980s will see that there is indeed a strong and tightly knit thread running through it. This also made Anthony Giddens (1988) conclude that Goffman’s work was in fact an important and systematic contribution to sociology rather than an obscure thing better to be assigned a spot at the outskirts of the discipline. It is probably safe to say that Goffman wanted his own theoretical contribution to consist of what Herbert Blumer (1954) had called sensitizing concepts that are almost immediately recognizable and usable for imaginative and incisive empirical study and analysis rather than abstract definitive categories consisting of clear-cut definitions of attributes and fixed benchmarks. Blumer had insisted that whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts merely suggest directions along which to look (Blumer 1954, 7). Without himself ever specifically embracing the notion of sensitizing concepts, this desire for developing a useful vocabulary or conceptual inventory of the interaction order may perhaps explain some of Goffman’s aversion toward more abstract forms of theorizing (see Chapter 6). In many ways, Goffman’s own terminology was simultaneously more concrete and more loose than that of many of those social thinkers and social theorists primarily looking at large-scale or structural features of society, because his concepts, on the one hand, attempted to capture concrete human behavior but without, on the other hand, being testable or becoming paradigmatic. Contrary to many of the definitive concepts derived from large-scale survey studies and systematic testing and re-testing, Goffman’s sensitizing concepts did not intend to bind their user or obligate him or her to parrot them. Rather, his concepts inevitably and openly invite exploration, testing, refining, developing and potentially also, in the end, discarding (see, e.g., Dellwing 2016).

After Goffman’s death, his name continues to attract an almost cult-like status among seasoned scholars as well as perhaps particularly among students. I still remember one student during class calling him Gothman—thereby simply suggesting that he was cool and in (and perhaps also revealing that the lecture texts had not been read). So Goffman lives on and continues to inspire the sociological imagination of students and scholars alike around the world. It also makes good sense to say that there has been a significant globalization of Goffman since his death, which is evident in his reception, use and status throughout the world. He is no longer mainly a North American phenomenon (if he ever was). Goffman’s legacy to posterity is in fact multifaceted and multidimensional. P. M. Strong (1983, 345) once stated on the content of Goffman’s ideas that their theoretical and methodological impact has been small. That statement was published the year after Goffman’s death. Since then, something has changed significantly. Nowadays, nearly fifty years after his concepts were originally developed, many studies draw freely or more systematically on his ideas within a mind-boggling diversity of different empirical fields of research (see, e.g., Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2015, 184–89), and new work continued to be conducted and published.

Aristotle was famous for trying to classify and catalogue almost everything in the human and animal world. Later, Carl von Linneaus attempted the same in the world of flora and fauna. A large part of social science is in fact concerned with providing concepts and classificatory schemas that can be used to capture and describe the social world in which we live, thereby making it comprehensible and meaningful. In this type of classificatory work, Goffman was himself a true master and developed an extensive network of concepts and analytical categories. As mentioned earlier, Goffman was a formidable conceptual generator. He left the world leaving behind a treasure trove of concept-driven sociology that has provided many fields and sub-fields with numerous concepts and ideas to be used, elaborated and developed in many subsequent studies. In his books, he invented and presented more than 900 concepts that each in their way have been adopted by and imported into the lingua of many different branches of knowledge. Moreover, many of Goffman’s own students continued his line of work and have contributed to the development of ideas, studies and theories that have gained international attention. In this way, Goffman and particularly his focus on conceptual invention and development inspired a vein of what might be called generic research in interactionist sociology exemplified in the writings of Randall Collins, Eviatar Zerubavel, Gary Alan Fine, and Robert C. Prus—all of whom have relied on, toyed with, applied and refined his conceptual apparatus in their own acclaimed theoretical work and empirical studies. It is interesting to note that—at least to my knowledge—no-one has ever stated that Goffman was wrong or that his ideas were useless or a waste of time. Even though many have disagreed with parts of his work—either specific studies or his approach to sociology in general—there has always remained something of a silent acceptance that what Goffman did when he discovered the interaction order as a domain of research in its own right was ground-breaking. Some, obviously, found this realm of human and social life irrelevant as compared to the study of abstract and amorphous social structures and social processes, however most—it will be my contention—could see that Goffman was on to something, which to many became true particularly when comparing his findings or applying them to their own everyday life experiences. The almost immediate and intuitive recognizability of Goffman’s ideas made them relevant and readable also to people outside the world of academia.

Goffman in the New Millennium

Goffman lived and wrote during the mid-twentieth