The two faces of Erving Goffman: Subtle observer of human interactions, and Smug organzation man

In response to my most recent post expressing bafflement over the Erving Goffman mystique, several commenters helped out by suggesting classic Goffman articles for me to read. Naturally, I followed the reference that had a link attached–it was for an article called Cooling the Mark Out, which analogized the frustrations of laid-off and set-aside white-collar workers to the reactions to suckers after being bilked by con artists.

Goffman’s article was fascinating, but I was bothered by a tone of smugness. Here’s a quote from Cooling the Mark Out that starts on the cute side but is basically ok:

In organizations patterned after a bureaucratic model, it is customary for personnel to expect rewards of a specified kind upon fulfilling requirements of a specified nature. Personnel come to define their career line in terms of a sequence of legitimate expectations and to base their self-conceptions on the assumption that in due course they will be what the institution allows persons to become.

It’s always amusing to see white-collar types treated anthropologically, so that’s fine. But then Goffman continues:

Sometimes, however, a member of an organization may fulfill some of the requirements for a particular status, especially the requirements concerning technical proficiency and seniority, but not other requirements, especially the less codified ones having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work.

This seemed naive at best and obnoxious at worst. As if, whenever someone is not promoted, it’s either because he can’t do the job or he can’t play the game. Unless you want to define this completely circularly (with “playing the game” retrospectively equaling whatever it takes to do to keep the job), this just seems wrong. In corporate and academic settings alike, lots of people get shoved aside either for reasons entirely beyond their control (e.g., a new division head comes in and brings in his own people) or out of simple economics.

Goffman was a successful organization man and couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the losers in the promotion game. It wasn’t enough for him to say that some people don’t ascend the ladder; he had to attribute that to not fulfilling the “less codified [requirements] having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work.”

Well, no. In the current economic climate this is obvious, but even back in the 1960s there were organizations with too few slots at the top for all the aspirants at the bottom, and it seems a bit naive to suppose that not reaching the top rungs is necessarily a sign of improper handling of social relationships.

In this instance, Goffman seems like the classic case of a successful person who things that, hey, everybody could be a success where they blessed with his talent and social skills.

This was the only thing by Goffman I’d read, though, so to get a broader perspective I sent a note to Brayden King, the sociologist whose earlier post on Goffman had got me started on this.

King wrote:

People in sociology are mixed on their feelings about Goffman’s scholarship. He’s a love-him-or-hate-him figure. I lean more toward the love him side, if only because I think he really built up the symbolic interactionist theory subfield in sociology.

I think that one of the problems is that you’re thinking of this as a proportion of variance problem, in which case I think you’re right that “how you play the game” explains a lot less variance in job attainment than structural factors. Goffman wasn’t really interested in explaining variance though. His style was to focus on a kind of social interaction and then try to explain the strategies or roles that people use in those interactions to engage in impression management. So, for him, a corporate workplace was interesting for the same reason an asylum is – they’re both places where role expectations shape the way people interact and try to influence the perceptions that others have of them.

It’s a very different style of scholarship, but nevertheless it’s had a huge influence in sociology’s version of social psych. The kind of work that is done in this area is highly qualitative, often ethnographic. From a variance-explanation perspective, though, I see your point. How much does “playing the game” really matter when the economy is collapsing and companies are laying off thousands of employees?

13 thoughts on “The two faces of Erving Goffman: Subtle observer of human interactions, and Smug organzation man

  1. Sometimes, sometimes means sometimes

    "Sometimes, however, a member of an organization "

    and sometimes maybe it does not.

    What an academic's personality has to with their published work and what we should make of it is an (the?) interesting point.

    K?

  2. I think you need to read the bit you quoted in the wider context of the topic of the article, which Goffman, in the introductory section of the article, describes thus:

    "It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. ((…)) By means of such defenses, a person saves himself from committing a cardinal social sin‑the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess.

    "A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the de­fenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. ((…)) This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no won­der that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.

    "In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered."

    Reading it in context, I think that in the bit you quoted, Goffman specifically refers to cases in which people are fired because they were not good enough (in the eyes of the decision-makers), contrary to their self-conceptions. The counterexamples you describe are situations in which it is not the employee's fault that s/he is fired. But these are of less interest to Goffman.

  3. Lemmus:

    Yes, I had read the whole article (which was indeed entertaining). Still, I think that much of the article's impact comes from Goffman's device of equating unhappy white-collar workers with con-game victims. Which, among other things, allows him to transfer some of the casual contempt and amusement we show toward con-game victims whom we don't know (those suckers who were trying to get something for nothing) toward white-collar workers who, unlike Goffman, didn't happen to grab the magic ticket that gave them permanent jobs.

    Think about that expression: "persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered."

    This doesn't just describe people whose "fault" it was that they were fired. If anything, it's a much better description of people who were fired for no reason having to do with them at all.

    I'd argue that the bit about "other requirements, especially the less codified ones having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work" is a classic example of an unrefutable statement. Popper would be spinning in his grave. If someone ever seems to have lost his or her job for no apparent reason, you can just say, Hey, it must be those less codified requirements!

  4. Kieran:

    I just read the Bennett review, which is indeed nice. Still, my impression of Goffman is similar to my impression of John von Neumann: Everyone describes him as a lovable jerk, but to me he just comes across as a jerk, in this case someone who is self-satisfied in his ability to see through others.

  5. I agree Goffman is limited (who isn't?) but I think this post reveals more of your own current limits than his.

    Goffman seems to me to be impolite by your politeness standards, and I think "that's not polite" is a major semantic stop sign limiting your epistemologic engagement with the world (but maybe less so now than in the past).

    A reason I think Goffman's theories are a bit underengaged is that studying them (specifically studying microsocial role optimization) can lead to microsocial arms races which are costly to larger society.

  6. Hopefully:

    It's not just that I find Goffman impolite; I also think he was missing the point. He was generally interested int he subtleties of human interaction, which is fine–I'm not denying that he made important contributions–but I think he also ended up over-attributing things in life to these interactions.

    For him to assume that lots of people are losing their jobs because of problems "other requirements, especially the less codified ones having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work"–well, that sounds as if I were to say that lots of people were losing their jobs because of their poor understanding of statistics. Or maybe it would be like Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise telling people that, if they only had a really charming smile, they'd have received that promotion.

    Again, I'm open to being corrected on this matter, but Goffman's attitude strikes me as naive and the product of the fallacy which says that whatever you particularly care about must be important to everybody.

    That said, I agree that it should be possible to separate Goffman's obnoxious smug attitude (as I perceive it) from the substance of his claims, which surely must apply to some people, as Keith notes above.

  7. Andrew, sorry I didn't respond earlier on. (You should get the MT plugin which allows people to subscribe to comments.)

    Here is my overall understanding of Goffman's argument technique in On Cooling out the Mark.

    1. Goffman finds in confidence games well thought out techniques for managing a type of disappointment.

    The con criminals have stolen the mark's money, and then, "when the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only an­other easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miserably lacking in them." (This language is from David Maurer's work on the confidence criminal's argot, which was the basis for the movie "The Sting.")

    Cooling out the mark is very well staged in confidence crimes.

    2. Goffman then states that although confidence crimes involve only a few, [pre-Madoff, Allan Stanford], there are many social dramas which require the use of similar consolation techniques – to manage the loss of self.

    (It is worth remarking at this point that Goffman's view of financial regulators appears to be they perform this role of consolation, also.)

    3. The passage which offends you is not meant as an explanation for why people may fail to advance. Goffman is simply noting that in some institutions "such as training institutions, it occurs all the time. The process of personnel selection requires that many trainees be called but that few be, chosen."

    And in this institutions, we will find the same consolation techniques used by confidence criminals in the blow-off.

    Does Goffman succeed on this point?

    Well, I leave that to your readers to discuss more fully. But, it is a remarkable type of analysis -look at the pathological to find regularities in the conventional.

    (I have no views about Goffman's personality or how that shaped his intellectual view points.)

  8. Andrew: I didn't mean to say you literally hadn't read the full article, I was trying to say that putting the bit you quoted in context suggests an interpretation closer to mine than yours; I would still suggest that, although Goffman's writing here isn't particularly clear, as usual.

    And I don't see why the hypothesis about uncodified requirements is unfalsifiable. You could get measures of fulfilling codified and uncodified requirments and run a logistic regression on a 'fired' dummy (with interaction effects).

  9. Michaal:

    I read the Maurer book many years ago and enjoyed it a lot. Although Maurer is somewhat controversial for what some perceive as his glorification of criminals, I didn't really find this objectionable when I read The Big Con. One reason for my equanimity on this point, I believe, is that the con victims described in that book are distant from me in many ways. They're 1940's-style guys in fedoras, doing things like betting on dice games in bars or playing high-stakes poker on the Twentieth Century Limited. Also, as been remarked by many, the victims are often presented as losing money in the context of an attempt to gather ill-gotten gains themselves.

    Now to return to Goffman: I agree that much of the power of his article is in drawing an analogy between the exotic (con victims) and the familiar (middle management). It's similar to those anthropology-style analyses that compare a modern town to a stone-age village, or that compare the U.S. Supreme Court to a pack of bobobos, or whatever. It's amusing to see this sort of connection, and I agree that insight can be provided as well.

    I think that's the point of the following quote, which is amusing in its precicion:

    In organizations patterned after a bureaucratic model, it is customary for personnel to expect rewards of a specified kind upon fulfilling requirements of a specified nature. Personnel come to define their career line in terms of a sequence of legitimate expectations and to base their self-conceptions on the assumption that in due course they will be what the institution allows persons to become.

    When written this way, the expectations of the "personnel" seem as ridiculous and illegitimate as the expectations of the fedora-wearing con victim that he'll make a fortune off a stolen wallet.

    But . . . why did Goffman have to write about "other requirements, especially the less codified ones having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work"?

    Other people have to be "cooled off" too. For example, consider someone who was fired or lost out on a promotion because his or her boss was dumped in favor of someone's brother-in-law? This person needs cooling off too!

    But, by restricting his analysis to people who can't do the job or can't play the game, Goffman removes some potential sympathy for these organization men. Instead of considering a hard-working employee whose explicit or implicit contract was violated, we're invited to consider a hapless fellow who can't play by the rules and doesn't even know what the rules are. This distances us from the event and allows us to be amused by the "cooling-off" story. Just as we are amused by those silly businessmen on the Twentieth Century Limited being outwitted by scrappy outsiders, and amused by seeing various fools and brutes outwitted by Robert Redford and Paul Newman in that movie.

  10. @Andrew, your clarifications have been helpful. I understand your point a little better, I think.

    Here are my background readings, priors if you will.

    1. The Big Con, while interesting, doesn't have the same psychological detail as the Yellow Kid's biography "Con Man". J.R. Weil, the "Yellow Kid", was a confidence criminal from the late 1800's to the mid 1950's. The confidence crimes he committed have their analogues today – nobody should be under any illusions that the "funny talking grifters" described in Maurer's book went anywhere.

    2. Yes, it is correct that most confidence crimes require the victim, in hindsight, to look greedy because they were trying to get something for nothing. Indeed, the constant refrain of the regulator that "If it looks to good to be true, then it isn't." is a dumbed down version of the something for nothing.

    3. But, I didn't read Goffman as claiming that the "something for nothing expectations" in the confidence criminal's victim were analogous to "legitimate expectations" of those say, entered into graduate school who don't end up in academia. (I do see how you came to this view, however.)

    What is analogous is the loss of self identity. The victim can longer think of himself as financially shrewd, and the rejected graduate student can no longer think of themselves as part of the academy.

    Both need consolation, unless they complain too much.

    I find this an interesting observation by Goffman – we need to shut people up in order to keep certain institutions viable. Again, I am not sure about this point's truth, but it is startling.

    4. Finally, I don't think that Goffman simply picked the confidence criminal as an analysis because it was exotic. Goffman would have known the dedication to acting, pretending, and creating illusions that the confidence criminals must have to be a success. My sense is, and Goffman scholars can correct me, that the confidence criminal's theatre of the mind was not exotic, except for its intended goal to rob people of their money.

  11. It's an interesting general dichotomy for a scholar explaining behavior: the deterministic v. probabilistic.

    If X makes it to the top do you focus on what X did successfully to make it to the top or to the randomness involved in him rather than somebody else making it to the top? Ideally, you would focus on both, but it's hard to be even handed. To do strong work, you need to focus on one or the other.

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