The Evolution of the Concept of Social Action: Parsons and Goffman

Goffman as ReaderErving Goffman is widely thought of as an ethnographic symbolic interactionist. In addition, he is institutionally recognized as a sociological theorist whose work is required reading in every undergraduate and graduate sociological theory course. However, only occasionally is he recognized as a great reader. Given that just about everyone accepts the first two of these descriptions, it's worth beginning by emphasizing the importance of the third.Goffman learned his sociology in the context of the post World War II expansion of the American university. The GI Bill had opened the doors of universities to large numbers of returning soldiers and Goffman's experiences at the University of Chicago have to be understood in this context (Fine, 1995). The unfriendly professor-student ratios of those years meant that anyone who was going to succeed in that environment was likely to be not just self-motivated but also self-taught. Blessed with a supportive and an unusually talented cohort, Goffman refined the critical, wide cast reading habits that he had first developed as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto (Smith 2006:15). By the time he completed his dissertation in 1953, he was steeped in the writings of the Chicago School, the sociology of Max Weber and the German methodological debates that framed his work and that of Simmel and others, the development of Emile Durkheim's sociology, leading to the breakthroughs in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Freud's work and the development of psychoanalysis generally, the existentialism of Sartre and Camus and of course the full complement of writings concerning Parsons' voluntaristic theory of action and the reactions to it by Merton and others. In addition, Goffman had a tremendous knowledge of studies of animal behavior and a dazzling array of other subject areas. In his spare time he also found time to read a staggering number of novels, newspapers, magazines and the literary detritus of everyday life. C. Wright Mills concludes The Sociological Imagination with the instruction to sociologists to keep notebooks of all their disparate readings and observations. Goffman's must have been amazing. And this last observation is not really a guess: the footnotes to all his writings have allowed us to glimpse the inner world of his study.Later Goffman was exposed to the microeconomic ideas of Thomas Schelling and others. Since we read Goffman in the 21st century, it is easy to forget that the context of Schelling's ideas was not consumerist trends but the Cold War and the threat of global nuclear destruction. Understood in this way, Goffman's other writings about espionage dovetail easily into his interest in Schelling's work. His reworking of Schelling's early writings about Cold War politics into an analysis of the world of the casino and the issue of risk-taking in general, required a creative development that is likely to seem less radical now than it was in its day.At some point Goffman also came to appreciate the importance of ordinary language philosophy for sociology. This is likely linked to his time at Berkeley where he got to know John Searle. This fact likely explains Goffman's decision to emphasize J.L. Austin's version of this project. (Duranti, 2009:24).Once we recognize Goffman as one of the great readers in sociology, it is easy to see that his peers were likely to include the other great readers of his day: Philip Rieff, Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons and others. That some of his peers were not great readers, Blumer being one of them (see Blumer 1969), makes it is easier to see why he likely held them in lower regard. Once we recognize that Goffman's sociology was made possible by his extraordinary reading, it is also possible to understand why we don't have a Goffman School of sociology today: we have some impressive and knowledgeable theorists and some impressive ethnographers but we have very few people who can practice sociology as Goffman did at the intersection of theory and ethnography. …