Can We Scale Up Goffman? From Vegas to the World Stage

IntroductionIt is an all-too-common lament among sociologists that Erving Goffman, though his writings remain widely read and respected today, failed to spawn an ongoing and cohesive research tradition. His idiosyncratic methods of data collection, the uniqueness of his biographical trajectory, and even his prickly personality have all been invoked to explain the lack of a distinctly Goffmanian school of research (Gamson 1985; Scheff, Phillips, and Kincaid 2006; Smith 2006; Shalin 2014). It is also the case that microoriented sociologies, such as symbolic interactionism and especially ethnomethodology, have been pushed to the margins of sociology as a consequence of the ascendency of quantitative methods. This paper is, on one level, an argument for continuing to read Goffman as a seminal figure in the sociology of everyday life. But it is more than this. It is an argument that we should be ambitious about using Goffman to generate and develop theories about other levels of social reality, including the most macro of them all: the global level. I make this argument through recounting my own experience attempting to replicate Goffman's famed ethnographic research as a casino dealer in Las Vegas.Are there contemporary sociological traditions about macro-level phenomena that do explicitly draw inspiration from Goffman's writings? Yes, and in this paper I will compare and contrast two of the most prominent of such theories, both of which address the phenomenon of globalization. On one hand, there is the world society variant of neo-institutionalist theory, associated with John Meyer and his colleagues and students at Stanford. On the other, a school of critical sociology known as global ethnography, as developed by Michael Burawoy and his students at Berkeley (Burawoy et al. 2000; Michael Burawoy 2009; Salzinger 2003; Sherman 2007; Sharone 2013). The assumptions, methods, and implications of these two traditions, the Meyerian and the Burawoyian, are generally understood to be polar opposites. Yet one thing that unites them, I argue, is that they both attempt to integrate some basic Goffmanian insights into their theories of the social world at levels of analysis beyond the micro.I came to think about the commonalities and contrasts between these two theoretical traditions during a study of the international casino industry and through my own engagement with Goffman's work. I ultimately became convinced that the world society thesis is premised upon a mis-reading of Goffman as a discursive theorist of cultural order, an interpretation which leads the researcher to assume an oversocialized conception of actors as mere enactors of scripts. Global ethnography, in contrast, takes seriously Goffman's dramaturgical model of social life as a system of strategic interactions.An important consequence of these disparate uses of Goffman is divergent understandings of the relation between the front and back stage of social life. The world society thesis obliterates any such distinction; while for global ethnography, it is the central dynamic driving national processes in the new world order.I first discovered the relevance of Goffman's theory to my own research rather serendipitously, while doing ethnographic fieldwork as a casino dealer in order to study interactions among dealers, gamblers and pit bosses in a Nevada casino. One afternoon before work I stumbled upon Goffman's classic study of risk-taking, "Where the Action Is," an essay which evinces an insider's knowledge of the workings of a casino pit (1967). Upon digging further into biographies of Goffman's life, I learned that Goffman had spent several summers, and even perhaps a full year, working as a casino dealer in Las Vegas during the 1950s. Anyone who knows anything about Goffman knows that he at one point worked as a gym assistant in a mental hospital-which became the empirical material for his book Asylums (Goffman 1961)-and many others know that he had done his dissertation research in a village in the Shetland Isles-the insights of which led to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959). …