Concept
dramaturgy
Goffman’s approach that analyses everyday encounters in the language of theatre: front stage, back stage and impression management.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (a 1956 monograph, the American edition in 1959) Erving Goffman treated everyday interaction as a stage. People present themselves to others and manage the impression they make. The presentation is given on the “front stage”, where the official definitions are shown; on the “back stage” the impression is prepared and the everyday dirty work of the show is hidden.
According to Goffman, learning about the person in front of you helps you define the situation. That is why dramaturgy is related to Thomas’s definition of the situation and to Mead’s view of the self.
Dramaturgy is a metaphor: it does not claim that life is theatre but that the vocabulary of theatre helps us understand everyday life. In media studies Meyrowitz argued that electronic media blur the boundary between front and back stage, and work on social media has discussed audience and presentation with this vocabulary.
Example
A waiter who jokes about customers as soon as he enters the kitchen and changes his expression as he steps into the dining room: the kitchen is the back stage, the dining room the front stage (our own example).