The Sociological Perspective Of Dramaturgy Is Associated...

The sociological perspective of dramaturgy is associated with Irving Goffman (1922 – 1982) who developed the concept in his book The Presentation Of The Self In Everyday Life (1959). Using theatre as an extended metaphor, dramaturgy explains the everyday interactions that uphold social reality. Life is like a play, and like actors in a play, people perform roles, working in teams to create the social world, like scenes in a play. This provides functional institutions of work, school, home, hospitals and other official bodies that constitute society. Social ‘performances’ are reliant on team-members understanding their role in the group and the aim of the scenario. Someone who undermines or disrupts a performance, by revealing hidden†¦show more content†¦Thus, dramaturgy is an effective and flexible method of analysis for qualitative, ethnographic based research. As a model for studying everyday life, dramaturgy reveals how identity is constructed, managed , and understood within contextualised locations through shared meanings. This understanding can be used further, to explain how and why human behaviour alters in different situations, identity development throughout the life course, power relations, conformity, subculture, as well as the formation of self and group identity. Dramaturgy is positioned within the ‘interactionist’ school of thought because it uncovers hidden meaning of everyday interaction. In terms how the self relates to society, Goffman’s dramaturgy overlaps with Mead (1943), as they both regard identity as being continually constructed through interaction, rather than a fixed personal attribute. Meaning that individual identity is performed in relation to other people’s perceptions, thus dependable on social context. Dramaturgy analyses society through micro level actions and interactions, contrasting to macro based or conflict theories. However, Rawls argues that dramaturgy is neither micro nor macro, because self-presentation occurs within the constraints of interactions (1987: 140). Although dramaturgy is observation of actions, identity is understood as being formed within the