Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

by Erving Goffman

Book Overview

Erving Goffman effectively extends his argument in favor of a diagnosis of deviant behavior which takes account of the whole social situation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029119405
• ISBN13: 9780029119402
• Release Date: September 1966
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Genius in the analysis of people in places

Very few books in sociology so clearly and profoundly conceptualize the concepts of social occasions as do the works of Erving Goffman. This book is especially important for it provides a framework for tricking out the seen but unnoticed behaviors of everyday life. The book's profoundity is not in what stands out in human intercourse, but rather what does not. The mundane world of social interaction is revealed in what most readers will find to be commonsensically true. In the same way that a physicist can tell us why a baseball flies over the fence (a fairly mundane evernt) in terms of mass, velocity, and drag coefficients, Goffman tells us why the ordinary is able to sustain itself as such.