PRESENTATION OF SELF
As used by Erving Goffman (1922-1982), refers
to the methodical as well as the unintentional practices of presenting or displaying one's
‘self’ in ways that create a particular definition of the situation. This
presentation may include verbal messages as well as gestures, clothing style, hair style,
posture, etc.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life. New York: Doubleday, 1956 - Extract: www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/courses/GOFFSELF.HTML
A person may try to present their self in a
particular way by ‘dressing up’ to go to court or they may find themselves the
victim of a jury's definition of the situation derived from the accused's appearance. The
presentation of self is usually done front stage, while in the back stage the actor can
let their guard down and ‘act themselves’.
In many modern settings, individuals are caught up in a
variety of differing encounters and milieux, each of which may call for different forms of
appropriate' behaviour. Goffman is normally taken to be the theorist par excellence of
this phenomenon. As the individual leaves one encounter and enters another, he sensitively
adjusts the 'presentation of self' in relation to whatever is demanded of a particular
situation.
Such a view is often thought to imply that an individual
has as many selves as there are divergent contexts of interaction, an idea which somewhat
resembles poststructuralist interpretations of the self, albeit from a differing
theoretical perspective. Yet again it would not be correct to see contextual diversity as
simply and inevitably promoting the fragmentation of the self, let alone its
disintegration into multiple 'selves'. It can just as well, at least in many
circumstances, promote an integration of self. The situation is rather like the contrast
between rural and urban life discussed previously.
A person may make use of diversity in order to create a
distinctive self-identity which positively incorporates elements from different settings
into an integrated narrative. Thus a cosmopolitan person is one precisely who draws
strength from being at home in a variety of contexts. - From Anthony Giddens, Modernity
and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991.
The Presentation of Self in Presidential Life: Onstage
and Backstage With Johnson and Nixon - Sigelman L.
Abstract: This is a dual case study of the strategic use of presidential rhetoric, drawing
on sociological and social-psychological treatments of self-presentation and impression
management. Comparison of the ''onstage'' and ''backstage'' language of Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon provides an unprecedented opportunity to analyze presidential impression
management strategies. The primary question posed here is the extent to which the tendency
to engage in impression management is observable in the two presidents' major public
appearances. The secondary questions are whether the two presidents pursued different
self-presentation strategies, projecting positive but distinctive personas, or converged
toward a common presidential profile and the extent to which their distinctive
personalities came through in their private conversations. On the three dimensions
examined here, the onstage Johnson and Nixon projected more ''presidential'' personas than
their backstage counterparts. Backstage, their personas differed considerably. Onstage,
they appeared very similar. - ingentaconnect.com
Emotion and performance - Prison officers and the presentation of self in
prisons
Elaine M. Crawley, Keele University, UK
This article explores how prison officers manage and perform emotion on a day-to-day
basis. Although the performance of emotion is invariably highlighted when things ‘go
wrong’ in prison - perhaps particularly during prison disturbances - the emotional
life of prisons at an everyday level has received much less attention. Moreover, although
the sociology of the prison has acknowledged the impact of prison on the emotional lives
of prisoners there has been much less interest in the emotional impact of the prison on
its uniformed staff. This article focuses on how prison officers’ emotions are
structured and performed on a daily basis. Prisons are emotional places, but like all
organizations, they have their own ‘rules’ about the kinds of emotions it is
appropriate for prison officers to express (and indeed feel) at work. In consequence,
working in prisons demands a performative attitude on the part of staff, an (often
significant) engagement in emotion-work and, relatedly, the employment of various
emotion-work strategies. - pun.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/41
Members of Congress and Presentation of Self on the World Wide Web
Girish J. Gulati, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
The Internet has become an important means by which members of Congress communicate with
their constituents. Although a number of studies have examined the content and features of
congressionalWeb sites, how members of Congress present themselves on theWeb has yet to be
addressed. A content analysis of the images displayed on the home pages of 100 senators
and 244 House members who served in the 107th Congress reveals two distinct presentations:
an "insider" style and an " outsider" style. The results vary,
moreover, by chamber, seniority, gender, and race. Within each party, the most significant
differences were by gender, with Democratic women the most likely to present themselves as
outsiders and Republican women the most likely to present themselves as insiders. -
hij.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/1/22
Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-Presentation and Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages
and Discourse - Wynn E., Katz J. E.
Source: The Information Society, Volume 13, Number 4, 1 December 1997, pp. 297-327(31)
Abstract: Futurist sensationalism, journalistic attention, constructivist theory, and
appeal to technical determinism all make the genre of literature on cyberspace, described
as postmodern, visible and possibly influential. A main theme of the postmodern
perspective is that Internet technology liberates the individual from the body and allows
the separate existence of multiple aspects of self that otherwise would not be expressed
and that can remain discrete rather than having to be resolved or integrated as in
ordinary social participation. The concepts under review presume a prior definition of
self as a psychological unity, when the term is open to many definitions including the one
that the self is a product of varying social contexts and is normally managed to
accommodate them. Evidence of the socially grounded nature of interaction exists
everywhere in cyberspace. Empirical examples include list discourse that illustrates the
situated significance of authentic identity in Internet professional groups, secondary
research suggesting that electronic communication is most successful as one genre in a
communication repertoire, cases of home page self-presentation mediated through socially
defined links, and evidence that the ''virtualness'' and alleged anonymity of Internet are
illusory and therefore could not over time support a plausibly disembodied, depoliticized,
fragmented ''self.'' - ingentaconnect.com
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