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Goffman, Like Emile Durkheim: What Makes Society Possible?

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Bourdieu (1977) insisted that hegemony is maintained in school by the ' direct imposition of presenting pedagogy of the dominant groups in society.' Willis, on the other hand, illustrated how the social identities of the lads arose not from downward mediation, but from powerful internal cultural relationships (Gordon, 1984). Goffman’s view on power, also in contrast to Bourdieu's top-down macro theory approach, stressed how people can exercise agency to resist disrespectful treatment by others in everyday interaction. He shed light on how the less powerful - in institutional and non-institutional settings - can resist surveillance and stigmatization by creating a meaningful sense of self (Alaszewski, Manthorpe, 1995, p. 39). Goffman, Like Emile Durkheim, sought to answer the fundamental sociological question: what makes society possible? Durkheim (1966 [1895] cited by Giddens, 2009) argued that society is far …show more content…

On Goffman's account, actions do not acquire their meaning primarily through a relation to external ends, but rather through a commitment to the internal ends of the interaction order. Every performance, on his account, requires a commitment even for the simplest of interactions. In other words, for him, there is no arena of human interaction that is meaningless. Where there is 'order,' said Goffman, there must be a working consensus. Furthermore, all meaningful relationships of co-presence are characterized by this underlying consensus (Rawls, 1989). Essentially, for Goffman (1983) 'society' and the order that characterises ‘the interaction order’, is the creation of highly skilled and knowledgeable agents. Consequently, the seemingly innocuous act of queuing up, for Goffman (1983), is not a meaningless activity. It is an act that possesses an interactional significance for all the

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