Performing performance: young aspiring athletes' presentation of athletic identity.

Youths are in the process of figuring out answers to the question "who am I?" and young athletes are searching for athletic identity in interaction with their friends, teammates, coaches, and so on. This study explores athletes' presentations of athletic identity based on 24 interviews with ambitious young athletes attending upper secondary sport schools. Anchored in Goffman's theory of the self and the presentation of the self, as well as Markus and Nurius' concept of possible selves, the study views identity as socially constructed in interaction. Utilising this theoretical perspective alongside thematic analysis resulted in four themes that reveal characteristics that are deemed central in an athletic identity. First, the theme I am a dutiful athlete constitutes integral facets of the athletes' self-presentation as committed and diligent individuals. The interviews also bring to light variations in the athletes' attitudes and approaches towards these expectations and concepts. The remaining three themes: I must be unique, We must be unique, and I must have fun, illustrate how being a performing athlete extends beyond duties tied to training, resting, and eating. While the findings suggest the existence of certain dominant and desirable characteristics in an athletic identity, they also highlight variations in identities, emphasising negotiation and flexibility in handling the athlete role.

Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters: how interaction ritual connects conversation analysis and cultural sociology.

This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similarly rooted in Durkheim, Goffman's theory of interaction ritual provides an analytic pivot between EMCA and the strong program. The broader theoretical argument is illustrated using data from interviews with adults about their most recent encounter with a rude strangers in public space, which are here treated a breaches of the interaction ritual of civil inattention. Members readily draw on the specifics of a particular stranger interaction gone awry to reflect on the nature of life in public and to expound on their understandings of the ethics of face-to-face interaction and everyday morality more generally. Where EMCA focuses on the discoverability of the organizational features of everyday interaction, the position developed here is concerned with the organization of members' interpretations of everyday interaction. While centered on specific kinds of interactional breaches, by finding common ground between EMCA and cultural sociology, the argument advances a potentially more broadly applicable approach that treats everyday encounters as morally meaningful and everyday lifeworlds as moral landscapes. Developing a comprehensive understanding of copresent interaction as a basic building block of society requires attention to both the organizational dynamics of copresent encounters and to the interpretive resources that ordinary members use to account for and justify their own and others' conduct.

A Goffmanian analysis of impact of unclear professional identity and role negotiation of pharmacists in primary care: A multiple case study.

BACKGROUND: Professional identity and its development is a focus of research, education, and practice. But, there is a lack of how professional identity impacts changes in pharmacists' roles in practice, which are particularly prevalent in primary care teams. OBJECTIVES: This research uses Goffmanian theory, micro-sociologic interactional theory, to describe the outcomes of role negotiation in integrated primary care teams. METHODS: This is a multiple case study done per Yin, which used interviews and documents to collect data. Interviews used a storytelling format to gather information on the pharmacist's role and negotiation with their team. Four to six interviews were done in each case. Data was analyzed in an iterative manner using the Qualitative approach by Leuven including narrative reports being created for each case. RESULTS: Five cases were recruited but three cases were completed. In each case, the pharmacist was passive in role negotiation and allowed other actors to decide what tasks were of value. Likely this passivity was due to their professional identities: supportive and "not a physician". These identities led to a focus on the pharmacists' need to develop. This multi-case study demonstrated that pharmacists' professional identity led to passivity being valued and expected. Whether pharmacists self-limited, which has been previously seen, needs to be better defined. But unclear archetypes reduced tasks identified as unique to the pharmacist. CONCLUSION: Goffmanian theory highlighted a key success for future pharmacist role negotiation, a clear professional identity by both pharmacists and society, including team members. Until that occurs, there is a risk of underuse in primary care team settings.

How storytelling through the use of avatars could help Fukushima evacuees express themselves: digital archive for people in the diaspora.

The Memorytalk online platform allows users to upload animated human stories. They may also choose to display related photos/characters and construct scenarios. Memorytalk may thus constitute a useful collaborative format for survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake, especially evacuees from the town of Namie, who are now relocated in different areas across Japan, particularly as they are hesitant to talk about where they are from. This study examined various narrated animations created by Namie high school students within the Memorytalk platform, specifically for the purpose of investigating their storytelling methods based on Erving Goffman's role-distance theory. Memorytalk not only allows avatars that provide users with anonymity when expressing a wide range of memories, it also creates (1) opportunities for face-to-face workshops in the context of computer-mediated communication and (2) the therapeutic benefits of being humorous. In sum, the platform may provide users with a form of role distancing in which people in the diaspora can more freely express themselves and also store valuable local memories.

Nursing as total institution.

Healthcare under the auspices of late-stage capitalism is a total institution that mortifies nurses and patients alike, demanding conformity, obedience, perfection. This capture, which resembles Deleuze's enclosure, entangles nurses in carceral systems and gives way to a postenclosure society, an institution without walls. These societies of control constitute another sort of total institution, more covert and insidious for their invisibility (Deleuze, 1992). While Delezue (1992) named physical technologies like electronic identification badges as key to understanding these societies of control, the political economy of late-stage capitalism functions as a total institution with no cohesive, centralized, connected material apparatus required. In this manuscript, we outline the ways in which the healthcare industrial complex demands nurse conformity and how that, in turn, operationalizes nurses in service to the institution. This foundation leads to the assertion that nursing must foster a radical imagination for itself, unbound by reality as it presently exists, in order that we might conjure more just, equitable futures for caregivers and care receivers alike. To tease out what a radical imagination might look like, we dwell in paradox: getting folks the care they need in capitalist healthcare systems; engaging nursing's deep history to inspire alternative understandings for the future of the discipline; and how nursing might divest from extractive institutional structures. This paper is a jumping-off place to interrogate the ways institutions telescope and where nursing fits into the arrangement.

Socialisation of children to nurse and nursing images: A Goffman-inspired thematic analysis of children's picture books in a Swedish context.

Picture books are often part of children's socialisation processes, contributing to the children forming images of the world, including ideas about (categories of) people, such as nurses. The study aims to explore how nurses/nursing are portrayed in children's picture books in a Swedish context. Through a systematic search, 44 books were included for analysis using thematic analysis and a theoretical lens inspired by Goffman. The results were presented in three themes: 'The costume characterised and designated nurses', 'Nurses and nursing were defined through specific activities and accessories', and 'Nurses' role as caregivers and decency practitioners'. The results showed that nurses were depicted/described in varied contexts, performing their roles mainly front stage in 'hands-on work' in close contact with patients and relatives. Nurses were attributed different accessories and personality characteristics. Nurses/nursing were generally set within a healthcare context, oftentimes within an overarching medical logic. Historical depictions of nurses' uniforms still appeared as a signifier for nurses/nursing. The presentation of nurses/nursing might have potential implications on children's understanding of and for reputations of nurses/nursing in the long term as primary socialisation and related understandings of the (sub)world(s) are deeply rooted in humans.

Interacciones y convivencia escolar en clave de inclusión: apuntes a partir de las concepciones docentes / Interactions and school coexistence in the key of inclusion: notes from the teaching conceptions

RESUMEN El objetivo del estudio es conocer lo que las y los docentes entienden por inclusión y las acciones que realizan en su nombre. La multiplicidad de interpretaciones que puede asumir este concepto y la variedad de formas de trabajo en función del público del que se trate, contribuye a que ésta tenga un carácter fuertemente situado. Los participantes fueron 100 docentes y personal profesional de 6 establecimientos educacionales públicos. Se utilizó un diseño cualitativo de investigación; la entrevista grupal y el análisis de contenido de los datos. Los resultados muestran a las interacciones escolares como la unidad donde ocurre la inclusión. Estas se presentan guiadas por lo que aquí llamamos una lógica inclusiva apuntando a propiciar el sentido de pertenencia de las y los estudiantes a la comunidad escolar; y acciones inclusivas propiamente tal, identificadas con prácticas especiales y técnicas dirigidas al trabajo con "la diferencia". Se concluye a partir de estos datos, la posibilidad de establecer una distinción entre la referida a aquella que sostiene las interacciones que fortalecen los valores y convenciones de la comunidad escolar, de la inclusión que, al contrario, demanda problematizar estas convenciones abriendo los espacios y las relaciones escolares a nuevos posibles.

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to know what teachers understand by inclusion and the actions they carry out on their behalf. The multiplicity of interpretations that the concept of inclusion can assume and the variety of ways of working depending on the public in question contribute to its highly localized nature. The participants were 100 teachers and professional staff from six public educational establishments. A qualitative research design, group interviews and data content analysis were used. The results show school interactions as the unit where inclusion occurs. These interactions are presented as a guide by what it is called here as an inclusive logic aiming to promote the sense of belonging of the students to the school community; and inclusive actions as such, identified with special practices and techniques aimed at working with "difference". It was concluded from these data that the possibility of establishing a distinction between the inclusive logic that sustains the interactions that strengthen the values and conventions of the school community, from the inclusion that, on the contrary, demands to problematize these conventions by opening the spaces and school relationships to new possibilities.

Beyond the "inimitable" Goffman: from "social theory" to social theorizing in a Goffmanesque manner.

Erving Goffman's status as a great social scientist today seems relatively secure. Many commentators highlight his extraordinary capacities to pinpoint the fine-grained details of human behavior in the "interaction order". But if Goffman's brilliance in this respect was deeply rooted in his various and interlocking personal, existential, social, and intellectual idiosyncrasies, and his intellectual practice is inimitable, the degree to which anyone else could, or should try to, imitate Goffman's intellectual practice today, remains an open question. This is especially so when we consider that such practice was grounded in notably wide reading across disciplines and in world literature, a highly developed analytical manner that was inseparable from a notable literary talent in composing published texts, and an open-mindedness about the gathering of data sources in ways that some today find methodologically much too promiscuous. The paper initially considers these issues: the multiple "Goffmans" that exegetes and commentators have identified; how such persons have claimed Goffman to be essentially of one or more theoretical persuasions; and how various social theorists have drawn upon Goffman's work. It then moves on to argue that a Goffmanesque kind of social theorizing, is not only possible (if difficult) today, but also vital too. Such theorizing insists on the ongoing role of literary-intellectual and metaphorical ways of thinking and writing, at a time when these are becoming apparently less crucial in studies of human interaction. No matter how technologically advanced such studies may become, they still require some of the intellectual and literary flair that Goffman brought to his scholarly doings. Goffmanesque theorizing can inform new insights into various domains, including the very nature of social change.

The ethical challenges of teaching business ethics: ethical sensemaking through the Goffmanian lens.

Business ethics (BE) professors play a crucial role in sensitizing business students toward their future ethical responsibilities. Yet, there are few papers exploring the ethical challenges these professors themselves face while teaching BE. In this qualitative paper, we rely on the lenses of ethical sensemaking and dramaturgical performance, and draw from 29 semi-structured interview conducted with BE professors from various countries and field notes from 17 h of observation of BE classes. We identify four kinds of rationalities that professors rely on for making sense of in-class ethical challenges, eventually leading them to engage in one of four corresponding types of performances. By juxtaposing high and low scores of two underlying dimensions (degree of expressivity and degree of imposition), we offer a framework of four emerging performances. Additionally, we show that professors can shift from one performance to another during the course of their interactions. We contribute to performance literature by demonstrating the plurality of performances and explaining their emergence. We also contribute to sensemaking literature by offering support to its recent turn from an episodic (crises or disruption-based) to a relational, interactional, and present-oriented understanding. Since professors' performances have an impact not only on their own teaching experiences but also on students' learning experiences, undermining these would result in compromising the efforts that business schools have been making toward sensitizing future managers to their ethical responsibilities.

Frontstage nursing and backstage growth: The emotional labour of student nurses in Dutch nursing homes.

The complex emotional work of nurses calls for more recognition of emotional labour and the incorporation of emotional labour in nursing education. Based on participant observation and semistructured interviews, we describe the experiences of student nurses in two nursing homes for elderly people with dementia in the Netherlands. We analyse their interactions using Goffman's dramaturgical view on the front and backstage behaviour and the distinction between surface acting and deep acting. The study reveals the complexity of emotional labour, as nurses swiftly adapt their communication styles and behavioural strategies between settings, patients, and even between moments within one interaction sequence, which shows that the theoretical binaries fail to fully capture their skills. Although student nurses take pride in their emotionally taxing work, the societal undervaluation of the nursing profession negatively impacts their self-image and ambitions. More explicit recognition of these complexities would enhance their self-appreciation. This calls for a professional 'backstage area' that allows nurses to articulate and strengthen their emotional labour skills. Educational institutions should provide this backstage for nurses-in-training to strengthen these skills as part of the professional skill set.

Three levels of framing.

A sociologist and a linguist, unaware of each other's work, each assigned a technical meaning to the term frame around 1970, based on separate usages of the word frame from the 1950s. Each researcher instigated a theory of frame analysis. Over the following decades, the two approaches to framing became intertwined as followers of both Goffman and Fillmore studied metaphoric framing, examined factors affecting the communication of frames, and became particularly interested in politics and the mass media. Years later, many theorists complain about the fragmented field of frame studies. The paper suggests that some of the fragmentation can be resolved by recognizing the dual origins of framing studies, and classifying instances of framing in either the Goffman or the Fillmore tradition as occurring at the level of language, thought, or communication. These three levels are termed semantic framing, cognitive framing, and communicative framing. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Computer Science and Robotics > Natural Language Processing.

Comprehensive analysis of social stigma of individuals with substance use disorder in Turkey in the context of Erving Goffman's stigma theory.

Goffman defines stigma as a disgrace and social outcast/disqualification. Individuals with substance disorder are exposed to stigma at certain periods of their lives. Stigma particularly affects their thoughts, behaviors, and treatment processes, as well as their social life and identity perception. This paper examines the effects of social stigma experienced by individuals with substance disorder in Turkey and its reflections on social life in terms of Goffman's stigmatization theory. In this regard, studies examining the social stigmatization of individuals with addictions and social perceptions and attributes toward these individuals in Turkey were analyzed. This analysis suggests that socio-demographic and cultural factors play a significant role in stigmatization, that society has negative perception and representations toward addicts, that stigmatized addicts are likely to avoid interactions with "normals" and are often stigmatized by the media, colleagues, and health professionals, and that stigma develops/creates "an addicted identity.". This paper suggests the need for robust social policies that would aim to minimize stigmatizing attitudes and misconceptions toward individuals with addiction, ensure access to effective treatment, fulfill their social functioning, and integrate them into society should be implemented.

Be prepared and do the best you can: a focus group study with staff on the care environment at Swedish secure youth homes.

PURPOSE: This study examined staff members' experiences of the institutional care environment within secure youth homes. METHODS: Data were collected through three focus group discussions with 17 staff members at two secure youth homes. Subsequently, a thematic analysis was conducted. RESULTS: The analysis indicated two main themes: risk management and damage control in a restricted environment and compensating and reconstructing ordinariness-trying to make the best of it; each theme had three subthemes. The care environment seems to be experienced by staff as characterized by conflicting demands, thus constituting a gap between needs and what is possible to achieve-a balancing act that constitutes a constant struggle. CONCLUSIONS: The staff members' constant struggle could be interpreted as conflicting moral and instrumental demands; they know what the youths need, but the environment of the secure youth homes demands the decorous behaviour of sociomaterial control practices-rather than care practices.

'I think this is where this lovely word "sustainability" comes in': Fruit and vegetable growers' narratives concerning the regulation of environmental water use for food production.

This article concerns UK commercial fruit and vegetable growers' narratives regarding the sustainability of water use for food production. In it we explore their perspectives on efforts by regulators to limit agricultural withdrawals of water from the natural environment in line with EU Water Framework Directive objectives, alongside their views on retailer sustainability commitments. Discourse analysis is used to investigate how the growers contested restrictive regulation, constructed their identities, portrayed other supply chain stakeholders, and conveyed their social relations with them. Using Erving Goffman's theory of frontstage and backstage performances, the implications for the growers' water management decisions and their internalisation of sustainability agendas for water are examined. Whilst the growers gave accounts of purposely misrepresenting their water withdrawal practices and their discourse illustrated significant polarisation between environmental and agricultural interests, their underlying commitment to environmental sustainability was ambivalent, with both anti and pro-environmental attitudes expressed. The growers also frequently gave critiques of superficial sustainability in fresh produce supply chains. We argue that, given contemporary shifting definitions of agricultural identities, settings in which their construction is negotiated can provide windows of opportunity for conventional growers to engage in genuine pro-environmental performances that may deepen their assimilation of environmental goals and commitment to sustainable water use.

Performing normality in working life among heavy substance users.

Aim: Work is an important part of most people's everyday lives and well-being. Substance use by employees is associated with several negative consequences, such as absence from work and poor work performance. The study examines the strategies through which people who have problems with substance use produce a "normal" self and avoid becoming stigmatised in the workplace. Methods: The study uses data from in-depth unstructured life story interviews, which were conducted over phone with 13 people. The participants had developed various problematic heavy substance use habits. The interviews were analysed by applying interactional analysis and by using Goffman's concepts of "normality", "embarrassment", "face-work", "stigma" and "performance". Results: The analysis identified multiple strategies the participants used to produce normality and to avoid embarrassment and stigmatisation at work. These include skilful use of drugs in order not to show withdrawal symptoms, various ways of hiding their heavy substance use, frequent change of jobs, the maintenance of a clean and professional look, and attributing the absence from work to mental or physical illness. Moreover, the participants strategically avoided social contacts in which embarrassing situations could arise. When this was not possible, they manipulated their corporeal looks by hiding such kinds of bodily marks that would connote abnormality. Conclusion: The analysis points out that maintaining normality at work does not only refer to the efforts of trying to hide the effects of the drugs on behaviours and the body. It also reveals that the participants used substances to be able to perform energetically their work tasks, and in this way present themselves as normal workers. This ambivalence in performing normality makes the work life of people who use substances challenging.

Validity of Erving Goffman's ideas in the work of the psychiatric interment ward from a general hospital / Vigencia de las ideas de Erving Goffman en el trabajo de la sala de internación psiquiátrica de un hospital general.

Several authors have taken up the challenge of demonstrating the influence of the social environment on mental health and questioning the hegemonic, individual and organicist psychiatric gaze, with the intention of constructing critical models of professional practice in which the subject is prime. This work proposes to study, on the one hand, the fundamental concepts of the sociologist Erving Goffman and, on the other, in the light of them, to expose the current operation of a psychiatric inpatient ward in a general hospital.

Varios autores han tomado el desafío de demostrar la influencia del medio social en la salud mental para cuestionar la mirada psiquiátrica hegemónica, individual y organicista, con la intención de construir modelos críticos de práctica profesional centrados en el sujeto. Este trabajo propone estudiar por un lado, los conceptos fundamentales del sociólogo Erving Goffman y por el otro a la luz de los mismos, exponer el funcionamiento actual de una sala de internación psiquiátrica en un hospital general.

'I'll put up with things for a long time before I need to call anybody': Face work, the Total Institution and the perpetuation of care inequalities.

Failures in fundamental care (e.g. nutrition or pain-relief) for hospitalised patients can have serious consequences, including avoidable deaths. Policy rhetoric of 'shared decision-making' fails to consider how structural constraints and power dynamics limit patient agency in nursing staff-patient interactions. Goffman's concepts of face work, the presentation of self and the Total Institution shaped our analysis of interview and focus group data from hospital patients. Patients avoided threatening 'good' patient and staff face by only requesting missed care when staff face was convincing as 'caring' and 'available' ('engaged'). Patients did not request care from 'distracted' staff ('caring' but not 'available'), whilst patient requests were ignored in Total Institution-like 'dismissive' interactions. This meant patients experienced missed care with both 'distracted' and 'dismissive' staff. Patients with higher support needs were less able to carry out their own missed care to protect staff face, so experienced more serious care omissions. These findings show that many elements of the Total Institution survive in modern healthcare settings despite attempts to support individualised care. Unless nursing staff can maintain face as 'engaged' (despite organisational constraints that can reduce their capacity to do so) patient participation in care decisions will remain at the level of rhetoric.

Forbidding your cake and eating it too: health performance strategies in U.S. middle class families.

Interviewing 67 primarily middle-class parents and children in a southern U.S. city, we learned that families know a great deal about the dangers of excess sugar consumption. However, in the private spaces of family life, families let down their guard and enjoy sugary treats, often treating them as symbolic markers of love and comfort. Theoretical concepts emerging from the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman (1959) and from contemporary symbolic interactionists illuminate how sugar consumption is simultaneously shunned and celebrated in private family life. Moving beyond previous research, we track the ways sugary products facilitate love, sanity, and privacy to make daily family life bearable for both parents and children. We call the rhetorical and physical practices that enable excusable sugar indulgence Health Performance Strategies. Our findings on how families engage in these health performance strategies have broader implications for many other efforts to govern the health habits of families.

"This is Our Family": LGBTQ Family Narratives in Online NCAA D-I Coaching Biographies.

Intercollegiate sport in the US is known to be heteronormative, heterosexist, and often an unwelcoming space for LGBTQ individuals, including coaches. A decade ago, scholars documented the scarcity of LGBTQ family narratives in online coaching biographies on athletics Web sites. In the years following, a socio-cultural and legal shift occurred pertaining to LGBTQ rights and visibility in the US. This study extends and replicates Calhoun et al.'s research by examining family narratives of a sample of all NCAA Division-I head coaches of women's teams (N = 3601). Data collected in 2018 as part of the annual Women in College Coaching Report Card™ illustrated despite socio-cultural changes, very few (n = 18, .05%) online biographies included a same-sex family narratives-all were women. Eleven of the 18 head coaches were interviewed, and Erving Goffman's work was employed to theoretically ascertain why and how these women managed identities, stigma, enacted power, and performed character, namely courage. Implications and future research are offered.

Enacting person-centred care in home care services for people with dementia.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To develop the theoretical understanding of the process of providing person-centred home care for people with dementia. BACKGROUND: People with dementia are increasingly cared for at home by family members and home care staff. Care of people with dementia should be person-centred; however, little is known about how home care staff understand and enact person-centred care in their daily work. DESIGN: Grounded theory. METHODS: Home care staff (n = 29) were recruited from home care services specialised in providing care for people with dementia. Group interviews were conducted, and a tentative theoretical model for providing person-centred home care to people with dementia was outlined. Nine of the participants were then individually interviewed to further develop the model. The analysis was conducted parallel to the data collection, and hypotheses concerning the evolving theoretical model were continuously tested in the following interviews. The COREQ checklist for qualitative studies was used in reporting the study. RESULTS: Person-centred home care of people with dementia was conceptualised as a series of processes: Getting ready, getting in, giving care, getting out and finalising the story, each with subprocesses. Theatre metaphors were used to describe how the care was provided. A core process, Enacting and re-enacting familiarity, was at centre in all processes. CONCLUSIONS: In the person-centred care of people with dementia, familiarity had to be established and continuously fostered. When familiarity was in place, the care recipient and the home care staff acted as a team to perform the care. The theoretical works of Goffman were used to interpret the results. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The study provides a model for person-centred care of people with dementia at home that deepens the understanding of its processes, prerequisites and outcomes. The model can inform education and administration of home care for people with dementia.