Framing Social Interaction

In circumstances where shared definitions and understandings of a situation cannot be taken for granted, social actors need to make sense of the situation by ’reading’ the situation and making interactional moves in the hope that the moves of other agents will reveal its social order - a process that is best understood in terms of ’metasociality’. Drawing upon a range of well-known concepts from Goffman’s thought, such as impression management, stigma, role and role distance, cooling out and civil inattention, this book represents a new understanding of his approach to framing and will therefore appeal to scholars and students of social theory, classical sociology and social interaction.