Chapter 2

2 Goffman and Garfinkel
Joint enterprises, theoretical

differences and personal
sympathies
Christian Meyer
1. Introduction
Erving Goffman’s relationship with Harold Garfinkel was multi-faceted.
Garfinkel and Goffman both stand for the achievement of having inno-
vated sociology by developing, diffusing and firmly establishing social
research about the evanescent details of everyday life and face-to-face
interaction, both theoretically and empirically, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Together with contemporary sociologists such as Howard Becker, Herbert
Blumer, Edward Lemert, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, they opened
up a new subject matter for the discipline. Goffman and Garfinkel both
represent a sociology that inspects in detail the ways in which people act
together in building their social reality physically in real time. They moved
the discipline away from focusing on abstract social structures that are
inaccessible for actors, and toward the valuation of the practices of actual
individuals and dyads within concrete social situations. Goffman and Gar-
finkel shared a concern with closely examining empirically processes of
social interaction in situ, a focus on the role of communication within
these processes and a skepticism towards quantitative methods, advocat-
ing instead methods of participant observation.
Thus, Goffman and Garfinkel lead the discipline toward a more detailed
Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
look at the interaction order as a topic of sociology in its own right and
not as standing for something else (e.g., social structure or culture). In
doing so, they were confronted with the challenge that studies on social
interaction at the time of their doctoral research were dominated by the
“small group interaction” approach, both at Harvard and Chicago (Bales
et al., 1950). Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s emphasis laid on factors relevant
for social interaction as well as on its unfolding dynamics in real-time. Both
focused on the relevance of real, putatively “messy” processes of commu-
nication for the establishment and maintenance of social order. This is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003094111-3
Mondada, L., & Peräkylä, A. (Eds.). (2023). New perspectives on goffman in language and interaction : Body, participation and
the self. Taylor & Francis Group.
Created from sheffield on 2023-09-22 11:47:01.
30 Christian Meyer
shown by both early outlines and manuscripts by Garfinkel (1948/2006,

1952/2008) and Goffman’s doctoral thesis (1953), which centers on the
communication and conduct in a community on Shetland. Garfinkel was
familiar with research on information processing and communication
theory more generally (Garfinkel, 1952/2008), and Goffman (1953) was
informed by anthropological and ethological studies of communication as
well as Birdwhistell’s kinesics. Both were not only interested in cultural
particularities but in generic social forms. Their concern with communica-
tion and linguistics sparked an interest in explicating member competences
that later led to joint interests with the ethnography of speaking and socio-
linguistics endeavors within the University of California system (Garfinkel,
1972, p. 307; Goffman, 1974, p. vii, 44 n. 14).
While Goffman focused on social interaction and the self, Garfinkel (later
joined by Sacks) turned to the problem of intelligibility of social action at
its most fundamental level. Garfinkel furthermore argued as early as in the
1950s and 1960s that even scientific practices and scientific objects are rec-
ognizably constructed social orders that should be made an object of socio-
logical inquiry. However, there are also some early theoretically anchored
differences between the two scholars: Goffman’s aim was to generate a
conceptual framework that illuminates everyday behavior, especially face-
to-face interaction and its rituals, whereas Garfinkel was concerned with
elucidating the processes by which social phenomena are practically consti-
tuted and then experienced by the co-participants as objective facts. Goff-
man treats interaction as being heavily influenced by stable outside factors,
whereas Garfinkel insists that any context of social interaction can only be
effective when the co-participants actively constitute it as being relevant.
In this text, I will deal with the relationship of the two famous soci-
ologists, both personal and intellectual. As will be revealed, Garfinkel and
Goffman knew each other very well beginning in the early 1950s, read
each other’s texts closely and often before publication, used them in their
university courses and even pursued joint publication projects. This con-
tradicts the widespread impression of dislike or hostility between the two,

even though it is also clear that both scholars theoretically differed in many
respects. To discuss these issues, I will first examine “views from within
and from without” about their relationship, mutual interests and scien-
tific positions. Then I will further consider convergences, but also differ-
ences in their “basic theoretical orientations.” My third interest concerns
the different positions the two scholars adopt in regard to “the interac-
tion order.” I will then discuss further how both contributed, individually
and in co-operation, to “developing a sociology of everyday life.” Since
their respective positions did not remain stable throughout their careers,
I will discuss in two subsequent sections the divergences that their sociolo-
gies went through in regard to “identity, self and participation” and “the
Goffman and Garfinkel 31
organization of experience.” By way of conclusion I will reconsider their

relationship, and theoretical positions, about “mutual recognition and
trust.”
2. Views from within and from without

From the outside, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Goffman’s drama-
turgical sociology were viewed in the 1950s and 1960s as two closely con-
nected exemplars of the same sociological movement that aimed at turning
sociology away from a focus on “society” (as represented by Parsons,
Lazarsfeld or Merton) toward social situations in everyday life. Frequently,
this view from the outside was antagonistic, criticizing it as trivial, non-
scientific and subjective (famously Gouldner, 1970). Until today, Goffman’s
and Garfinkel’s theoretical advancements tend to be sorted into the areas
of “micro-sociology” and “qualitative methods” which does not live up
to their own aspirations. Their ambition was not to fill in trivial “micro”
details of the big picture provided by theorists of society, nor to produce
“qualitative” research that prepares the ground for quantitative surveys.
Instead, Goffman intended to complement the level of society with an inde-
pendent interaction order sui generis. Garfinkel, drawing on phenomenol-
ogy, offered an alternative picture of society that focuses on the perceptual,
interpretive and judgmental work through which society is accomplished
as a social object by its members. In this vein, Parsons’ concept of “com-
mitment” as shared moral basis of society (Garfinkel, 1962, 2019, p. 234)
became translated into the realm of fragile situated action and empiricized
by what Garfinkel (1963) calls “trust conditions” and Goffman (1956)
calls “working consensus” (cf. Rawls & Turowetz, 2021, p. 320).1
While initially, Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s approaches were seen as com-
plementary up to being open for integration into a single general theory
(Denzin, 1969), particularly ethnomethodologists began to insist on signifi-
cant differences between their own approach and the work – increasingly
well-known in the American public – of Goffman as well as symbolic inter-

actionism (Zimmerman & Wieder, 1970). These debates of mutual differ-
entiation partly led to the wrong impression that Goffman was “almost in
a personal fight (intellectual, that is) with Harold Garfinkel” (Winkin &
Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013, 67).
For it is widely unknown that Goffman and Garfinkel knew each other
well and cared for each other. Many of the ideas later attributed to either
ethnomethodology or Goffman actually emerged in early close exchanges
between Garfinkel and Goffman.
Their joint initiative toward developing a sociology of everyday life and
face-to-face interaction began when Goffman and Garfinkel met in 1953
immediately after their doctorates. Garfinkel had received his doctorate
32 Christian Meyer
from Harvard in 1952, Goffman from Chicago in 1953. At the initiative of

Edward Shils, in 1953, Goffman and other Chicago graduate students were
made available copies of seminar papers from Harvard doctoral students,
including Garfinkel (1948/2006). Goffman sent comments to Garfinkel
and encouraged him to publish the manuscript (Rawls & Turowetz, 2019,
p. 21, n. 15). A copy of the manuscript with Goffman’s marginal notes
is kept in the Garfinkel Archive. In this time, Goffman also sent an early
draft of his dissertation to Garfinkel, and they met and discussed it (Wieder
et al., 2010, p. 134).
They continued their interchange: in the 1950s and 1960s, the two schol-
ars regularly exchanged their unpublished manuscripts, placed each other’s
texts on their seminar literature lists and taught them to their students
(Turner, 2010; Wieder et al., 2010, p. 134). Larry Wieder, a 1957 gradu-
ate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, learned about
Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in the Edinburgh Edition
(1956) in an introductory course because his instructor Clovis Shepherd
had previously read it in a seminar with Garfinkel at UCLA (Wieder et al.,
2010, p. 134). They also engaged in personal contact: as Cicourel (2009)
reports, Erving Goffman celebrated New Year’s Eve of 1957 at Harold
Garfinkel’s home in Los Angeles.
When Goffman was at Berkeley, Philip Selznick, who had arranged for
Garfinkel to take over his position at UCLA in 1954, but already moved
to Berkeley in 1952, founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society
in 1961. This allowed numerous later interaction sociologists to receive
funding for their doctoral projects. These include, for example, David Sud-
now, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Roy Turner. Aaron Cicourel
conducted a postdoctoral project at the Center. Parsons’ newer work, Goff-
man’s first books and Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s joint one-semester stay at
Harvard in 1959 had sparked a great interest in interaction and everyday
sociology among students on the East Coast and now drew them to Cali-
fornia. Schegloff reports, “I learned from Goffman of the very possibility
of studying interaction per se, and of the possibility of description as a

serious disciplined undertaking” (Cmejrková & Prevignano, 2003, p. 21).
For many of these students, Goffman served as a springboard to Garfinkel
(Rawls et al., 2008). Some speak of a “propaedeutic function” that Goff-
man assumed for ethnomethodology (Wieder et al., 2010, p. 136). Often,
his influence was mediated by Sacks who began his own research on the
details of conversational activities upon his arrival at UCLA from Berkeley
in 1963 (Sudnow, 1972, p. vix).
Goffman’s relationship with Garfinkel intensified thanks to the favorable
situation that both had received assistant professor positions within the
dynamic and innovative University of California system (Garfinkel, 1954
in Los Angeles, Goffman, 1958 in Berkeley), where, as Berkeley sociologist
Philip Selznick remembers it, the “implicit mission” was “to turn marginal
fields into mainstream fields” (Calhoun & VanAntwerpen, 2007, p. 403).
This is true in particular for Berkeley where in the 1950s sociolinguistics
developed in a broad interdisciplinary milieu. John Gumperz had arrived
in Berkeley in 1956, social psychologist Susan Ervin-Tripp in 1958 and
Dell Hymes in 1960. Gumperz, Hymes, Ervin-Tripp and Goffman formed
a core that established what today is called “interactional sociolinguistics”
and the “ethnography of speaking”. They met occasionally on Saturdays
where they were sometimes joined by Africanist anthropologist Ethel
Albert, folklorist Alan Dundes, philosopher John Searle, psychologist Dan
Slobin, linguist Wallace Chafe and others (cf. Murray, 2010, pp. 98–99).
The “sociolinguistics reading group” of Berkeley also exchanged regular
visits with Stanford cognitive anthropologists and linguists (Charles Frake,
Kimball Romney, Roy D’Andrade and Charles Ferguson) in the early
1960s. Garfinkel, who knew Hymes as well as the Stanford anthropolo-
gists and linguists from Harvard – where they had studied within the eth-
noscience movement – sometimes participated in these meetings. He had
been inspired by the ethnoscience group at Harvard and Yale to coin his
term “ethnomethodology”.2 Harvey Sacks who later moved to UCLA was
also part of that group. In these years, Gumperz and Hymes started to
edit two collections (1964, 1972) in which many members of this group
published contributions, including Garfinkel and Goffman.3 Based on these
experiences, Hymes and Goffman later moved to the University of Pennsyl-
vania (Hymes in 1965, Goffman in 1968) where they founded the journal
Language in Society in 1972.
3. Basic theoretical orientations

In spite of their joint interests, Goffman and Garfinkel drew on different
theoretical resources for their sociological approaches. Goffman was heav-
ily influenced by pragmatism, the Chicago school of sociology (Everett
Hughes), Durkheimian sociology (Lloyd Warner), game theory and ethol-

ogy along with social anthropology, particularly the work of Radcliffe-
Brown and the video-based microstudy of human movements of Ray
Birdwhistell. Garfinkel based his approach on phenomenology, Parsonian
sociology and Wittgenstein. Interested in the intersubjective and practical
foundations of social order, Garfinkel had studied texts by Edmund Hus-
serl, Alfred Schütz, Aron Gurwitsch and Felix Kaufmann early on. When,
after an interlude in the U.S. Air Force, he received a fellowship for gradu-
ate school at Harvard University in 1946 to pursue a doctorate in sociology
with Parsons, he took this orientation with him. He used phenomenology
until the mid-1960s to further develop Parsons’ approach to action theory.
While he made particular use of the texts of Schütz and Kaufmann in the
34 Christian Meyer
1940s and 1950s, the “non-egological phenomenologies” of Aron Gur-

witsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger gained in importance from
the second half of the 1950s (cf. Meyer, 2022). From this perspective, the
act of perceiving an object is not organized like a voluntary spotlight-kind
singling out of elements in the world guided by the interested and attentive
ego. Instead, the individual elements (e.g., branches, leaves, a trunk) that
make up the whole of a phenomenon that we perceive (i.e., a tree) to some
degree self-organize involuntarily to the perceiver. They are autochtho-
nously accomplished gestalt contextures of objects. From the non-egologi-
cal perspective, we are always already embedded in a world of meaningful
objects even though these objects are constantly constituted in conscious-
ness (though not by a spontaneous ego).
However, Goffman and Garfinkel also shared several theoretical orien-
tations. Similar to Goffman’s direct exposure at Chicago, Garfinkel came
into contact with the Chicago School of Sociology, particularly William I.
Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, during his MA studies at the University
of North Carolina from 1939 to 1942. Even earlier, he had become
acquainted with pragmatism, especially John Dewey, through exchanges
with Philip Selznick, who studied sociology at Columbia University and
acted as tutor for Garfinkel’s BA studies at the University of Newark (now
Rutgers, 1936–1939). They had been on friendly terms ever since (Gar-
finkel, 2002, p. 83; Rawls, 2002, pp. 10–11, 14). Goffman’s and Gar-
finkel’s conception of social order as a practical achievement of human
action is consistent with pragmatism. They also shared the assessment that
Znaniecki parallels Parsons in positive ways in his “Social Action”, but
they both did not like his “Polish Peasant” (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 83; Ver-
hoeven, 1993, p. 321).
As early work (1948/2006) shows, Garfinkel developed his theoretical
positions in critical engagement with the pragmatist approaches of Dewey,
Mead, James and Peirce (cf. Emirbayer & Maynard, 2011). Garfinkel
criticizes Mead for a reifying conception of the person that locates the
interactive exchange between persons in the mental rather than in empiri-

cally observable sequences of utterances in social situations. Since in Mead
sequential orders are not captured in their empirical details, motivation is
also treated as a property of actors rather than of the relationship between
actors. Even conceptions such as perspective-taking and role-taking, which
were at the center of contemporary symbolic interactionism, reify the self
and its motivations according to Garfinkel’s critique. Mead, and even more
so Goffman, advocate the idea of strategic and deceitful presentations of
self with a “true self” and “true motives” hiding behind the mask, while
for Garfinkel presentations of self are foundational, constantly precari-
ous and with no essential self residing somewhere in the background (cf.
Rawls, 2006, pp. 72, 79). Goffman focuses on individuals as human beings
who possess a core self that is independent of the roles they play.4 Garfin-
kel defines human beings as “members” who are familiar with methods
to competently and unimpededly participate in a collectivity, but differ
according to the situation of which they are momentarily members (Gar-
finkel, 1967, pp. 57, 76). He is interested in how people constitute social
phenomena in the first place, not in how they manipulate perceptions or
what motives or needs they have in doing this.
On the other hand, Garfinkel shared with Goffman a lifelong interest
in Emile Durkheim’s writings. Goffman (1955) drew on Durkheim assum-
ing that relationships and encounters are founded on an implicit “moral”
order that serves as guideline for interaction rituals, including, among oth-
ers, “good faith” (Goffman, 1961a, p. 174). Garfinkel (1963) argues that
the pre-contractual infrastructure of social life takes on the form of “back-
ground expectancies” and “socially-sanctioned-facts-of-life-in-society-that-
any-bona-fide-member-of-the-society-knows” (1967, p. 74). Both assume
that people do not simply act out role obligations in a pre-programmed
fashion so that moral order is contingent. They are interested in these con-
tingencies, their management and strategic exploitation.
However, Garfinkel criticized Goffman’s idea, following Durkheim,
of emotionally invigorating or debilitating effects of successful or failed
interaction rituals. Accordingly, Garfinkel also objected to Goffman’s use
of the concept of ritual in general to explain social interaction, arguing
that it suggests a fixed, reliable and repeatable structure. For him, inter-
action actually involves permanent interpretive work of its participants,
especially in terms of the constant question, “what to do next” (Garfinkel,
1967, p. 12). Nextness, for Garfinkel (and conversation analysis), rep-
resents a basic feature of “practical action”, in which there is no “time-
out”, but in which second actions (such as answers, second greetings) are
conditioned in a situated manner upon first actions (questions, first greet-
ings), requiring “practical reasoning” (cf., e.g., Garfinkel, 1967, p. 99;
Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). The concept of ritual, in contrast, suggests an
exogenous form that is followed by the co-participants in interaction.

Here, Garfinkel saw the same theoretical problem as with Parsons’ con-
cept of norms that are followed in interaction (cf. Goodwin, 2014): both
(ritual forms and norms) can never be explicit enough to determine every
possible social situation, so that, in fact, the co-participants always need
to do interpretive work (“practical reasoning”) as to how to translate
the abstract features of ritual form or norm into the situation. Garfinkel
therefore concluded that interaction can only be understood by concep-
tualizing it as endogenously accomplished by both producing the context
and the practices that constitute it. In doing so, he drew on Gurwitsch’s
non-egological concept of autochthonously accomplished gestalt contex-
tures of objects (cf. Meyer, 2022).
36 Christian Meyer
Other, less controversial common references involve the comparative

anthropological literature and Kenneth Burke’s social drama theory. Goff-
man might have become familiar with Burke via his teacher at Chicago,
Everett Hughes, who drew on Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” (1935,
pp. 95–213; cf. Hammersley, 2018, p. 51). Garfinkel had read several of
Burke’s books in his early years at the Universities of Newark (now Rut-
gers, 1936–1939) and North Carolina (1939–1942). Garfinkel and Goff-
man both liked to generate “perspectives by incongruity” by (more or
less systematically) creating social disorder that illuminates how order is
achieved and sustained in the first place.
Furthermore, Kenneth Burke pioneered a “dramatistic” approach that
provided inspiration for Goffman’s own “dramaturgical” approach (e.g.,
in 1956, 16 et seq.) that understands everyday life as a kind of theater.
Burke, and with him, Goffman, regard as characteristic of approaches
which consider human conduct dramatistically, that they advocate a the-
ory of agency rather than a theory of knowledge, while Garfinkel treats
agency as informed by knowledge. Garfinkel (1967, ch. 5) criticizes that
in his dramaturgical approach, Goffman applies one “kind of perspective
by incongruity” that Burke calls “conversion downwards” (1935, p. 169):
by it, all action is metaphorically presented as moves in a game or as play-
acting, thus downgrading or ironicizing it by treating is as less than fully
seriously meant or consequential. Garfinkel has identified such ‘ “ironies”
as major methodological devices in Goffman (cf. Watson, 1999).
For Garfinkel, in turn, Burke’s dramatism – being about charting the
inscription of rhetorical sayability in action – was one of the sources of his
concept of accountability. Burke allowed Garfinkel to treat motivation and
reasons as a property of interaction among actors and not as one of actors
as subjects (1956a).
4. The interaction order

Goffman had already conceptualized “conversational interaction” in his

dissertation as “one species of social order” (1953, p. 1), which possesses
its own organizing principles that he analyzed in several steps and finally
called “interaction order”. To describe the order of interaction, Goffman
referred to Talcott Parsons, modifying his system model of structural-
functionalist tradition (1953, pp. 343–360). For Goffman as for Parsons,
the social order of interaction consists of a set of “moral norms” that “con-
dition and constrain”, even “regulate”, the way individuals pursue goals
(1963a, p. 8, 1971, pp. x–xi). Goffman follows Parsons in conceptualizing
norms as culturally determined choices among alternative means to achieve
ends. Thus, for Goffman, social order consists of patterns of behavior which
result from individual motives and fundamentally relate to norms or rules.
Social order, then, is a result of the transformation of behavior into what he

calls “conduct” (1963a, p. 8). According to Goffman, people do not simply
behave toward one another, they conduct themselves according to restric-
tive and enabling norms (1971, p. x). Goffman also refers to Parsons in his
critical elaboration of the role concept (1961b, pp. 85–152): while Parsons
put the emphasis on the normative dimensions of role performance, Goff-
man argues that role distancing may indeed fulfill a function of tension
relief on the system level, but on the interactional level it rather resembles
improvisational acting. He emphasizes the situational contingencies that
shape role relations and locates the foundations of the normative order in
the requirements of interactional co-presence itself, i.e., as being related to
negative and positive face wants.
The stance that interaction has properties of its own has some similarities
to Garfinkel’s, who viewed Goffman’s idea of an independent “interaction
order” (1983a) to be identical with his own terms “systems of interac-
tion” and “interactional systems” of 1960–1961 (Turowetz & Rawls,
2021, p. 320, n. 4). However, Garfinkel considered interaction not as a
social level sui generis, but as the only site of realization of social order,
into which actors read their everyday knowledge of social structures (Shar-
rock, 1999, p. 121). When using the term “interaction order”, Goffman
never intended to identify the phenomenal details and depth that Garfinkel
views as constitutive of social objects. For Goffman, the interaction order
had primarily to do with strategic moves within a game of presentation
performed by individual selves and not as an autonomous, self-emergent
and self-regulating sphere (or “machinery”; cf. Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970)
occurring in between co-participants in a situation (cf. Rawls, 2002, p. 59).
At a workshop at the Suicide Prevention Center in Los Angeles on Janu-
ary 10 and 11, 1964, that Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfin-
kel and Harvey Sacks attended along with Edward Rose and psychologist
Edwin Schneidman, Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel intensely discussed
their concepts and theoretical differences (cf. Garfinkel Archive n.d.). In
these discussions, Parsons and Goffman insist against Garfinkel that there
must be external structures determining social situations, and that it is the
job of sociologists to identify them over the actors’ head. In turn, Par-
sons and Garfinkel positioned themselves against Goffman in regard to
the fundamental importance of research into the constitutive functions of
communication.
Garfinkel’s reference to Parsons, whose student he was and to whose
“action frame of reference” he critically oriented his work until the early
1960s, is even stronger. By integrating phenomenological insights, Garfin-
kel attempted to further clarify the orientation of social actors toward con-
ditions, means, goals and norms (see Garfinkel, 2019). Both Garfinkel and
Goffman criticized Parsons, however, for transforming Durkheim’s interest
38 Christian Meyer
in practices into a focus on beliefs and values and for treating embodied
practices like conceptual orders. In doing so, they say, Parsons neglects the
specifics of “disorder”, contingency, deviance and eventuality in situated
interaction that they placed at the center of their interest.
Yet, Goffman was sympathetic to a certain positivism or even realism,
which he attributed to Parsons (but also to Chicago ethnographic soci-
ology) (Verhoeven, 1993, p. 325; Becker, 2003, p. 668), while Garfinkel
rejected this stance as well as Goffman’s references to behavioral research.
Instead, Garfinkel sought to reconstruct the very social constitutedness of
supposedly objective circumstances. According to him, neither Goffman
nor Parsons were concerned with problematizing, or bracketing, their own
tacit understandings of social phenomena or with the relation of scientific
knowledge to everyday knowledge (cf. Sharrock, 1999, pp. 121–122).
5. Developing a sociology of everyday life

For Goffman as for Parsons, it is the sociologist’s job to identify regulari-
ties in the chaotic world of individual strategic action. For Garfinkel, by
contrast, the world of embodied practices of co-participants in situations in
which they cooperate with one another is already ordered in and through
their own efforts. It possesses coherence and meaning because they are
forced to make themselves understood by others (Rawls, 2006, pp. 3–4).
And yet, in the 1950s, Goffman and Garfinkel shared a common interest
in how the social is shaped and performed in concrete face-to-face interac-
tions. With this interest, they were still relatively alone in academic soci-
ology in the USA. At that time, this subject area was subsumed within
academic sociology under the heading of “social psychology”. Garfinkel
and Goffman were indeed interested in what was then called the sociology
of deviant behavior. They pursued this interest using the examples of psy-
chiatrically induced norm deviations, status manipulations, and ambigu-
ous identities. Both investigated these issues in organizations specializing in
them using ethnographic methods, the value of which Garfinkel probably

learned to appreciate from Goffman. Later, drawing on his collaboration
with Sacks and emerging conversation analysis, Garfinkel favored record-
ings and transcripts of naturally occurring situations as data, restricting
inferences to what is observable in these as accomplished in situ. He thus
became increasingly critical of Goffman’s methods, claiming that he uses
data merely to illustrate concepts he introduces, rather than to induce what
the data present (cf. Schegloff, 1988).
Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s original ethnographic aim of rendering
everyday life unfamiliar might also have to do with their shared Jewish
background: both were used to trying to figure out the rules that White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant members took for granted in order to participate
unnoticedly in everyday interactions. This feeling of strangeness and mas-

querade made them find parallels in confidence games (e.g., Maurer, 1940),
which they both read and wrote about during the early years of their
acquaintance. As say Turowetz and Rawls (2021, p. 300), such “games
require imposters to learn the rules of a social group well enough to con-
vincingly ‘pass’ as one of its members”. Goffman (1952) as well as the
respective chapters on “passing” in Goffman (1963b, pp. 73–91) and Gar-
finkel (1967, pp. 116–185, 285–288) focus on this topic.
As I said, Goffman and Garfinkel both liked to create new “perspectives by
incongruity” (Burke, 1935), agreeing that disorder can illuminate how social
order is achieved and sustained. They took a delight in creating trouble and
subverting normal expectations as a way of rendering social order explicit
(Hammersley, 2018, p. 61). Garfinkel did this through his “breaching experi-
ments” and “tutorials” (2002, ch. 4). Goffman reportedly did so in interac-
tions with other people (Turner, 2010). He “enjoyed testing the limits of the
rules and understandings shaping face-to-face conduct in restaurants, cinema
queues, lecture theatres and living rooms” (Smith, 2006, p. 3; cf. Hammersley,
2018, p. 61). In his view, total institutions can even be seen as “natural experi-
ments” on what can be done to the self (Goffman, 1961a, p. 12).
Their interests in strangeness affects their methodological preference.
Garfinkel (1967, p. 9) argues that while for members who accomplish
occasions of interaction, these occasions appear unproblematic and com-
monplace, sociologists (“members doing sociology”) who intend to “make
that accomplishment a topic of practical sociological inquiry” need to
“treat the rational properties of practical activities as ‘anthropologically
strange’ ”. In the same vein, Goffman explains his preference for the ethno-
graphic method (Verhoeven, 1993, p. 318). For both, anthropological and
ethnographic methods were immediately plausible, and they contributed to
putting them onto the sociological table again.
The deep impact of these joint orientations is often not visible. Wieder
(1974, p. 6) says that Goffman’s writings had
a considerable impact on the character of my ethnographic observa-

tions. Goffman gives the ethnographer what amounts to a set of power-
ful glasses. This kind of influence is so general that particular textual
locations which offer the possibility of citing him rarely permit the clear
acknowledgment of the importance of the intellectual debt.
This is partly also because – in contrast to Garfinkel – Goffman never

intended to develop an all-encompassing theory and sociological school.
Goffman even criticized Garfinkel’s students to form a closed group under
the label of “ethnomethodology” that isolated itself from the rest of U.S.
sociology (Verhoeven, 1993, p. 345). For him, sociological concepts were
40 Christian Meyer
not identity signs of an activist group, but rather like “different coats to
clothe the children well than a single splendid tent in which they all shiver”
(Goffman, 1961a, p. xiv).
6. Identity, self and participation

Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s shared sociological interest in everyday life and
interaction, in identity and role and in their fragile and manipulable status
was not limited to teaching and regular reciprocal invitations or to joint
conferences and workshops. It was also reflected, as we know from docu-
ments in the Garfinkel archive, in a joint book project in 1962 and 1963
that ultimately fell through. The plan was to publish Goffman’s manu-
script, which appeared as Stigma (1963b), together with Garfinkel’s una-
bridged manuscript of Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status
in an Intersexed Person, included in an abridged version in his Studies in
Ethnomethodology (1967, ch. 5), as a joint book titled On Passing and
Stigmatized Identity (Turowetz & Rawls, 2021, p. 318, n. 30). The cor-
respondence on the book’s planning, which is in the Garfinkel archive, is
amicable. Both hoped to have their university positions made permanent.
Garfinkel’s ultimate reason for withdrawing his involvement was that he
wanted to evaluate the postoperative interviews that his colleague in psy-
chiatry, Robert J. Stoller, had conducted with Agnes, but Goffman did not
like this delay. Thus, separate publication ensued.
The fact that both texts were intended for a joint book project is insofar
surprising as Garfinkel’s Agnes chapter is often read as a sharp criticism of
Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, revealing a strong theoret-
ical antagonism between the two sociologists. In his text, Garfinkel indeed
raises several theoretical problems with Goffman’s approach, the most
important being that Goffman conceptualizes social interaction in overly
strategic terms and ignores the large portions of interaction that are not
purposefully calculated. In order for humans to deal rationally and strate-
gically with the one tenth that lies above the water, says Garfinkel (1967,
p. 173) in an iceberg analogy, they must take for granted the “nine tenth”
that lie below the water as an indisputable background that is relevant
to their calculations but goes unnoticed. Garfinkel therefore was critical
toward “game” or dramaturgical metaphors (e.g., Goffman, 1956, 1961b),
focusing himself on constitutive conditions (Garfinkel, 1963).
Garfinkel at this point refers to Durkheim’s discussion of the unstated
and unstatable pre-contractual conditions of social contracts, which Goff-
man would overlook. Especially everyday forms of the presentation of
socially gendered selves could therefore not be explained by Goffman’s
dramaturgical analysis, since we could not continuously “play theater” in
our everyday behavior. Rather, as Garfinkel argues, much of what we do

must be based on a taken-for-granted substrate of practical knowledge.
Goffman’s concept of “impression management” (1956, pp. 132–151) is
therefore, in Garfinkel’s perception, not applicable to large parts of social
interaction. In the everyday performance of identity – e.g., passing as mem-
ber of a determined gender – purely strategic interaction cannot take place,
but rather a mixture of naturally embodied, practical knowledge and inten-
tional behavior is required.
Not so, admittedly, for Agnes: as Garfinkel says, she was “not granted
this luxury” (1967, p. 175) – rather, she was forced to become a “practical
methodologist” who uses the methods of portraying a “woman” strategi-
cally throughout, and who therefore could also reflect on them in the inter-
view. With Goffman, in contrast, an ahistorical view of the actor emerges,
who in each next social situation seems ever again free to take on whatever
role he or she deems appropriate to achieve desired ends. According to
Garfinkel, however, passing as owner of an identity is a principally unfin-
ished process that is constantly being worked on.
Furthermore, Garfinkel argues that Goffman’s dramaturgical model
presupposes a world of constant objects – a container-kind of external
context – in which strategies of identity management can be applied. Gar-
finkel argues that it must be described how these seemingly constant exter-
nal objects are produced within situations in the first place. Moreover, he
claims that no amount of “staging” is sufficient to account for Agnes’ crea-
tion of her female sexuality because of the ubiquity of unanticipated occur-
rences. Agnes could not be a Goffmanian strategic actor because she could
never know in advance exactly what would be required of her for display-
ing herself as the natural female in any given interaction. Unlike a game,
to pass as a member of a particular gender has no “time outs”, no exits
from the constant work of passing, e.g., to re-calibrate strategic calculi.
She learned what it took to be a woman when she acted as if she were non-
problematically a woman in the first place. In his “Rational Properties”
paper (1960; reprinted in 1967, pp. 262–283), this argument is presented

against game models on a more general level.
The theoretical background for this divergent assessment is that, socio-
logically speaking, Garfinkel does not admit any “independent variable”
as a factor externally influencing social situations. Instead, he argues that
any factor has to be read into, and practically implemented within, the
situation by the co-participants in situ. This is even true for the “vari-
able” of the “actor”. Goffman has emphasized that he is not interested in
psychology (“men and their moments”) but in situations – “moments and
their men” (1967, p. 3) – and thus focuses on the ways in which social
forms of conduct are maintained despite being constantly confronted with
42 Christian Meyer
threats and troubles. These ethnographically observable forms of conduct

unveil the continuous struggling and wrangling of the self into line with
social expectations. Goffman assumes a constant reckoning of the actor
between being a “society man” and the inner aspiring and desiring self.
His actor vacillates between the pursuit of goals and the motivation of
“keeping up appearances” and “preserving face” through “tact” and inter-
actional rituals.
For Garfinkel, the actor, like any social object, is constituted through
practice in the first place. Garfinkel (2006, p. 149) calls this actor-within-a-
practice the “identified self” since he, or she, is identified each next time in
a particular way according to relevancies and affordances of the situation.
The geologist is a geologist because he treats a mountain as a rock for-

mation. Or, to put it in a way that should circumvent the misunder-
standing that arises from the use of the term “is;” the stability of the
actor’s givenness as an identified self is directly dependent on whether it
continues to be possible for the actor to treat the object according to the
terms of the actor’s definition of the object.
(Garfinkel, 2006, p. 171, orig. emph.)
Garfinkel thus rejects the idea of an inner personal self that seeks social rec-
ognition. In social interaction, such Goffmanian self mainly reconciles the pur-
suit of their goals with expectations of others that Goffman had developed
prominently in his concept of “face” and “face wants” as well as in his model
of ritual contingencies of interaction (1981, p. 16). From the ethnomethodo-
logical perspective, “all appearances of persons as a type of person are the man-
aged accomplishments of the person presenting him/herself” (Wieder, 1984,
p. 4; cf. Liberman, 2008, p. 253). Thus, compared to Garfinkel and ethnometh-
odology, Goffman retains an essentialist idea of the self.
Since their joint book project had not materialized, Goffman was wor-
ried about Garfinkel’s future and urged him to publish his own anthology.
To this end, he also lobbied the publisher Prentice Hall, where Stigma had
come out (Garfinkel, 1993, p. 9; Gabowitsch, 2009; Rawls et al., 2008).
After its publication, Goffman cited Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnometh-
odology (1967) approvingly in Relations in Public (1971, p. 169, n. 49),
additionally referring to its notion of “accomplishment” (1971, p. 223).
Goffman was also aware of the early development of conversation analy-
sis, in which Garfinkel was involved, before its publication. In Strategic
Interaction (1969, p. 9, n. 8), for example, he refers to Garfinkel and Har-
vey Sacks’ work on conversational situations. Particularly, during a lecture
series at Manchester in 1966 and 1967, Goffman spoke enthusiastically of
Garfinkel and Sacks (Psathas, 2008, p. 57).
7. The organization of experience

Even after he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, Goffman
engaged with Garfinkel’s thought. In one of his latest texts (1983b), Goff-
man even accepts, with reference to Garfinkel’s text Studies of the Rou-
tine Grounds of Everyday Activities (1964, reprinted in 1967, pp. 35–75),
Garfinkel’s critique directed against his own methods and concepts used in
his Presentation of Self. Garfinkel had criticized that Goffman presented
his ethnographic evidence in a terminology that he imposed as omnisci-
ent observer who always knows better than the member of society on the
subjects and situations studied. He thus employed what Garfinkel called
(with Mannheim) a “documentary method of interpretation”, reading into
the evidence encountered his own presuppositions and motives that he,
as researcher, identifies in them, e.g., by way of “conversion downwards”
(Burke). Garfinkel criticizes that they are not the members’ ways of inter-
pretating the respective social instances as documents of something else,
unstated but present for them, thus introducing completely alien references
and being distant from the object of study.
In Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures (1962), for exam-
ple, Garfinkel mentions Goffman’s concept of “impression management”
(1956) as an example of the “documentary method of interpretation” by
which an empirical instance is “read” as a document for a known pattern.
This is stylistically sustained by Goffman’s discursive procedure of first pre-
senting concepts which are then illustrated by selected examples. In this
way, his readers are provided with an “instructed reading” of illustrations.
From the ethnomethodological perspective, however, such a procedure
violates society members’ endogenous understandings of the phenomena
so redescribed (Watson, 1999). In 1983, Goffman confirms that Garfinkel
was indeed right in his critique, for “any expansion of a substitute term
would itself require for understanding something unstated that was taken
for granted, the antecedent always one step away from the dutiful explica-
tor” (1983b, p. 21).
Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) has sometimes been interpreted either

as heavily influenced by ethnomethodology (Smith, 2003, pp. 256–257)
and a result of Goffman’s “phenomenological turn” (Smith, 2006, p. 410;
but see critically Lanigan, 1990), or as a direct replica to Garfinkel’s cri-
tique (1967) and presentation of Goffman’s own social theoretical blueprint
(Collins, 1981, pp. 219–253; Winkin & Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013, pp. 66–67).
However, the book does neither contain extended borrowings nor a direct
critique of Garfinkel, though Goffman said in lectures given in 1966 and
1967 that he was collaborating on Frame Analysis with Garfinkel (Psathas,
2008, p. 57).
44 Christian Meyer
Like the early Garfinkel, Goffman’s theoretical outline in Frame Analysis

builds on Alfred Schütz’s concept of multiple realities (1974, p. 5; Verho-
even, 1993, p. 342). However, to a much larger extent Goffman uses theo-
retical elements from Gregory Bateson to elaborate how social activities
are given different characters of meaning. In doing so, Goffman assumes –
in contrast to both Schütz and Garfinkel – that there is a kind of neutral
and unmarked sense-substrate of “concrete, actual doing” that can then be
creatively modulated as source material to produce modifications of mean-
ing and new social definitions (1974, p. 560). Garfinkel (1993, pp. 26–27)
criticizes the assumption of such a neutral source material, assuming that
the impression of unmarkedness is an achievement constituted in practice.
What Goffman understands as modulated derivations and transformations
of an actual source material is – as all forms of the social – itself accom-
plished (Garfinkel, 1993, pp. 26–27).
Although Goffman’s Frame Analysis is subtitled An Essay on the Organ-
ization of Experience, it does not use the phenomenological concept of
experience, but rather conceives of experience “something that an indi-
vidual actor can take into his mind” (Goffman, 1974, p. 13). This raw
individual experience is then socially or communicatively organized and
framed. For Goffman, essential to these organized experiences are fixed
social frames that pre-exist and are pre-defined (Verhoeven, 1993, p. 342).
Framing, in Goffman’s model, is information added to the perception of
an initially naturally organized situation, thus creating a difference from
other situations. With this conception, he follows Bateson’s theory of com-
munication, who calls this additional information metacommunication.
Thus, Goffman presupposes the intersubjectivity of frames. Furthermore,
he sometimes designates frames as scientific constructs (1974, p. 10) and
sometimes as everyday concept of actors (1974, p. 46).
For Garfinkel, in turn, experience is already socially organized in its
seemingly natural perceptual dimension (Garfinkel, 1952/2008, p. 132).
Following phenomenology, he assumes that the perception of situations
results from organized coordination with other participants and is oriented

toward assumedly shared constitutive rules or background expectations.
Together, actors thus constitute experiences that invisibilize their social
constitutedness: they appear so self-evident and natural that they remain,
as Garfinkel (1967, pp. 36–37) puts it, “seen but unnoticed”. For Garfin-
kel, consequently, there exists no pure experience of natural situations to
which framings are then added, but only an experience specifically organ-
ized as such by the practices of its members.
The salient difference between Goffman and Garfinkel in respect to their
conceptualization of meaning is that Goffman draws on Bateson’s logic of
difference, while Garfinkel builds on the phenomenological logic of consti-
tution and accomplishment. Difference in Bateson presupposes an extant
system of communicative meaning that can then be modularized and

manipulated, while constitution and accomplishment assume that shared
meanings cannot be presupposed, but have to be established and respeci-
fied in the first place within the ongoing situation. This also becomes visible
in the concept of sign that plays a major role for Goffman, while Garfinkel
(1993, p. 27) criticizes it for assuming invariant and intrinsic core mean-
ings and for overlooking the permanent vagueness and contextual indexi-
cality of meaning (Garfinkel, 1993, p. 27). This fundamental difference
accounts for the dissimilarities between the theories of the two scholars,
which increasingly come to bear from the end of the 1960s onward.
Goffman’s final work, Forms of Talk, is equally not directed against Gar-
finkel or ethnomethodology, as it is sometimes assumed. Goffman mentions
the theoretical basis of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology quite approvingly
(1981, p. 224, n. 17, 225 n. 19). As Hammersley (2018, p. 58) says, the
late Goffman even seemingly integrated Garfinkel’s concept of “accounta-
bility”, when he writes that “we find ourselves with one central obligation:
to render our behaviour understandably relevant to what the other can
come to perceive is going on” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 51). Rather, Goffman’s
Forms of Talk is directed, for one, against currents of ethnomethodology,
which Goffman calls the “left wing of ethnomethodology” (1981, p. 168).
Secondly, it is specifically intended to remedy some dangers that Goffman
saw in contemporary developments of conversation analysis: Goffman
feared that it became overly technical and formalistic (Cmejrková & Pre-
vignano, 2003, p. 34).5
Here, Goffman’s ambivalent relationship with conversation analysis
becomes evident: in retrospect, it is widely recognized that conversation
analysis as a strong international and interdisciplinary endeavor emerged
from Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s interactionally achieved ground-work. It
presents “a synthesis of the perspectives” (Heritage, 2003, p. 2) of “two
key ‘forebear’ figures” (Schegloff et al., 1996, p. 13) and “giants of Ameri-
can social theory” (Heritage, 2008, p. 301) without whom conversation
analysis would not exist.

However, Goffman found himself obliged to constantly remind conver-
sation analysts not to forget the social, moral dimension of interaction. He
held that the perspective on what he calls the “system requirements” of
interaction needs to be complemented by a thorough study of what he calls
its “ritual contingencies”, resulting from the “socialness” of an encounter,
i.e., the fact that social persons are not only dealing with procedural con-
straints in interaction, but also with social relations (1981, pp. 14–15, 16).
“System requirements” refer to conditions of social interaction that have
“ecological” reasons such as the establishment of a channel between par-
ticipants or the necessity of being within the range of one another’s senso-
rium. They are constituted by the “basic framework for face-to-face talk
46 Christian Meyer
from what would appear to be the sheer physical requirements and con-
straints of any communication system” (Goffman, 1981, p. 15). Further
basic requirements of interactional encounters are operative when partici-
pants have established a joint focus, i.e., when they have “jointly agreed to
operate (in effect) solely as communication nodes, as transceivers, and to
make themselves fully available for that purpose” (1981, p. 15).
Goffman emphasizes that “system requirements” are not the only
requirements operative in social interaction. They are, in fact, comple-
mented by “ritual contingencies” concerned with the interactants as social
persons with needs and desires relevant beyond the interaction situation
as such. In Goffman’s eyes, they are much more important than the mere
system requirements. For example, a request to engage in a focused interac-
tion, i.e., to open a channel of communication, also implies that the person
requested has to leave other activities aside and concentrate on the channel
established, at least for a period of time. Such a request thus constitutes an
intrusion into one’s autonomy and can be resented and declined. A request
to enter in an encounter is thus always a risk for both sides: for the person
requesting to be refused (and thus to be denied as an individual) and for the
person requested to be seen as a person who refuses and denies the worth
of others. As Goffman (1981, p. 18) says, “to decline a signal to open chan-
nels is something like declining an extended hand, and to make a move to
open a channel is to presume that one will not be intruding.”
The social costs connected with requests are thus much higher than mere
technical efforts of opening, sustaining and closing channels of transmit-
tance as listed above. The possible social costs entailed on such kind of
transaction also influence the form of the messages exchanged. Some utter-
ances and gestures used to open a channel for communication thus also
serve as means whereby the worthiness of the participants is given recogni-
tion. They are much longer and more elaborated than they were, would
they only meet system requirements. The same holds for closings, in which
a party does not simply “turn off their receivers”. Rather a laborious and
complex process of forewarning and preparing closure is gone through.

This makes these moments of socially risky phases of interaction ritualized:
the processes of channel-opening and channel-closing become elaborated
into rituals of greeting and departure. Encounters thus not only respond
to system requirements, but also to the needs and wants of the interact-
ants derived from their general agreement they have to entertain as to each
other’s worthiness as persons (Goffman, 1981, pp. 15–21).
As Hymes (1984) reports, Goffman was often critical of conversation
analytic texts sent to “Language in Society”, “eth-meth pieces” (1984,
p. 51) as he called them (as did Sacks and Schegloff), for having become
overly naturalistic and linguistic. While in this time, linguistics was turning
to integrate social aspects of language usage, “eth-meth”, they say, was
reducing interaction to syntax, presenting de-contextualized data snippets.

Goffman says in a letter to Hymes:
After all, to ask us to focus on such a small strip when there is no way
for us to know the biography of the occasion and its participants is to
imply that magical unpacking is going to occur. . . . Nothing convincing
can be done unless the context is richly provided.
(Hymes, 1984, p. 51)
Goffman’s (and Hymes’) critique of conversation analysis certainly

attacked a strawman, drawing insofar a distorted picture as conversation
analysis has, even before this critique, analyzed opening and closing of
interaction or preference organization as social, morally laden practices
and not only as technical transmission or the occurrence of noise. Gar-
finkel, however, drew a conceptual red line in regard to Goffman’s fond-
ness for the notion of ritual (Goodwin, 2014). As I have said above, he
insisted on an image of the social person as constantly adapting to the
situated contingencies of the ongoing here and now by sociological rea-
soning, while the term ritual suggests a clear scheme for conduct that has
external origins.
8. Conclusion: mutual recognition and trust

As we have seen, a mutual rejection between Goffman and Garfinkel as it
is sometimes assumed (Widmer, 1992; Winkin & Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013)
never existed. Goffman often mentions Garfinkel’s work approvingly, for
example Garfinkel’s chapter on Agnes in Stigma (Goffman, 1963a, p. 88,
n. 82) and in Relations in Public (1971, p. 278, n. 37) as a “useful case
study”. In numerous places Goffman thanks Garfinkel for references or
refers appreciatively to unpublished manuscripts (e.g., 1961a, p. 375, n.
40, 1963a, p. 78, 1963b, p. 62). Some of the references (e.g., 1967, p. 140)
demonstrate profound knowledge of concepts that Garfinkel had only

marginally published, such as “praxeological validity” (Garfinkel, 1956b,
2002, pp. 105–109, 185–187). In Goffman’s early text “On Facework”
(1955, p. 218, n. 9), in Asylums (1961a, p. 139, n. 19), especially the anal-
ysis of the “moral career of a mental patient”, and in Stigma (1963a, p. 85,
n. 74), he draws on Garfinkel’s (1956a) concept of “degradation ceremo-
nies”. Garfinkel’s text on trust (1963), which Goffman cites in Encounters
(1961b, pp. 19, 25), apparently had particular appeal. Garfinkel (1993,
p. 9) describes that Goffman considered this text his “masterpiece” and
“high-water mark” while in retrospect Garfinkel himself characterized it
as still being too strongly attached to Schützian and Parsonian paradigms
and as “pre-ethnomethodological”.
48 Christian Meyer
In his text on trust, Garfinkel (1963) describes the conditions that must
be fulfilled for a social situation to be stably sustained. When practical trust
is breached, the participants do not succeed in seeing what is happening
and are unable to respond and incapable to restore order. In Frame Analy-
sis (1974, p. 378), Goffman describes similar “negative experiences”: when
things happen differently than expected, the frame of reference is broken
and individuals are unable to produce “an organized and organizationally
affirmed response”. Garfinkel, however, locates the trouble at a more fun-
damental level: not only are participants unable to manage their common
activity, they are also cognitively disoriented, showing emotional perplex-
ity, distress and resentment.
The reverse deep esteem is equally true: Garfinkel first thanks Goffman
explicitly for “criticisms and editorial suggestions” in his text on Condi-
tions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies (1956a, p. 420, n. 1). In the
acknowledgements to his Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) he includes
Goffman among a list of “old friends” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. xi). In addition
to the Agnes study in Garfinkel (1967), in which Garfinkel (quite critically)
discusses Goffman’s Presentation of Self (1956) at length, he deals in Some
Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists (1956b) with Goff-
man’s On Cooling the Mark Out (1952), which he treats as an example
of the ethnographic use of natural metaphors familiar from the Chicago
School. In doing so, the ethnographer identifies formal similarities between
situations with people standing at different positions in the social order,
regardless of their own assessment of the situation. When, for example,
Goffman speaks of actors alternatively as “ritual participants” (1967, p. 21),
“strategic manipulators of impressions” (1956, p. 51) or “identity pegs”
(1963b, p. 56), he uses these metaphors to generate abstractions as well as
to defamiliarize the object of inquiry (cf. Hammersley, 2018, p. 64). The
deployment of metaphor is intended to render visible the mundane objects of
daily life by means of Burkean “perspective by incongruity”. This prompts a
“look again” response from readers, as Watson (1999) says.
While Goffman is skeptical of the scientific value of describing social sit-

uations only in their own terms, Garfinkel advocates rigorous descriptions
“from within” (cf. the extended debate about this question in Garfinkel
Archive, n.d.). Their exchanges at the Suicide Prevention Center Confer-
ence (documented by audio recordings and transcripts; again see Garfin-
kel Archive n.d.) are amicable, and in a lecture in 1993, Garfinkel speaks
fondly of Goffman.
By way of conclusion, the early and long-lasting contact between Goff-
man and Garfinkel was marked by great esteem (Sharrock, 1999, p. 120),
greatly fertilized both their work and succeeding developments and served
to sharpen their respective approaches conceptually. The antagonism
between the two is significantly overstated and relates more to a dispute
between Goffman and conversation analysis, which he himself had helped

to establish.
Notes
1 Wieder (1984, p. 35) insists on the difference of Goffman’s “working consen-
sus” to ethnomethodology, since it assumes an identical mental state of the co-
participants. Instead, for ethnomethodology there is no “negotiated” or “shared”
meaning, but rather an ongoing unfolding of co-responsively accomplished social
objects, the appearance of which varies for each of the participants (cf. Liberman,
2008, p. 253–254). Therefore, Goffman’s reasoning about a “working consen-
sus” as well as about “the definition of the situation”, from an ethnomethodo-
logical perspective, leads to, as Watson (1999, p. 141) argues, an unproductive
choice between either an omnipotent actor who can act as he or she pleases or an
omniscient observer who always knows better than the member of society.
2 Equally inspired by these discussions around ethnoscience and cognitive anthro-
pology, Aaron Cicourel, who had cooperated with Garfinkel and Goffman in the
1950s, chose “cognitive sociology” instead.
3 Other contributors include Gumperz, Hymes, Sacks, Schegloff, Frake, Ervin-
Tripp, Ferguson, Albert, and Dundes.
4 This is evident in his concept of role distance (Goffman, 1961b, pp. 85–152).
5 Goffman had blocked the award of PhD to Sacks at Berkeley. He had eventually
withdrawn from the panel, and Cicourel had taken over his place (Schegloff,
1992, p. xxiv).
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2 Goffman and Garfinkel

Joint enterprises, theoretical

shown by both early outlines and manuscripts by Garfinkel (1948/2006,

tradicts the widespread impression of dislike or hostility between the two,

organization of experience.” By way of conclusion I will reconsider their

2. Views from within and from without

well-known in the American public – of Goffman as well as symbolic inter-

from Harvard in 1952, Goffman from Chicago in 1953. At the initiative of

of studying interaction per se, and of the possibility of description as a

3. Basic theoretical orientations

Hughes), Durkheimian sociology (Lloyd Warner), game theory and ethol-

1940s and 1950s, the “non-egological phenomenologies” of Aron Gur-

interactive exchange between persons in the mental rather than in empiri-

exogenous form that is followed by the co-participants in interaction.

Other, less controversial common references involve the comparative

4. The interaction order

Goffman had already conceptualized “conversational interaction” in his

Social order, then, is a result of the transformation of behavior into what he

5. Developing a sociology of everyday life

them using ethnographic methods, the value of which Garfinkel probably

unnoticedly in everyday interactions. This feeling of strangeness and mas-

a considerable impact on the character of my ethnographic observa-

This is partly also because – in contrast to Garfinkel – Goffman never

6. Identity, self and participation

our everyday behavior. Rather, as Garfinkel argues, much of what we do

paper (1960; reprinted in 1967, pp. 262–283), this argument is presented

threats and troubles. These ethnographically observable forms of conduct

The geologist is a geologist because he treats a mountain as a rock for-

7. The organization of experience

Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) has sometimes been interpreted either

Like the early Garfinkel, Goffman’s theoretical outline in Frame Analysis

results from organized coordination with other participants and is oriented

system of communicative meaning that can then be modularized and

analysis would not exist.

complex process of forewarning and preparing closure is gone through.

reducing interaction to syntax, presenting de-contextualized data snippets.

Goffman’s (and Hymes’) critique of conversation analysis certainly

8. Conclusion: mutual recognition and trust

demonstrate profound knowledge of concepts that Garfinkel had only

While Goffman is skeptical of the scientific value of describing social sit-

between Goffman and conversation analysis, which he himself had helped

America. A history (pp. 367–410). The University of Chicago Press.

developments (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Goffman, E. (1961b). Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction.

Beyond Goffman. Studies on communication, institution, and social interaction

Rawls, A. W. (2002). Editor’s introduction. In H. Garfinkel (Ed.), Ethnomethod-

chive at the University of Nevada. http://cdclv.unlv.edu/archives/interactionism/

Wieder, D. L. (1984). Toward a general theory of the communicative situation.

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2. Views from within and from without

3. Basic theoretical orientations

4. The interaction order

5. Developing a sociology of everyday life

6. Identity, self and participation

7. The organization of experience

8. Conclusion: mutual recognition and trust