Introduction
Goffman's Theory of Presentation of Self provides a valuable framework for understanding your internship experience. His concept of impression management suggests that individuals actively work to control the impressions they make on others. This is particularly relevant in your internship context, where your interactions with colleagues and clients can significantly impact your professional reputation.
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| Key Goffman Concepts |
Key Goffman Concepts and Your Internship
Front Stage and Back Stage: Goffman distinguishes between the "front stage" where performances are staged for an audience and the "backstage" where preparations are made and impressions are managed. In your internship, the office environment might be considered the front stage, where you interact with colleagues and clients. The backstage could be your personal workspace, where you prepare for meetings or discuss work-related matters privately.
Impression Management: Your conscious efforts to present yourself in a positive light to your colleagues and clients align with Goffman's concept of impression management. This might involve dressing professionally, maintaining a friendly demeanor, and demonstrating your skills and knowledge.
Role Performance: As an intern, you are expected to fulfill certain roles, such as a learner, a team member, and a potential future employee. Your ability to perform these roles effectively involves understanding the expectations associated with each and adapting your behavior accordingly.
Props and Setting: The physical environment of your internship, including your office space, the company's culture, and the technology available, can serve as props that help to create a particular impression. For example, a modern, well-equipped office might convey a sense of professionalism and innovation.
Specific Examples from Your Internship
Office Dress Code: Adhering to the company's dress code helps to maintain a professional appearance and aligns with the expected role of an intern.
Team Meetings: During team meetings, you might actively participate to demonstrate your engagement and enthusiasm, while also taking care to avoid appearing overly eager or assertive.
Client Interactions: When interacting with clients, you might emphasize your skills and knowledge to convey a sense of competence and professionalism.
By applying Goffman's theory of presentation of self to your internship experience, you can gain a deeper understanding of the social dynamics at play and the ways in which you are actively shaping your professional identity. Recognizing the importance of impression management can help you navigate your career path more effectively and build strong relationships with colleagues and clients.
Goffman's concept of frames of reference provides a robust theoretical framework for understanding social interaction and the construction of meaning. This essay will delve into the key aspects of his theory and its implications for research.
Key Concepts and Implications
Natural vs. Social Frames: Goffman distinguishes between natural frames, which are based on physical events, and social frames, which involve human intentions and are subject to social evaluation. This distinction highlights the importance of considering both objective reality and subjective interpretation in social analysis.
Guided Actions and Social Evaluation: Social frames guide human actions, shaping our behaviors and expectations. These actions are subject to social evaluation, meaning that our behavior is often shaped by the need to maintain a positive impression or avoid negative consequences.
Frames as Cognitive Structures: Frames are cognitive structures that allow us to interpret events and assign meaning to them. They provide a framework for understanding the world and communicating with others.
Impression Management: Goffman's concept of impression management is closely related to frames. Individuals actively work to control the impressions they make on others by carefully selecting and presenting information within the appropriate frame.
Implications for Research
Goffman's theory of frames has significant implications for research in various fields, including sociology, anthropology, and communication studies. Some key implications include:
Understanding Social Interaction: Frames provide a valuable tool for analyzing how individuals interact with each other and how meaning is constructed in social settings.
Examining Power Dynamics: Frames can be used to explore power dynamics and how dominant groups may use their frames to control the interpretation of events.
Investigating Cultural Differences: Comparing frames across different cultures can help to understand how cultural values and beliefs shape social interactions and interpretations.
Analyzing Media Representations: Frames can be used to examine how media representations shape public opinion and influence social behavior.
Essential Parts of a Theoretical Framework
The parts or elements of the theoretical framework are the following:
Symbolic Interactionism provides a valuable lens for examining internship experiences. This theoretical perspective emphasizes the significance of social interaction, symbols, and meaning-making in shaping human behavior and understanding.
Key Concepts and Implications for Internship Analysis
Symbols and Meaning: Symbolic interactionists argue that human interaction is mediated by symbols, which are objects, gestures, or words that have shared meanings. In an internship context, these symbols can include company logos, dress codes, and professional jargon. Understanding these symbols is crucial for effective communication and integration into the workplace culture.
Social Interaction: Human behavior is shaped through social interaction. Internships offer opportunities for individuals to interact with colleagues, supervisors, and clients, learning social norms, expectations, and appropriate behaviors.
Role Taking: Symbolic interactionists emphasize the importance of role-taking, which involves understanding the perspectives of others and adjusting one's behavior accordingly. In internships, successful individuals must be able to take on various roles, such as learner, team member, and potential future employee.
The Looking-Glass Self: This concept suggests that individuals develop a sense of self based on how they are perceived by others. In internships, feedback from supervisors and colleagues can significantly impact an intern's self-esteem and career aspirations.
Implications for Internship Analysis
Cultural Norms and Expectations: Symbolic interactionism highlights the importance of understanding the cultural norms and expectations of the internship workplace. This includes understanding company values, dress codes, and communication styles.
Building Relationships: Effective internships involve building relationships with colleagues and supervisors. Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the role of communication and shared meanings in fostering positive relationships.
Professional Identity Development: Internships can be a significant step in developing a professional identity. Symbolic interactionism suggests that this development is influenced by social interactions, role-taking, and the feedback received from others.
Organizational Culture: Understanding the organizational culture of an internship can provide valuable insights into the company's values, norms, and expectations. Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the role of symbols and shared meanings in shaping organizational culture.
Symbolic interactionism offers a rich theoretical framework for analyzing internship experiences. By focusing on social interaction, symbols, and meaning-making, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of how individuals navigate workplace environments, develop professional identities, and contribute to organizational success.
Goffman separated the front and back stages. We spend most of our lives on the front stage in our daily lives, where we are able to deliver and succeed. Goffinan argues that the symbols in the interaction allow the person to gain information about him and predict how others respond to his actions through a process of social role understanding of role-taking.
Learning the behavior suitable for each position involves the internalization of society within the person and can therefore step out of him and determine his features and behavior. The author also uses terms like the "mainstream other" and the "generalized other. (Rubini and Sigall 351" First of all, the individual who plays relevant roles in a person's life parents, educators, peer groups, etc is a key component in the process of socialization, since it promotes roles. In order to save its origins, consolidation, primary predictions and contribution to social psychology, the thesis focuses on the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism.
On the basis of a literature review, some of the views of thinkers regarded by Goffinan as the precursors are studied. The original structure structures of the symbolic interactionist movement and the multiple possibilities to turn the idea are central to the debate and described by the varying definitions and methodologies of the schools of Chicago and Iowa (Lehrer 425). The methods of scholars such as Strauss, Shibuterani, Berger and Luckmann and Stryker are briefly described in order to detect the major innovations that derive from interactionist conceptions Hewitt, & Shulman, 1979.
One of the principal proposals is that identity is based primarily on contact, which is often symbolic, meaning something. That is, the identification of individuals is often linked to the meanings circulated within a social community; they are based on the circumstance and the places every person takes in that community. In other words, it depends upon the capacity of us to assess and make sense of personal and social phenomena: the 'order of symbolic.' interaction is thus often an operation of social significance Jeon, 2004. In that sense, language is no longer a representing tool, but instead a way of manifesting the speaker's emotions, intentions, roles or goals, which is also a social act and a way of constructing this reality. Our activities are also known beyond a collection of patterns or automatic behaviours.
Actions still have an interpretable significance. The outcome is a reflection of us, a version of ourselves, made up and uncovered in the language language that doesn't belong to a particular logic, but to a particular social context or isolated, or created by the individual. In other words, the individual is made up of the meanings that circulate in connection with other people. Here comes one of the core principles of symbolic interaction: the "self," which tried to explain how a person constructs the copies (Quist-Adade 25).
The focus of self-presentation is on controlling, affecting, or seeing other entities so called the audience. The way it is communicated and done generates the ideal feeling. It includes Besides Goffman, several writers have developed several of today's symbolic experiences, Garfinkel, Cicourel and Rom Harré are the most representative authors of ethnology. In the following categories, pragmatism, social activity, action and attitude, the individual and community derives from the thinking of Goffinan are explored in the values and the elements of symbolic interactionism. Blumer's symbolic interactionism shows the active moment the self of an individual that avoids the problem of the absence of a regulatory system of social interaction. Since symbolic interactionism has no macro-social significance, its theoretical methods cannot take social change into account.
The Goffmann self-presentation concepts were a humanistic modification of Goffinan 's philosophy on the extremely competitive life of North American society. From pragmatism arose a theory of communication which took on the universality of social symbolism and consensus. The creation of various social alternatives or the development of social expectations is thus far removed from its horizon of understandable significance (Lehrer 4). Symbolic interactionism represents traditional contractual individualism, removing the personal power and impulses of the biological ego. It fluctuates in the sense of social action between rational and emotional idealism.
Not only does it lack an empirical theory, but it also lacks social empirical consideration. Since symbolic interactionism constitutes a variant of American reformist individualism, it is the theoretical basis for rationalization of large companies. In 1900-1950 it was perceived to be inherently heterogeneous and with complex social theory, as was the legacy of the Chicago Sociological School, as well as numerous influents by writers such as William Thomas and Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Everett Hughes (Charon 5).
The abstract experiences used to illustrate a vision of the lives and behaviours of individual groups in compliance with the belief that what we call 'truth' is not beyond the realm by those who approached its central theoretical and scientific guidance.
'Real Universe' is consciously created as we behave in the universe. This awareness should be based on what they really do in the world if the aim is to consider people. The first is that it allocates the ability of an person to act in an understanding of the environment the environment would be "not given"; second, that the participants are dynamic reciprocal institutional structures the perception of "situations" and, lastly, that the relationship is central to the principle that relationship with society.
The player and the environment argue that understanding of "situations" is dynamic and reciprocal processes and that the human mechanism of action and interaction has to be symbolically defined. At the end of the day, people are acting as symbols created by interaction with the "other." They argue that players and environment are dynamic, reciprocal processes the "situations" being interpreted, and that relationship and a function of the human act can essentially be symbolically defined.
Ultimately, individuals would behave in terms of symbols generated by communication with the "other." Symbolic experiences were protagonists of a truly rich semantic journey that still continues to take form on new empirical and theoretical issues, owing to the discord with the dominant functionalism and structuralism of midsize-twentieth-century sociology (Banerjee 487).
We can therefore understand the possible connection between recent studies of culture and power with interactive sociological perspectives as an significant challenge. In fact, here we are looking at the relationship between symbolic interaction and culture and power studies, post-structuralism and post-modern critique. Furthermore, these new views are a little addressed in line with the reuse of symbolic interactionism and that it is the origin of detraction from some questionable nostalgia for structuralism.
The theoretical foundations and common concerns share these insights, along with a methodological definition that, in short, tends to derive from symbolic interactionism and a large culture definition (Reynolds 60). Understanding as a "living experience" social mechanism in my experience. The latter does not evolve without problems or inconsistencies, however, is known.
This is why the notion of power emerges in a poststructuralist theoretical tradition, which a permit a series of analyzes of the theoretical and analytical contexts of symbolic interaction which assume the complexity of social interactions (Quist-Adade 25). Due to its abstract nature, they are nothing more than representations derived from a type of ordering of the world. A sociological model that turns these categories as an objective fact of reality, and whose cultural activities and productions would be read as expressions of class positions, status or power or gender, race, etc., is revealed, fundamentally, deterministic and theoretically naive.
The class, status and power variables are fully materialized in a theory of power and social reality that interacts in fields of social and cultural, linguistic and historical experiences that are presented only linked to an “idea of structure”, and whose activities and cultural productions would be read as expressions of class positions, status or power or gender, race, etc., is fundamentally deterministic and theoretically inexperienced (VanderDrift, Tyler and Ma 453).
The way to define the world is through contact, a society encountered, perceived as a social activity can be discovered through a series of interactive and symbolic acts and classifications, which have some meaning. The way to define the world is through contact, a society encountered, perceived as a social activity, can be discovered through a series of interactive and symbolic acts and classifications, which have some meaning. The way the world is classified and how the person should behave in it is experienced through interaction (VanderDrift, Tyler and Ma 453) .
For example, hiking ability seems to be influenced by social contact, which helps people to understand the context and signals they can use to act and communicate with. This leads one to think that language and conjectural rules of culture are not inherently derived from "underpinning social structures "social structures" or "stable systems of meaning". Now, does that not lead one to believe that this textual perspective of reading social reality doesn't take into account the "structural variables," such as class, status, and power? The problems considered to be critical for the study of truth are not at all left out. Goffman continues on the premise that we strive-consciously or unconsciously-to make a certain image of ourselves, by presenting our self to other people.
We understand the role we want to play in this regard. According to Goffman, such details about us will help one identify the scene, helping the "audience" to decipher what to expect and how to respond as it interacts (Rubini and Sigall 343). This ensures that any social encounter is a presentation created for the audience. Simply put: as actors, we "express" ourselves to make our audience a "impression." If circumstances are to be identified, an agreement must be formed between the interlocutors. For recognition and definition of the scene, the spiritual essence of the actor illustrated in the first experience is crucial: we have to be who we think we are. This is why, when someone introduces themselves to another, the perception they get is controlled (Lehrer 412). The variables of class, status and authority are completely expressed in an authority and social reality theory that interacts in social and cultural, linguistic and historical experiences which are presented in a "structural idea" only Spoiled Identity is nothing but embodiments of a kind of world order because of their abstract existence.
Therefore, it is an empirical point of view and social reality itself, concerned with what is necessary in a given moment for a person and which implies the existence of the "other." Regardless of whether Goffinan is concerned with the modern phase of individualization and social distinction as the Goffinan methodological emphasis on the meanings of the "symbols" derived from the social relation, the "situational logic" of his acquires a precise dimension of any relation or interaction (Lehrer 412).
This situation viewpoint will approximate what Goffman refers to as the "reference system" that people in society have, which is important to recognizing and describing the importance of events. But as Goffman himself warns, a multiplicity of incidents arises concurrently in most social contexts Fine, 1993. The depiction of the same occurrence may vary from one person to another based on the role played in a task that may give a particular interpretation of value that is different from another. A situation which is understood as a means for organizing experience is not just linked to a person who in isolation grants importance to an event but is also connected to a cultural repertoire that, despite the apparent agreement on what will take place at the time, raises the issue, which sets out the analytical basis of symbolic interaction.
Somehow, when the roles involved in some situations vary, the opinion that an individual has of what happens is probably quite different (Hendricks and Brickman 40). Against this analytical impasse, for symbolic interactionism, for their subjectivist meaning theory and for their priority of the mediation of all interaction as a symbolically determined medium, a "hermeneutical turn" of vital importance is created. This is a "transform" that stems from the potential epistemic and theoretical approach to cultural studies and questions about the culture and power of the aforementioned postmodern criticism. The attitude to acknowledge certain epistemological limitations regarding the linguistic and discourse order, the statements made, the "reference structure" from which they derive, and in an essence of the social and institutional conditioning that permits the situation lived in concrete contexts. In a set of pre-existing social meanings, a symbolic order resulting from one's relationship with others emerges (Banerjee 507).
Individuals come into play to define the situation, where they want to know what the other individual is like, what concepts they have of their status, of themselves, of their socioeconomic situation. Knowing this, they will know how to act with them, what to expect from them. The "real" attitudes or emotions of the individual are discovered through a confession or their involuntary expressive behaviour. Sometimes the interaction does not reveal the totality of the meanings; given certain aspects of it being naturalized the underlying reality cannot be understood. The expressiveness of individuals involves two types of activity (Charon 54).
The expression he gives and the one that emanates from him. The one that gives is through speech, it transmits verbal symbols. What emanate are actions considered symptomatic of the actor. Individuals accept him in good faith in exchange for something that will not be established until he is gone they will evaluate their relationship and what they can get out of it Individuals will infer about him. Regardless of each individual's goal, it will be in our interest to control the behaviour of others and how they relate to it. This t is achieved by influencing the situation that others come to formulate. Here they will deal with the most theatrical and contextual mode of communication, presumably involuntary, whether or not it is handled intentionally.
To the extent that others act as if the individual had conveyed a certain impression, we can adopt a pragmatic attitude and say that he has effectively projected the understanding that a certain state of affairs prevails. Actions the individual can act believing or not in the mask his person that he has of himself, when he does not believe he is called cynical, he can act using the image he has seeking some benefit. The sincere unlike the previous one, this one acts believing in his self, reaffirms his person with his actions. Facade it is the part that the others observe of the situation, that is, the exteriority of the subject (Lehrer 420).
It is distinguished between medium, appearance and modal. The medium is the place where the interaction takes place, it is the stage part, the stage Personal date The appearance is the image that projects the socioeconomic status The modal has to do with the role of the performer, if he is more submissive or more. Dramatic realization for the activity of a subject to be meaningful to others, it must be expressed during the interaction; it must effectively show the projections that it wants to (Hendricks and Brickman 440).