[1] In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.

Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981).

[3] Goffman's dissertation, entitled Communication Conduct in an Island Community (1953), was completed under the supervision of W. Lloyd Warner, Donald Horton, and Anselm Strauss.

[7][15] After graduating from the University of Chicago, in 1954–57 he was an assistant to the athletic director at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

[7] In 1968 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the Benjamin Franklin Chair in Sociology and Anthropology,[7] due largely to the efforts of Dell Hymes, a former colleague at Berkeley.

[17] In 1970 Goffman became a cofounder of the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization[18] and coauthored its Platform Statement.

[10] In 1979, Goffman received the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship, from the Section on Social Psychology of the American Sociological Association.

[20] He was elected the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association, serving in 1981–82, but was unable to deliver the presidential address in person due to progressing illness.

[1][3][23] Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning have said that Goffman never engaged in serious dialogue with other theorists,[1] but his work has influenced and been discussed by numerous contemporary sociologists, including Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu.

[1] His ideas are also "difficult to reduce to a number of key themes"; his work can be broadly described as developing "a comparative, qualitative sociology that aimed to produce generalizations about human behavior".

[30] From a methodological perspective, Goffman often employed qualitative approaches, specifically ethnography, most famously in his study of social aspects of mental illness, in particular the functioning of total institutions.

[31][32] His influence extended far beyond sociology: for example, his work provided the assumptions of much current research in language and social interaction within the discipline of communication.

when an individual from an upper-class background goes to a black-tie affair, the definition of the situation is that they must mind their manners and act according to their class.

In 2007 by The Times Higher Education Guide listed Goffman as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens, and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.

[2] His popularity with the general public has been attributed to his writing style, described as "sardonic, satiric, jokey",[32] and as "ironic and self-consciously literary",[35] and to its being more accessible than that of most academics.

[32] Interestingly, if he is rightly so credited, he may by this means have contributed to a remodelling of the norms of academic behaviour, particularly of communicative action, arguably liberating intellectuals from social restraints unnatural to some of them.

[1] Despite his influence, according to Fine and Manning there are "remarkably few scholars who are continuing his work", nor has there been a "Goffman school"; thus his impact on social theory has been simultaneously "great and modest".

[31] Fine and Manning attribute the lack of subsequent Goffman-style research and writing to the nature of his style, which they consider very difficult to duplicate (even "mimic-proof"), and also to his subjects' not being widely valued in the social sciences.

[25][31] Of his subjects, Fine and Manning observe that the topic of behavior in public places is often stigmatized as trivial and unworthy of serious scholarly attention.

In a social interaction, as in a theatrical performance, there is an onstage area where actors (people) appear before the audience; this is where positive self-concepts and desired impressions are offered.

[44][7][45][46] Regardless of whether Goffman coined the term, he popularized it with his 1961 book Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.

[52] He describes how institutionalization socializes people into the role of a good patient, someone "dull, harmless and inconspicuous"—a condition that in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness.

They include "On Face-work" (1955); "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor" (1956); "Embarrassment and Social Organization" (1956); "Alienation from Interaction" (1957); "Mental Symptoms and Public Order" (1964); and "Where the Action Is".

Goffman presents reality as a form of game, and discusses its rules and the various moves that players can make (the "unwitting", the "naive", the "covering", the "uncovering", and the "counter-uncovering") while trying to get or hide an information.

A frame is a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives that organize experiences and guide the actions of individuals, groups and societies.

[11][58] In Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman provides a platform for understanding and interpreting the interaction between individuals engaging speech communication.

"[62] Goffman's key idea is that most conversation is simply a replaying of a strip – what he describes as a personal experience or event.

When we talk with others, the speaker's goal is often always the same, to provide "evidence for the fairness or unfairness of his current situation and other grounds for sympathy, approval, exoneration, understanding, or amusement.

"The participants will be bound by norms of good manners: through frequency and length of turns at talk, through topics avoided, through circumspection in regard to references about self, through attention offered eagerly or begrudgingly-through all these means, rank and social relationship will be given their due.

[70] She also noted that feminist scholars like Jean Kilbourne "[built] their highly persuasive and widely circulated findings on the nature of gender in advertising on Goffman's original categories".