Situation Ideas Of Erving Goffman:Connotation,Origin And Enlightenment

Goffman pays attention to the individual fate in the micro-context all his life.He discussed the interaction of individuals in the micro-situation based on the concept of situaiton.Goffman's concept of situation represents a surveillance space environment.Situation is a real-time social entity with communicative attributes.It also provides a control field for the order and norms of individual participation.Goffman examined the intrinsic logical level of interaction in situation-based categories,which is closely related to the individual's encounters in certain situation: the individual's interaction strategy ensures the effectiveness of the situation involvement and maintains the existing situation order;situational propriety and situational impropriety mark the coordinates of individual situational behavior in the "appropriate" and "inappropriate" intervals as the external manifestations of the effectiveness of interaction.The individual's behavior in the situation forms a consistent norm through negotiation,while the external norm prescribes the moral evaluation criteria in the situation,and also provides the basis for the individual's moral degradation.The theoretical origin of Goffman's situational thought can be traced back to Georg Simmel's views on form sociology and spatial order.At the same time,he criticized and inherited William Thomas' theoretical views on situational definition.In addition,he was deeply influenced by situation-viewpoint and self-viewpoint in the trend of symbolic interactionism.In the process of the formation and development of Goffman's situational view,his perspective of situational analysis has gradually narrowed,showing a strong tendency of structural functionalism,and his characteristic of situational determinism and theoretical bias of ignoring the diversity of social environment have also been criticized and disputed.Goffman responded to the situation-viewpoint in the theory of symbolic interactionism through the interpretative mechanism of situational interaction,which affected the development of situational sociology to a certain extent.In addition,Goffman's concept of situation has far-reaching enlightenment for the research of communication in media era.The investigation and analysis of individual situation enriches the view on media in communication studies to a great extent,leading the vision of interpersonal communication to the daily triviality in situation,and connecting the embodied problem in communication studies.The narrowed definition of situation is highly structured,and provides a frame-based interdisciplinary dialogue space for the research of communication effect and social movement.Generally speaking,this study attempts to discover the connotation of Goffman's situational concept and the level of his situational thought by interpreting Goffman's classical works.It traces the theoretical origin of Goffman's situational thought by combing the intellectual history,clarifying the clues of formation and development of Goffman's situational thought,and evaluating Goffman's theoretical controversy,value and enlightenment for communication research.