Part of the SAGE Social Thinker series, this book serves as a concise and inviting introduction to the life and works of Erving Goffman, one of the most prominent social theorists in postwar sociology. Goffman’s ideas continue to influence scholars in various fields and have also attracted many readers outside conventional academia. Goffman’s overall research agenda was the exploration of what he termed the interaction order—that is, the micro social order that regulates the co-mingling of people in each other’s immediate presence. He coined several new concepts (face-work, impression management, role distance, civil inattention, etc.) with which to grasp and understand the complexities and basic social restructuring of everyday life, many of which are now part of sociology’s standard vocabulary.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen (born 1971) is a professor of sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published many titles as author or editor, including The Transformation of Modernity (Ashgate, 2001), Erving Goffman (Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2002), The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman (Ashgate 2008), Public Sociology (Aalborg University Press, 2009), Encountering the Everyday (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), The Contemporary Goffman (Routledge, 2010), Utopia: Social Theory and the Future (Ashgate, 2013), Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences (Ashgate, 2013), Deconstructing Death (University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013), and The Poetics of Crime (Ashgate, 2014). Søren Kristiansen (born 1971) is a professor of sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has, as author or editor, published several titles on the work of Erving Goffman, including Kreativ sociologi (Aalborg University, 2000), Erving Goffman (Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2002), and Mikrosociologi og social samhandling (Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2004) and numerous articles in Danish and international journals. In recent years, he has turned his attention toward the sociology of gambling.