Introduction

Actors seem indispensable as metaphors, as do the stages they inhabit and the worlds that those stages conjure. Literature abounds with these metaphors. More than one person reading this has no doubt already silently responded: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”¹ A more elaborate use of the metaphor of life as stage was published in 1959 by a young sociologist named Irving Goffman. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman offers an analysis of behavior within social situations, in particular the workplace, from “one sociological perspective . . . that of theatrical performance: the principles derived are dramaturgical ones” (xi). For Goffman, the presentation of self is a performance. In the everyday life of work or school, roles are assigned and parts are played, requiring all involved to “manage” the “impressions” they make on others, as an actor is...