September 29, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Erving Goffman: Memories, method and metaphors

If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was brought back to me when I talked with somebody who once shared a taxi-ride with Goffman and chatted with him about his research. That somebody is my husband. He has never written down this story, so I offered him the opportunity to get some of it across in this blog.

I’ll first provide a quick overview of Goffman’s work and then hand over to my husband, David Clarke. After that, I say a bit more about Goffman and metaphors, as metaphors were, in a sense, his “tool of sociological analysis“.

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