Erving Goffman's Ethnographic Study

An Ethnographic Study Macy’s Employees Social Performances

In my ethnographic study, I apply theoretical concepts developed by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to the behavior of employees in the retail department store, Macy’s. Goffman (1959) argues that social interactions in everyday life can be understood as presentations between performers and audiences. Within social establishments, he suggests four analytical frameworks may govern how performers stage their “characters” including the technical, political, structural and cultural; he also argues that the aforementioned perspectives are situation-specific and thus can also be analyzed within a broader dramaturgical framework (Goffman 1959). The task of this
In the context of a retail cashier, this would require the systematic repetition of their primary job to scan products and retrieve payments (Gabbur et al. 2011); the woman’s failure to provide payment and then subsequent arguing was clearly a disruption to the cashier’s technical performance. However, in real life, the cashier did not reorient his performance to meet his technical objective; he did not demand that she leave or call for security to escort her out of the building. I would argue that this is because the importance of Macy’s culture, which is to be polite, respectful and courteous, is more important than its technical objective of scanning customers in line at a rapid pace. To understand the reason, Goffman (1959:283) asks us to consider the implications of a “performance disruption,” or a social interaction in which the existing communication comes “to an embarrassed and confused halt.” While this certainly happened to the cashier from a technical perspective as he was forced to halt his rapid succession of scanning products and hekping new customers in life, the negative implications were minor; the company simply lost about 5 minutes of employee productivity. However, the implications of a performance disruption to the company’s culture could be far more severe. If compelled to leave the
This is an important area of study because of how relevant shopping and customer-employee interactions are to our everyday lives as citizens and consumers. Additionally, the study is useful to scholars of sociology, as well as audiences interested in the sociological theory of how retail employees might act in given circumstances. The study found that when different perspectives came into conflict, the first priority of Macy’s employees was to maintain the company’s culture of professionalism, politeness and civility. I speculate that this is because the cost of a “performance breakdown” is particularly severe in culture, but less so with respect to politics or