Page 144 - Essencials of Sociology

The Microsociological Perspective: Social Interaction in Everyday Life 117

costumes as you play your roles, wearing different costumes for attending class, swim-
ming, jogging or working out at the gym, and dating.
Your appearance lets others know what to expect from you and how they should
react. Think of the messages that props communicate. Some people use clothing to say
they are college students, others to say they are older adults. Some use clothing to let
you know they are clergy, others to give the message that they are prostitutes. In the
same way, people choose models of cars, brands of liquor, and the hottest cell phone to
convey messages about the self.
The body itself is a sign-vehicle. Its shape proclaims messages about the self. The
meanings that are attached to various shapes change over time, but, as explored in the
Mass Media box on the next page, thinness currently screams desirability.
The third sign-vehicle is manner, the attitudes you show as you play your roles. You
use manner to communicate information about your feelings and moods. When you
show that you are angry or indifferent, serious or in good humor, you are indicating
what others can expect of you as you play your roles.

Teamwork. Being a good role player brings positive responses from others, some-
thing we all covet. To accomplish this, we use teamwork—two or more people working
together to help a performance come off as planned. If you laugh at your boss’s jokes,
even though you don’t find them funny, you are doing teamwork to help your boss give
a good performance.
If a performance doesn’t come off quite right, the team might try to save it by using
face-saving behavior.

Suppose your teacher is about to make an important point. Suppose also that her lec-
turing has been outstanding and the class is hanging on every word. Just as she pauses
for emphasis, her stomach lets out a loud growl. She might then use a face-saving tech-
nique by remarking, “I was so busy preparing for class that I didn’t get breakfast this
morning.”
It is more likely, however, that both the teacher and class will simply ignore the
sound, giving the impression that no one heard a thing—a face-saving technique called
studied nonobservance. This allows the teacher to make the point or, as Goffman would
say, it allows the performance to go on.
Becoming the Roles We Play.
Have you ever noticed how some clothing simply doesn’t “feel” right for certain occasions?
Have you ever changed your mind about something you were wearing and decided to
change your clothing? Or maybe you just switched shirts or added a necklace?
What you were doing was fine-tuning the impressions you wanted to make. Ordinar-
ily, we are not this aware that we’re working on impressions, but sometimes we are,
especially those “first impressions”—the first day in college, a job interview, visiting the
parents of our loved one for the first time, and so on. Usually we are so used to the roles
we play in everyday life that we tend to think we are “just doing” things, not that we are
actors on a stage who manage impressions. Yet every time we dress for school, or for any
other activity, we are preparing for impression management.
A fascinating characteristic of roles is that we tend to become the roles we play. That
is, roles become incorporated into our self-concept, especially roles for which we pre-
pare long and hard and that become part of our everyday lives. Helen Ebaugh (1988)
experienced this firsthand when she quit being a nun to become a sociologist. With
her own heightened awareness of role exit, she interviewed people who had left mar- teamwork the collaboration of
riages, police work, the military, medicine, and religious vocations. Just as she had two or more people to manage
impressions jointly
experienced, the role had become intertwined so extensively with the individual’s
self-concept that leaving it threatened the person’s identity. The question these people face-saving behavior techniques
struggled with was “Who am I, now that I am not a nun (or wife, police officer, colo- used to salvage a performance
(interaction) that is going sour
nel, physician, and so on)?”