Compare and contrast Goffmans and Foucaults explanations of how social order is made and remade

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Christine Bussey                 DD101                 TMA04                

Compare and contrast Goffmans and Foucault’s explanations of how social order is made and remade.

In this essay I will be looking at how Erwing Goffman and Michel Foucault’s explanations of how social order is made and remade with both having a rather different view and show of evidence on why and how the social order is made and remade.  

Order is the way people both imagine and practise their social existence and how individuals fit together with others and with things around them in the world. It also depends on how people’s expectations are towards things. Social life continues to be practised throughout that person’s life. Social order is continuously being remade as it always provides the rules, norms and expectations that enable people to go about their daily lives.

Goffmans theory is focused more on the social patterns of people’s everyday life interactions and sees social order as being built up from social interactions that people use rather than historical processes that embed these social orderings and the ways in which various orders of interaction are authorised (cited in Silva 2009 pg. 319). Whereas Foucault’s believes that social order is produced through discourse and the power of knowledge (meaning language), which are the products of historical process in disciplining individuals. (Cited in Silva 2009, pg. 309)

Both Goffman and Foucault’s draw upon the question of how social order is made and remade by gathering different evidence in which are completely different, however they both explain the connections between society and how individuals make and remake social order.

One contrast between the two is that Goffman’s approach is focused on micro – social phenomena which is at the smaller scale, meaning particular interactions between people, whereas Foucault’s uses macro, which explores a larger scale of patterns, systems or structures of social life. (Cited in Silva 2009, pg. 309)

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Goffman looked into more of the individual’s interactions to others and how the roles of people change in different context, and the situation of where they are and what they are doing at the time. He believes that social interactions are through how people use their body gestures towards other. Either in a threatening manner or looking at someone to show they mean know harm.

Goffman uses an example of a restaurant. Imagine a waiter/waitress in a restaurant performing a role to customers, being happy and polite and providing good customer service to the customer sitting at the table ordering ...

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