Concepts
This concept, described by Erving Goffman, explains how people actively shape the way others see them—much like performers controlling what the audience sees on the front stage while keeping certain things hidden backstage.
Impression Management
A teacher expects a student to be a ‘top performer,’ so she gives extra attention—and the student ends up excelling. This classroom chain reaction is an example of what?
Self-fulfilling prophecy
This layer of identity lives inside you — the private self-views you carry, even when no one else knows them.
Personal layer of identity
This identity gap strategy involves finding work opportunities outside one's primary job to fulfill aspects of occupational identity not met in the main workplace.
Repositioning
The two main strategies Black professionals use to manage the paradox are:
Conformity and resistance
This American philosophical tradition—used by early sociologists like Mead—says that people understand the world by doing things and learning from the consequences of their actions.
Pragmatism: A student switches their major from philosophy to nursing because it offers stable employment.
→ They make a decision based on practical outcomes, not abstract ideals.
This concept from Mead describes the internalized sense of society’s expectations that guides how we behave even when no one is watching.
The generalized other: Shared Norms and Values in society
A student stops talking loudly in the library—not because anyone tells them to, but because they’ve learned the shared expectation that “everyone should be quiet here.” They imagine how society views their behavior and adjust accordingly.
This layer of identity refers to the shared sense of ‘who we are’ that emerges from belonging to a group—built through collective histories, symbols, and cultural meanings.
Communal layer of identity
This is the identity gap strategy where workers cognitively reframe their existing work rather than finding new work opportunities.
Reappraising
This form of taint occurs when an occupation is associated with garbage, death, bodily fluids, or dangerous environmental conditions — think miners, butchers, chimney sweeps, or morticians.
Physical taint
This sociological perspective—associated with scholars like Mead and Blumer—argues that people act toward things based on the meanings those things have for them, and that these meanings arise through social interaction.
Symbolic interactionism
In Mead’s theory, this early activity allows children to take the role of one other person at a time, while the later one teaches them to coordinate the roles of many people at once.
Play and games: In Mead’s theory, play is when children pretend to be one person at a time, helping them understand individual roles. Game requires following rules and coordinating with many roles at once, teaching children how their actions fit into a larger group. This shift from play to game helps them develop a sense of the generalized other.
This CTI concept explains how the four layers overlap, influencing one another so that a change in one layer can reshape the others.
Interpenetration of Identity Frames
This identity process happens when people imagine who they could become by watching role models, mentors, or coworkers and projecting themselves into those possible futures.
Envisioning the self through others
In organizations, this concept describes the impossible situation where workers must perform an identity that meets institutional expectations, yet any attempt to do so makes them appear inauthentic — leaving them punished whether they comply or resist
Performative double bind
This fundamental process describes how individuals do not simply react to the environment, but actively name, interpret, judge, and decide what a situation means before acting. Blumer says this internal conversation is the very mechanism by which meaning is constructed in action.
Self-Indication
In this case, a restaurant server switches between an upbeat, polished performance for customers and an exhausted, unfiltered demeanor in the kitchen. This strategic separation of behaviors across different social spaces demonstrates which of Goffman’s core dramaturgical concepts?
Front stage and back stage
Marcus sees himself as independent and self-reliant, but his romantic partner consistently views and treats him as someone who needs guidance and support. This represents:
Personal - Relational Identity Gap
This identity process involves understanding yourself by mapping your position within a web of relationships—seeing how your connections, obligations, and opportunities shape who you can be.
Situating in a network
This form of taint is tied to moral judgment — society frames the occupation as sinful, deceptive, or norm-violating, such as exotic dancers, bill collectors, or casino managers.
Moral taint
This strategy changes the meaning of dirty work by redefining it as socially valuable — for example, a slaughterhouse worker saying, ‘We feed the nation,’ or a funeral director saying, ‘We care for families at their worst moments.
Ideological reframing
In this scenario, a new student carefully studies his peers’ style and behavior before constructing his own performance, while those peers modify their reactions to help define who he is. According to Goffman, this mutual adjustment demonstrates what process through which people collaboratively establish social reality?
Working consensus
This consequence often arises when who someone thinks they are does not align with how they actually communicate in daily life—creating tension between the self they feel and the self they perform.
Identity conflict or stress resulting from identity gap
This identity process involves imagining who you can become by drawing on the achievements, feedback, or examples of others — while its counterpart focuses on locating yourself within a web of relationships to understand your position, resources, and constraints.
Envisioning the self through others and situating in a network
This specific form of social weighting flips the stigma by attacking the credibility or morality of those who judge them — as when bail bondsmen say activists are ‘hypocrites who don’t understand danger.
Condemning the condemners