By Steven Seidman

A brand new department has emerged within the social sciences among modernists and their postmodern critics. the previous guard the venture of a normal concept with safe analytical foundations; the latter problem the prospect and certainly the desirability of desiring to create totalizing theories. Postmodernists contest the view of technology as an automonous sphere of information and mirrored image. This quantity brings jointly prime theorists within the social sciences and philosophy to discuss the respective advantages of modernism and postmodernism as paradigms of social inquiry. It examines the relation among technological know-how, critique and narrative, addressing questions on the ethical and political that means of technological know-how this day.

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In 1949 he presented “Symbols of Class Status” to the annual meeting of the University of Chicago Society for Social Research and two years later a modified version was published in the British Journal of Sociology. This paper shows Goffman exploring a problem that exists in the still waters at the edge of the dramaturgical maelstrom. The crux of the paper is that although symbols of class status represent status, they do not constitute it. This discrepancy directs attention towards both fraudulent presentations of self and towards the attempts of legitimate status holders to immunize their symbols against misuse.

Goffman distinguished five kinds of secret (1959: 141–3): 1 “dark secrets”: facts incompatible with the team’s image; 2 “strategic secrets”: facts about what the team will do; 3 “inside secrets”: facts which, if known, identify a person as a team member; 4 “entrusted secrets”: facts which are kept as a demonstration of trustworthiness; 5 “free secrets”: facts which can be disclosed without discrediting a team performance. Various characters try to steal these secrets by gaining illicit access to the backstage.

Earlier Goffman expresses exactly this thought when he comments that the apparent cynicism of professionals is “a means of insulating their inner selves” (1959: 31). This expression reveals his explicit or implicit willingness to distinguish two selves. When The Presentation of Self was reissued in 1959, 46 Early Writings Goffman reconsidered his earlier account of the self. For the most part he limited his revisions to stylistic changes and the amplification of the general theme. However, at two key points he appended sections that challenge the two selves thesis.

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Postmodernism and social theory: the debate over general by Steven Seidman
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