Spontaneous Involvement and Social Life

Abstract

Throughout his writings, Erving Goffman develops the principle that successful impression management requires an appearance of “spontaneous involvement” as evidence of individuals' sincerity. Goffman never articulates this principle in terms of how persons are actually—indeed, as he sometimes recognizes, necessarily involved spontaneously in the social environment. This paper asks: What does it mean for our reading of Goffman and of social situations generally if we move the proposition of the experiential necessity of spontaneous involvement to the center of sociological analysis? I discuss why it never moved to the center of Goffman's inquiries, and then argue that a theory of habit facilitates an elaborate of its sociological significance.