Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, offers a sociological portrait of the human being in relationship with other human beings as he or she consciously and unconsciously attempts to shape the others' perception of him:
I assume that when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation. This report is concerned with some of the common techniques that persons employ to sustain such impressions. . . . I shall be concerned only with the participant's dramaturgical problems of presenting the activity before others (Goffman, 1959, 15).
Goffman's notion that human beings "perform" as if in a drama on stage is fascinating, if somewhat chilling at the same time. He posits that the human being is so socialized into concern for what others think of him, what he can get out of any given situation, what others want out of him in that situation, that he is hardly an independent being at all. The picture Goffman paints is of a society which is indeed comparable to a stage in a theater, with the humans merely actors in a play, stuck in the part they have had mapped out for them. True, they participate and cooperate in this mapping out, but far less so than the "independent" human being might like to think.
Focusing on the human being in situations at work, Goffman refers to the words of Sartre, who argues that once a man has become defined by those around him, he is made to feel a virtual prisoner in his role, as if society were threatened by a person who might try to break out of the mold into which he has been poured: "There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition" (Goffman, 1959, 76).
Society and especially the workplace depend on teamwork, and teamwork depends on individuals giving up a c...