Erving Goffman

Front-stage behavior is the performance people present to an audience under recognizable social rules. Back-stage settings let performers prepare, relax, or contradict the impression maintained in public.

Impression management is the effort to guide how other people define a situation and judge its participants. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman analyzes clothing, setting, speech, and teamwork as parts of that process.

A total institution places sleep, work, and daily life under one authority in a single enclosed setting. In Asylums, Goffman examined mental hospitals and the processes by which institutional routines can strip away an inmate's previous identity.

Stigma examines attributes that discredit a person within a particular social encounter. Goffman focuses on how people manage disclosure, passing, concealment, and tension between their perceived and claimed identities.