Face (sociological concept)

About: Face (sociological concept) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5171 publications have been published within this topic receiving 96109 citations. The topic is also known as: Lose face & Face (sociological concept).

To Mother or Matter: Can Women Do Both?

Abstract: Despite a burgeoning interest in the interface between work and relationships, and its origins in feminist thought, crucial aspects of women’s experiences have remained invisible in the face of mai...

Negotiation styles in intercultural communication

Abstract: This project focuses specifically on how intercultural negotiating differences are evidenced communicatively. Evidence suggests that negotiators deal differently with internationals than domestics. Therefore, it is important to move beyond within‐culture comparisons as a basis for predicting intercultural negotiation processes. This paper tests empirically the endurance of culturally‐associated negotiation styles in inter‐cultural negotiations between Americans and Taiwanese. Results suggest that culture does exert some global effects in face‐to‐face encounters with cultural outsiders. Other aspects of negotiation are managed locally, so that predicted cultural differences do not emerge in interaction.

The Writing Conference as Performance

Abstract: This study uses the performative theory of Erving Goffman to understand the conversational roles taken on by students and teachers during college-level writing conferences. According to Goffman, both teacher and student are engaged in the performance of roles, and they cooperate so that discrepant information (revelations that might undermine these roles) are not revealed. Some of that information can come out, however, in what Goffman calls "backstage" areas. This study creates two "backstage" areas where both an instructor and the two students involved can listen to tapes of their conferences and provide commentary about tensions and miscommunications in the conferences. The study particularly examines confusions about terminology concerning unity in writing and the negotiation of roles in the conference. The perspective taken in this study illuminates the specific performative demands of a writing conference, suggesting that because these demands are new to some students, their teachers may need to engage in considerable role-shifting to ease the conversational burden and help the students "save face." When my brother began his surgery rotation in medical school, he developed a bad habit. Whenever he made a mistake with an incision, a clamp, or a stitch, he would say, "Whoops." The supervising surgeon soon took him aside and told him never, ever to say "whoops" in the operating room again. The reason for this warning is perhaps too obvious to explain, but the situation presents a clear illustration of Goffman's (1959) theory of social behavior as a form of performance. According to Goffman, individuals in social encounters play an information game, selectively revealing and concealing attitudes, feelings, and thoughts, so as to maintain a "front" consistent with the idealized role that is being played. One of the aspects of a culture is to provide exemplars that characterize idealized roles: In the case of a doctor, there is a cultural expectation of near infallibility, or at least of such an appearance. The doctor enacting this role must be especially careful not to reveal discrepant information that seems to undermine that role (as my brother's "whoops" surely did). Because concealment is intrinsic to any performance, actors often need a backstage area where they can reveal to each other information that would have undermined their public performance. Later in the day, in a conver

Humour and the Construction of Maori Leadership at Work

Abstract: Leadership is primarily a communicative activity, and humour provides leaders with a valuable communicative resource for reconciling the competing transactional and relational demands which face th...

Can caricatures really produce distinctiveness effects

Abstract: It has been shown that humans can remember faces of school mates over an interval of as long as 30 years (Bahrick, Bahrick & Wittlenger, 1975). One thing that may be crucial to the development of such a face capacity is the ability to encode the distinctive elements of a face. That is, the ability to identify the information that distinguishes a target face from some notion of an average face or central tendency. Distinctiveness has a well-documented effect on the ease with which a face is processed. Using faces that vary naturally in distinctiveness, it has been shown that the more atypical a face is the more likely it is to be correctly identified and the less likely it is to be mistakenly identified (Bartlett, Hurry & Thorley, 1984; Goldstein & Chance, 1981; Light, Kayra-Stuart & Hollander, 1979; Shepherd, Gibling & Ellis, 1991; Valentine & Bruce, 1986a; Winograd, 1981). Facial distinctiveness appears to confer a recognition advantage in such face recognition tasks.