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When we think about social interaction or communication, we normally think of the most typical case, which is a two people face-to-face talking to one another.

But in fact, Erving Goffman in his discussion of the idea of participation recognized that there were many, many different ways for people to participate in social encounters.

Directly participating in a face-to-face interaction where two people are talking is the most typical prototype of social interaction, but it is not the only way in which we can participate.

In fact, participation is a complex concept in communication.

It's useful to understand it in more detail.

I'm going to talk about all the different ways in which people can participate in a social interaction.

In particular, I'm going to talk about the sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of participation frameworks.

 

Focused vs. Unfocused Interactions

Goffman says an interaction or an encounter is any occasion where people come together to be involved in a common activity. He says at minimum, there are two types of interactions – what he calls focused and unfocused interactions.

A focused interaction is one in which there is one central purpose to the interaction, where the participant roles and rules are fairly rigidly defined. Any activity other than the central main purpose of the interaction is seen as a distraction.

A classic example of a focused interaction is in a courtroom. There is one singular purpose here, and that is doing the business of the court. Any extraneous discussion or activity outside of the court's main purpose is unwelcome and sometimes even unlawful. You can get in trouble and be in contempt of court if you deviate from the main purpose of the interaction.

Other examples might be a classroom or an interview, where for both there's one main purpose, the participant rules are rigidly defined, and any departure from the main purpose is seen as a distraction or digression from that focused interaction.

An unfocused interaction is characterized by no central purpose. It has freely flowing participant rules and roles. There is no real notion of distraction or digression because there's no central purpose to begin with, to be distracted from or to be digressed from.

I think the classic example of an unfocused interaction will be something like in a bar room, where there's just free flowing talk between all sorts of different people and people talking across boundaries of social interactions. Street scenes or street talk is also relatively unfocused interaction. Or maybe the interaction that goes on between students before class starts would be another example of relatively unfocused interaction, compared to the courtroom or the classroom when it's in session which would be focused.

 

Ratified vs. Unratified Participants

The second point that Goffman makes about participation is this idea of ratified and unratified participants in an interaction. Now, in order to understand this distinction, I want to tell you a story.

I was once driving down the street on a summer day and I had my windows open and I saw a couple on the street, a man and a woman arguing. It was a pretty heated argument. And it looked like maybe the man was going to do something physical or violent to the woman.

Just as I was watching this, a third person walked by this couple and started to try to say something to the couple, especially to the man, to get him to cool down and not hurt the woman. He had not been a part of this interaction before. The man who was yelling at his girlfriend turned to the third guy and said, "You ain't in this." And I thought, he is an unratified participant in this interaction.

Goffman has this notion of ratification, which is whether you were officially included in the interaction or not. He says in any given interaction, especially in a focused interaction, there will be some participants who are ratified participants, that is, who have access to the floor and official rights to speak.

Then there will be unratified participants, people who are passers by or are merely observers, but don't normally have the right to speak or the right to participate in any formal way.

I think this is an interesting and important concept because it allows us to draw distinctions between all the different people in interaction and what their participant roles might be. For unratified participants, this doesn't mean they can't participate. It just means their participation isn't ratified.

So that guy walking down the street and trying to intervene in this argument between a man and a woman was not ratified, but he could still participate. He could interject himself into the situation. But the man who was a ratified participant in the argument with his girlfriend, he said, "You ain't in this,” meaning to say, “you are not a ratified participant in this interaction. You are interrupting and getting into an interaction where you don't belong and you don't have any rights.”

The most important thing about ratification is that ratification structures participation. For the most part, unratified participants don't have the opportunity to participate or they have far fewer opportunities to participate. And when they do participate, they risk having it pointed out that they are not ratified participants. So even if they do participate, their participation isn't as valid as the participation of those people who are ratified participants in the interaction.

In addition to this, the participants in the interaction who are ratified are sensitive to the ratification status of all the other participants. Sometimes you might be talking to somebody at work, for example, and a third person walks by and overhears you and begins to interject something. And you're like, "Who is this person? What right do they have to interject something?" Then the person who you were initially talking to you might say, "Oh, this is Mary. Let me introduce you to her. She's a colleague of mine who's an expert in this thing that we're talking about."

In that way, your counterpart can ratify this other participant and they say, "Oh." Then you'll invite them into the conversation. They become a ratified participant with the same rights and access to the floor that you might have.

 

Participant Roles – Production vs. Receptor

We normally think about the two main ways of participating in interaction as the speaker or the listener. There's just two roles. If you're a ratified participant, you're going to be either the speaker or the listener.

But as usual, Goffman is more sensitive than that. He says, no, there are many more roles than that. They're actually multiple production roles, more than just speaker. There are also multiple reception roles or audience roles more than just hearer. I want to describe each of those in turn.

In terms of production roles, Goffman says they are three: the animator, the author, and the principal. I think these are really interesting ideas.

1. The animator: the one who's actually doing the talking normally. Although obviously, animator is a metaphor. We can think of the animator as being like literally the animator, the guy who drew Mickey Mouse or Scooby-Doo or Homer Simpson. There is an animator who is doing the drawing, even though that person might not be responsible for the words that Homer is saying.

   So the animator is the one who actually produces the words. Normally we think of as the one doing the talking. That's the first production role.

2. The author: the one who actually composed the words. So in this case, the writers on the Simpsons are the ones who write the words that Homer says even though they're not the ones who draw the pictures of Homer, and they're not the ones who do the voiceover of Homer Simpson.

   The voice of Homer Simpson is actually the actor Dan Castellaneta. So he's the animator, but the writers on the Simpsons are the authors.

3. The principal: the one who is officially responsible for the words being said. In this case, maybe that's Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons or the Sam Simon, the producer of the Simpson. The people who are ultimately responsible for what the writers write and what the actor says.

Another way of thinking about author, animator and principal is something like a corporate spokesperson. A corporation might hire a PR company, so a professional PR person speaks the words. That person is the animator. Someone in the marketing department of the PR department wrote the words, serving as the author. Then the CEO or the president of the company is the principal – the one who is responsible for the words being said.

You can see the same thing in politics, where the press secretary is the animator of the words. Somebody in the press office or a speech writer is the author of the words. The president of the United States is the principal. The one who presumably stands behind the words. These are the three production roles, animator, author, and principal.

In terms of reception roles, there are at least two:

1. The addressees: the people who are being officially addressed in any communication. This is the person who you're talking to and intend to be the recipient of your message. The person who you are addressing, they are the addressee.

2. The unaddressed: the people who are not officially addressed in an interaction. Goffman says whenever you're in a social interaction there's also the possibility that although there may be one person who you're addressing, there may be lots of other people around who might hear you. They are the unaddressed.

There are these two categories of reception roles, the addressee or the addressees and the unaddressed, and both may hear you. Among the unaddressed, there's at least a couple of different typical reception roles that we can think of.

First are overhearers, people who simply overhear us when we're talking in public. We hear. You may be at a bar or at a restaurant and you're talking or in public and you talk and people can overhear you. Or you're at the office and you're talking on your cell phone and people can overhear you even though they are not whom you are addressing. The person on the other end of the phone is the one you're addressing. But there are unaddressed people who can overhear you.

Then there’s a special category of overhears are eavesdroppers. So people can intentionally try to overhear you. You can think of unaddressed people as unintentionally over hearing you.

People are on the train who are talking on their phone makes you an unintentional overhear. You wish you didn't have to listen to this conversation, but you do. Then there's eavesdroppers, which is you're in public and you're intentionally trying to overhear someone else's conversation.

In any social interaction, we can manage these boundaries between those people who are addressed, and those people who are unaddressed. We can use pasture gesture, facial expression, volume to indicate who is addressed and unaddressed. We can also indicate to those people who might be overhearing that we don't want it to be overheard – that they are unaddressed and unratified and we don't want them in the interaction.

 

States of Talk – Dominant vs. Subordinate (Byplay, Crossplay, & Sideplay)

I'll add one last concept before finishing this video on Goffman's idea of participation is the idea of the state of talk.  Goffman said there at least two states of talk in any social encounter.

1. Dominant

   This is the talk involving ratified participants in standard production and reception roles. For example, the dominant state of talk in a courtroom, for example, is that talk that occurs between the judge, the attorneys and the witnesses, and maybe the bailiff and the transcriptionist.

   These people are the only ratified participants, the only ones who really get to talk. The jury doesn't get to talk. The people in the gallery don't get to talk. So the only ratified participants are the judge, the lawyers and the witnesses. The dominant state of talk is any of the talk involving those participants.

2. Byplay

   Now, occasionally the judge might make a joke to the bailiff or the attorneys, and these are considered departures from the dominant state of talk. This is what Goffman would call byplay, or the subordinate state of talk. Remember the dominant state of talk is talk between ratified participants that's on the focused topic of the interaction. So, when two ratified participants engage in subordinate talk, Goffman calls that byplay.

   An example of byplay would be in a classroom. In class the students are ratifying participants. But when they talk to one another about something unrelated to the class, this is what Goffman would call byplay. It's a certain kind of subordinate state of talk.

3. Crossplay

   Crossplay is when one ratified participant talks to someone outside the interaction, an unratified participant. This might be something like you're in a meeting at work. A lot of these meeting rooms at work now have glass walls, which means everybody can see you in the meeting room. I assume maybe this is so we can't go into the meeting room and sleep or something, but there's no privacy.

   Let's say you're in this meeting room and you catch someone's eye. A colleague of yours is walking by the open door of the meeting room and they say something to you, and you say something to them. That's crossplay. They're not a ratified participant in the meeting. They're just walking by and you say something to them. Crossplay – the talk between a ratified and an unratified participant.

4. Sideplay

   Finally, Goffman talks about sideplay, when two unratified participants begin to have an interaction about something other than the main purpose of a focused interaction.

   An example of this is that you're in a meeting at work and two participants in the meeting just start to have their own conversation about some topic other than the topic of the meeting. Maybe they stand up and move into a corner and start to have some conversations about an unrelated topic. This is sideplay. All of these are subordinate states of talk.

 

Summary

I think Goffman's idea of Participation Framework enriches our understanding of how social interaction works or how communication works, the name of this website. It helps us understand that there's more to any social encounter than simply a speaker and a hearer in face-to-face conversation.

That production roles are more complicated. That reception rules are more complicated. That states of participation are more complicated.

Then when we analyze communication situations, we have tools to improve them if the communication situation is performing sub-optimally.

Like in health communication, which is what I study, you can begin to study the participation framework. Maybe you find that there is a way of improving participation as a way of improving the outcomes of the interaction. I think this is one of the main reasons why the idea of participation frameworks is important to understand.