Erving Goffman and Everyday Life Mobility

Contemporary social life is marked by increasing levels of physical movement of people, goods and symbols. Within this context much theoretical activity points at notions of globalisation and the network society (e.g. Castells 1996). Such macro-theoretical interpretations capture only parts of the meaning of contemporary mobility. In this chapter the thesis is that by exploring contemporary mobility practices in an everyday life context applying theories and concepts coined by Erving Goffman a much richer sociological vocabulary emerges. The chapter contains a re-reading of Goffman with the ambition of showing a vocabulary that makes the macro-societal conditions for contemporary mobility comprehensible from the vantage point of the ‘little practices' of everyday life. The exploration of everyday life mobility using Goffman as guide makes us see that waiting in line for the bus, riding the subway, biking to work or the freeway commute are by no means neither just instrumental practices of getting from A to B, nor are they trivial acts of physical displacement. Goffman's insights into the ‘little practices' of social life substantiates that contemporary everyday life mobility is produced by and re-producing culture and social norms. Goffman's concepts provide us with a rich vocabulary describing how the everyday life mobility in the contemporary city is regulated formally and informally. Clearly Goffman's immediate applicability is more relevant in ‘micro mobility' studies than in for example studies of global migration and large-scale population shifts, even though such ‘macro phenomena' also could be studied at the ‘micro level' (this distinction being perhaps less fruitful at the end of the day). The chapter offer a novel way of conceptualising the sociological meaning of an important contemporary phenomenon as it invites to a new field of application of Goffman's work. This is in particular explored in the concepts of the ‘mobile with' and the ‘networked self' where the legacy of Goffman is put to usage analysing the phenomenon of everyday life mobility.