All the world's a stage: How Irish immigrants negotiated life in England in the 1950s/1960s using Goffman's theory of impression management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses oral history to consider the relative merits of symbolic interactionism in revealing new insights regarding the Irish immigration experience in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a variety of rubrics attributed to Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, I critically examine the nature of identity work performed by Irish men and women when in their new host country. The paper highlights the interface between citizenship and sociocultural identity epitomised by both the use props (corporeal modifications) and the power of sign vehicles, notably Irish accents in shaping the nature of social interactions. The extent to which Goffman neglects sensory driven constructs of identity is highlighted. The way in Irish immigrants negotiated two simultaneous worlds front and back stage in response to the anticipated reaction of the given audience evokes the metaphor of a revolving door of identity fluid and chameleon like in nature. Actions were at times driven the anticipated reactions of others following presentation but then reclaimed elsewhere manifested by front and back stage behaviours. The Irish men and women worked inside and alongside systems of control where their identities were contested, ambiguous, or problematised to create a fluid sense of self (selves).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".