Potencijal zdravorazumske kritike u Gofmanovoj sociologiji okvira

In this paper, I will try to appraise the critique potential of Erving Goffman’s sociology. The starting hypothesis will be that Goffman’s understanding of common sense offered in Frame Analysis opens the possibility of attaining a critical insight into the structural givens of everyday practice. I will also try to show that Goffman’s understanding of common sense was under heavy influence of pragmatism and phenomenology – and that the often-overseen epistemological differences between these two schools of thought had significant consequences on his sociology. Namely, in the Frame Analysis we can easily find a certain tension between insistence on the autonomous theoretical importance of common sense putforward by the pragmatist and reductionist tendencies towards this type of thought found among the phenomenologists. Therefore, I will argue that this ambivalence regarding the role of common sense in interpreting social realty is the main reason why critique potential of Goffman’s sociology remains implicit in its character.