11-13). These frames also explain how people see situations differently. For instance, two individuals might frame the same activity as volunteering or work. Without frames, society would consist of numerous unrelated interactions. No one would know how to relate to each other. However, Goffman emphasizes that framing can be inhibited by the social organization, which takes the primary role with framing of experiences in everyday social situations. Experiences are organized by each person into frameworks, keys and keyings, and designs and fabrications. The meaning behind an event can be changed by the key from what it actually seems to be into something else. For example, a person might say something may be perceived as an objective statement or keyed as a pun or joke.
Recently, Deborah Tannen is observing how framing works in different settings, where people are not sure of the meaning behind the words. She gives the following example:
woman asked another woman in her office if she would like to have lunch. The colleague said no, she was sorry, she had a report to finish. The woman repeated the invitation the next week. Again her colleague declined, saying she had not been feeling well.
The first woman was confused. So she asked her colleague what her refusals meant: Was she really just busy one week and ailing the next, or was she trying to say she simply didn't want to have lunch, so stop asking? The response only confused her more: "Well, um, sure, y' know, I really haven't been feeling well and last week really was difficult with that report which, by the way, was about a very interesting case. It was...."
The woman was frustrated. She couldn't understand why her colleague didn't just say what she meant. But the other woman was frustrated too. She couldn't understand why she was being pushed to say no directly, when she had made perfectly clear that she was not...
The other was expecting her indirectness to be understood; to her, directness is rude, and being direct would mean being a sort of person that she finds unappealing. Both felt that their own ways of talking were obviously right. Neither realized that both systems can be right or wrong; each works well with other people who operate on the same system, and both fail with people who do not. They instinctively tried to dispel the tension by doing more of the same. Neither thought of adopting the other's system. (1987)
Americans often say one thing and mean the other, notes Tannen, and expect the other person to understand the truth behind the indirect comment. For Tannen, frames are "structures of expectation," where on the basis of experiences a person organizes knowledge about the world to predict interpretations and relationships about new information, events, and experiences" (1994, p.16).
A number of organizations are reading Tannen's books to help them understand what others are actually saying and to think clearly about how they are interacting and communicating with people.
References
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor
____ (1961). Asylums. NY: Doubleday
____ (1963) Behavior in Public Places. NY: Free Press
____(1967) Interaction Ritual, Chicago: Aldine.
____(1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tannen, D. (March 1, 1987). When you shouldn't tell it like it is. Washington Post website retrieved December 12, 2006. http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/tellit.htm
____(1994). You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation. NY: Random House.
