One of the concepts Erving Goffman wrote about was “impression management.” He was interested in the control people have over what others learn about them. Sometimes the impression one gives is quite different from the reality, and often that’s deliberate. Let me give an example, describing something from Goffman’s life. He has often been said to have been a “loner.” While it is true that he never co-authored a publication, there is a difference between publishing and more informal collaborations.

When I was asked a few years ago to participate in a celebration honoring the 100th anniversary of Erving Goffman’s birth in Brazil in 2022, I thought about what I knew that neither I nor others had already written about, given the enormous literature discussing Goffman and his ideas. I realized that, as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I had been research assistant at the Center for Urban Ethnography while Goffman was part of that group. As a result, I knew that he was closely connected with a small circle of well-known scholars at Penn, which contradicted what others were saying about him being a loner. While writing up that story, I discovered there were in fact several projects I knew something about which also had not been widely discussed, and added those in. Each project added more names of people who were part of Goffman’s network.

A good term for this is “invisible college.” Briefly, an invisible college describes a scholar’s connections to people who are not known to be part of their network, and so they develop a “college” (in this usage describing a group of researchers who work together) but whose collaborations remain unnoticed, thus invisible. Goffman did not deposit his papers anywhere – he said on multiple occasions that people should study sociology, not sociologists (so, his ideas, not his life). Even so, I wanted to study the context of those ideas. Ideas do not just arise from nothing, after all – they need a context. We talk to others, and that helps us sort out what we think. And this is not true just for people in their everyday lives; academics do the same: we refine our ideas through discussion with others.

Typically, we assume scholars have the most in common with, and thus connect most often with, others in their own discipline. Those in the same department at the same university are expected to share assumptions; they make up the “visible college” as it were. When historians have used the term invisible college, they have typically described scholars based in the same discipline but at different universities (as when graduate students who share training and assumptions then take jobs in different states or countries, leaving others unaware of their connection). What’s interesting about this story is that one of the key elements involves a network within a single university, but across disciplinary boundaries.

An underlying issue is that disciplines are social constructions – that means we invented them, they don’t occur naturally. Dividing the world into disciplines is an idea people had in the past, and which today we take for granted and treat as real. Disciplines are convenient because they help us to divide the world into manageable pieces, but that doesn’t mean the world can be best understood as a set of tidy parts, each distinct from the others. In fact, researchers must frequently cross disciplinary boundaries and collaborate to adequately study the real world, which often has more complexity than we might find convenient.

I ended up looking at Goffman’s connections to people not just at the University of Pennsylvania, where I found about a dozen projects he worked on with colleagues across campus, but also at other places where he had been affiliated (the University of Chicago, the National Institute of Mental Health, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University) or where he had connected with still more colleagues on projects (Indiana University, University of Texas at Austin). In doing the research, I read through nearly two dozen collections of papers donated by many of his colleagues to archives around the country. (In keeping with his idea that it isn’t necessary or appropriate to study sociologists, Goffman never donated his own papers. But many others disagreed and have donated their papers to archives where they are now available.)

What did I learn? The impression that Goffman was a loner was wrong, even though many people have repeated it. In fact, he worked with five others based in different departments at Penn on five successful projects, as well as 61 others at Penn from another dozen departments on another half dozen projects, and then dozens more people including still more disciplines on even more projects across the country. Some of this work was technically “multidisciplinary” (meaning people from different disciplines study the same thing and then bring what they learn home to their own disciplines) and some of it was “interdisciplinary” (meaning that people from different disciplines work together to develop a new topic, approach, theory, or method).

What does this show? Goffman is known for his ideas, but even he did not simply sit down and just write brilliantly. Instead, he talked with others, he asked for feedback on his drafts, and he critiqued drafts others sent to him. It turns out that having a good idea is a necessary beginning point, but ideas make a difference only when they are put forward by someone and then picked up by others who talk and write about them. Ideas are not self-sustaining, and they do not live on their own. Like disciplines, ideas are made up by people and then accepted (or not) by other people.

The book resulting from this research is Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College. It’s available open access, which means it’s free to download, if you want to learn more about Goffman, invisible colleges, interdisciplinarity, or theory groups.