Front and Back

After reading “Front and back regions of everday life”, by Erving Goffman I thought about the possible front and back regions of my topic, blue and white collar workers. Goffman describes front regions as being faked appearances, behaviors, and personalities. Front regions for my topic would cover how the workers act when a boss is around, or strangers. It would also be interesting to see how the different classes of workers try to act in public when doing normal everyday chores and activities, such as grocery shopping, or doing an action as simple as walking down a public street.

Back regions are more accurate performances of how people really act when there is no audience watching them. Here it would be interesting to see how workers of different classes act when their fellow employees or higher ups are not around. Also how workers of different classes act at the end of their work day, and they return home to their families or loved ones.

After reading “Front and back regions”, I now have more insight to go further in depth with my topic and gave me some new possible research questions and ideas for my topic.

Topic Paragraph

I am interested to seeing the kind of jobs which people from different ethnic groups and genders have, and how they are treated at these jobs compared to other workers. It would be interesting to see if certain people get paid more or less in certain jobs just because of their gender or ethnic background. It would also be interesting to compare the amount of work that blue collar and white collar workers put into their jobs.

Research Topic

Theme: Work

Terms: gender, ethnicity

Topic: blue collar work vs. white collar

Fieldwork - Consumerism

The fieldwork topic I would want to look deeper into would be the subject of consumerism. I would want to look further into how much money people spend when they typically go shopping, and compare how much money the person spends on an outing to how much money the person makes in income. I would have to observe their shopping habits from shopping for gas and clothes to shopping for cars and their home or homes. I would also compare the differences between female shoppers and male shoppers, and compare and contrast their shopping habits. I think it would be interesting to also check to see if females and males are treated differently when they enter a store.

gender

Somewhere out in the middle of Pennsylvannia, a family awakes and begins to work. The men go out to the fields and begin a long physical day of work, plowing fields etc., while the women go and begin some less physical work, such as cleaning clothes, and cooking food. After the long day the family goes to bed and starts all over the next day.

consumerism

The man enters the mall looking for a couple items of clothing. Noticing the size of this mall he realizes that he might be here for awhile. He begins to walk around, observing what stores are available to him. After walking around for a little while checking out stores, he notices a big department store and walks in where he finds everything that he needs.

Work

The worker arrives at his current place of employment, late as usual. He walks over to the time clock and places his fingers on the reader to clock himself in. He hastley graps an apron and walks behind the counter to prepare the meats and salads so customers will be interested in purchasing some. The first customer walks in the store and orders a pound of corned beef. The worker grabs the corned beef with a sigh and begins to slice. After cutting the worker wraps the meat and hands it to the customer. This same situation occurs rarely over the next seven hours till the worker happily clocks out and heads home.

test

this is a test of bLog