Unknown author · Public domain

Goffman reshaped how sociology understood ordinary social life, arguing in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) that people perform versions of themselves for different audiences the way actors perform roles on a stage — an idea, dramaturgical analysis, that became one of the most cited frameworks in the social sciences. His later books Asylums and Stigma examined how institutions and social labels shape identity, and he served as the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association; a 2007 survey ranked him the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences.