Description
Book Synopsis"There are always clients to please, rules to subvert, difficult tasks to perform, work to shirk, and upward mobility to seek.... Most people with work experience have encountered at least some version of exaggerated resumes, exploitative bosses...
Trade ReviewDeception occurs in every workplace, to some degree. Employees deceive their bosses, peers, subordinates, customers, competitors, regulators, and various other people during the course of their work lives. Organizational sociologists occasionally address such behavior, usually as a form of 'deviance,' but few social scientists have studied deception as a normal feature of work worthy of study in its own right. David Shulman's book is an important exception. Drawing on Goffman's 'dramaturgical' perspective and two in-depth case studies, he take a close look at both 'official' and 'unofficial' workplace deception and the conditions that create and sustain it. One hopes that Shulman's book will inspire sociologists to study deception beyond the workplace and behind the symbolic interactionist perspective. We might consider, for example, a sociological approach to deception that would apply Donald Black's general theory of social life and focus on the 'social structure of the lie.' This approach would direct our attention to the relative status of the principals, the degree of social distance between the principals, and the status of any third parties and their relationships to the principals and among themselves.
* American Journal of Sociology *
