Impression Management and Dramaturgical Applications: My Participation at IAEA Ministerial Conference Vienna, Austria
By Prof. Dr. Halimu Shauri
Email, thecoastnewspaper@gmail.com
When you get lucky to interact and engage with ministers and ambassadors from all over the world , then you need to upscale yourself and manage their perceptions.
This is important for ideas from poorly perceived individuals; even professionals are not taken seriously or do not find their way to the decision making, and implementation table.
For Africa, this is a colonial legacy that we have failed to decolonise. Many a times, ideas are those of elites – elites in church, military, academia, economics, or political elites.
“The irony is that some of these elites found themselves in elitist positions without themselves being real elites in those professional areas.”
This has implications for decision-making and implementation. While efforts have been made to include non elites in the development agenda, this has not been successful in many African countries.
In Kenya, during the Moi administration, we tried the District Focus for Rural Development [DFRD], which was hijacked by politicians and administrative elites in rural areas.
The constitution of Kenya 2010 introduced public participation and made it mandatory. Again, political elites are abusing it and have not been effective either.
The current government introduced the bottom-up economic model, which is facing loads of implementation challenges.
As a good student of the Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman, the father of the Theories of Dramatullurgy and Impression Management, I am well aware of what to do to fit within the contexts that I find myself in the performance of my roles.
Goffman’s idea of impression management is clear as a: “Person’s attempts to present an acceptable image to those around them, verbally or nonverbally. in fact,
“Goffman believes that all humans are trying to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others.”
Accordingly, when I got the invitation from International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] to attend the Ministerial Conference in Vienna, Austria as part of the Kenyan delegation in my capacity as Project Scientific Consultant [PSC] for IAEA project: Atoms4Food, I knew the context will demand managing impressions.
I had to prepare myself well, and if Goffman was alive today, he would have been proud of me, having used his contribution of impression management to sociology very well.
Secondly, it was not just a context for me to use impression management as presented by Goffman, but also a dramatological opportunity.
The conference was a stage where many actors from all over the world were acting in diverse areas of application of Nuclear Science and Technology [NST].
More specifically, some were on stage performing on the application of NST to health provision such as the Rays of Hope project and cancer treatment, some on food and nutritional security like in the Atoms4Food and some in sterilisation of medical equipments and preservation of farm and sea produce, and waste water management using the electronic beam [e-beam technology].
Despite the dominance of hard sciences, you can see that all these sciences were focusing on challenges that affect social and human life. Since we, in the social sciences, focus on human behaviour, relationships and interactions, we were rightfully represented to ensure the technology is impactful to the socioeconomics of the people and, above all, is humanised and acceptable by the targeted users.
It is thus, about time that the world embraces fully the socialisation of nuclear science and technology, especially its application to solve global pressing challenges.
The world should be made aware that NST is not about war and negative safety concerns only, but it has peaceful uses as well, which are beneficial to humanity. I will share the benefits in my sister articles that will follow in two parts.
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— Writer is Dean and Consultant Sociologist Pwani University
