Goffman was influenced by Herbert Blumer , Émile Durkheim , Sigmund Freud , Everett Hughes , Alfred Radcliffe @-@ Brown , Talcott Parsons , Alfred Schütz , Georg Simmel and W. Lloyd Warner . Hughes was the " most influential of his teachers " , according to Tom Burns . Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning state that Goffman never engaged in serious dialogue with other theorists . His work have , however , influenced and been discussed by numerous contemporary sociologists , including Anthony Giddens , Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu .