Strategic Interaction

9 STRATEGIC INTERACTION Gary D. Jaworski Introduction This chapter examines the intellectual contributions and reception of Erving Goffman’s book and ideas on strategic interaction. It discusses, first, the publication details of Strategic Interaction (1969) and its Anglo-American reviewers, whose lukewarm reception foreshadowed the limited legacy to follow. It then explores the intellectual background of the book’s ideas. Goffman credited his University of Chicago forebears, George Herbert Mead, Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess; but these thinkers were not alone in stimulating Goffman’s work. He was writing in the context of the American Cold War, where the word ‘strategic’ was loaded with government and military connotations. Goffman had been an early adopter of the game theory thinking of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern and the revision of those ideas that was being developed by economist and strategist Thomas C. Schelling. Goffman’s late 1950s meeting with Schelling and subsequent introduction into the orbit of Rand Corporation consultants and conferences provided added occasion to develop the ideas further. The chapter then examines the key contributions of the book’s two essays and their value to the ongoing study of communication and interaction. A conclusion underscores both the book’s continuity with Goffman’s earlier works and its current value to sociological inquiry. The book and its reviewers Strategic interaction is the title of a book, the title of a chapter in a book, the name of a concept, and one of Goffman’s many coinages. Like Encounters (Goffman 1961), Strategic Interaction (Goffman 1969; hereinafter SI) is a slender volume of two long essays, both of which were previously unpublished.1 SI was first issued by the University of Pennsylvania Press and went through multiple printings; it was published by agreement internationally with Basil Blackwell and, in a mass-market paperback edition, by Ballantine Books. This mass-market edition, priced at $1.50 and meant for the ‘spinner racks’ in groceries and bookstores, carries a cover with a photo collage of young people sizing each other up, along with a helpful description of the book’s content: ‘An Analysis of Doubt and Calculation in Face-to-Face, Day-to-Day Dealings With One Another’ (Goffman 1972). A German translation by Hermann Vetter was published in the ‘Hanser Anthropologie’ series edited by Wolf Lepenies (Goffman 1981), and an Italian DOI: 10.4324/9781003160861-11 108 Strategic interaction translation by Dina Cabrini and Vittorio Mortara was published (Goffman 1988). Francophone countries have shown little interest in the book (on Goffman’s French translations, see Winkin 1983).2 It is not widely known or accepted that Goffman coined the term ‘strategic interaction’. Some leading scholars today still question the claim. But at least one of Goffman’s contemporaries, Kathleen Archibald, credits him with it in the published transactions of the 1964 Conference on ‘Strategic Interaction and Conflict’, an invitation-only conference organized by the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, then directed by Seymour Martin Lipset. There Archibald writes: ‘In using Erving Goffman’s term “strategic interaction” as a label for the conference, we hoped to designate a particular network of concepts of interest to several disciplines’ (Archibald 1966:v). Two searches using Google Scholar and WorldCat produced results consistent with this statement. An examination through WorldCat of library holdings worldwide, using the key words ‘strategic interaction’, reveals no such holdings anywhere until the aforementioned proceedings of the 1964 conference, which were published two years later. A Google Scholar search yields the same results. It has been speculated that perhaps ‘strategic interaction’ is a coinage of Thomas C. Schelling, the economist and defence intellectual with whom Goffman carried on an intellectual exchange. At present, there seems to be no evidence for this hypothesis. The only time Schelling employs the term in his published works is when he cites his own original contribution presented at the 1964 conference and included in its transactions (Schelling 1966). Goffman himself divided up the credit in this way: Schelling identified the ‘intelligible area in its own right’ and he (Goffman) gave it a ‘label’ (Goffman 1969:00n24). Upon publication, SI was widely reviewed in American and British academic journals.3 The reviews are mostly positive, occasionally glowing, and rarely dismissive. But all make the same point: that the book is not an advance over either the author’s own prior publications or the concepts elaborated by game theorists. Edwin Lemert (1972), writing in American Anthropologist, was the most vocal critic on this point. He pronounced SI as ‘more of the same’ and ends with these words: ‘A Goffman is a Goffman is a Goffman’. But all the other reviews, though less biting, make the same point. On the matter of Goffman’s extensive examination of spies and espionage, opinion was mixed. Writing in the American Sociological Review, Carl J. Couch thought it limiting. Goffman ‘inhibits himself and the reader from recognizing the generality inherent in the behaviour he describes’, Couch (1971:136) asserts. Guy E. Swanson, however, writing in the American Journal of Sociology, would express a different view. He saw Goffman’s analysis as successful at expressing general truths. Goffman’s exploration of spies and their ‘expression games’ of knowing moves, countermoves and counter-countermoves, Swanson (1974:1005) writes, ‘drives home the extent to which the structure of all social interaction and all social arrangements derives from this conspiracy’. For Swanson, Goffman’s implication that ‘we are all and always spies and spied upon’ was insightful, not inhibiting, as it was for Couch. Alan Dawe’s (1973) review essay remains one of the most insightful analyses of Goffman’s early work. Dawe concurs with the other reviewers in the judgement that SI marks no advance in Goffman’s thinking. He writes: ‘As the corpus grows, each new volume prompts the feeling that we have been here before, many times and this time, perhaps, once too often’ (Dawe 1973:246). But he also registers a distinct view that SI represents an important shift in Goffman’s work, a turn to a ‘darker underworld’. Goffman had long been interested in underworld characters of social life – its con artists, deviants, and stigmatized populations – all of whom were, in their own way, thumbing their noses at society. Dawe (1973:251) cites Alvin W. Gouldner’s (1970) remark in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology about Goffman’s interest in these 109 Gary D. Jaworski ‘tricky, harassed little devils’ wriggling ‘acrobatically on [society’s] underside’. But SI expresses a ‘slightly darker underworld’, Dawe argues, as shown in Goffman’s repeated reference to the treacherous world of espionage. This shift conveys a new ‘terrifying vulnerability’ during a time when ‘violence has become open and central’ – that is, during the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The decisive point about Goffman’s work, Dawe (1973:252) concludes, is that it is ‘about the condition of America’, which had turned nastier, more brutish, and short in the years between The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Strategic Interaction (1969). The ideas and their context Goffman himself situates his examination of the concepts of communication and interaction in the University of Chicago tradition of inquiry on those subjects inaugurated by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess in their Introduction to the Science of Sociology, originally published in 1921 (Goffman in Archibald 1966:199). Those important forebears considered sociology ‘a common enterprise’ and invited readers ‘by their observation and investigation’ to make their own contributions to the developing discipline (Park and Burgess 1921:vi). Goffman was doing just that, engaging in what Daniel R. Huebner (2014), in his study of Mead, called a ‘common intellectual project’ – here done with Park and Burgess. But he also thought that subsequent generations of researchers had not brought clarity to the terms and, indeed, had made something of a muddle of them. What he meant was that studies of communication were often studies of what people say, such as answers to survey questions or opinion polls or verbal interpretations being offered through other social and psychological instruments of the time. But for Goffman, who was deeply distrustful of people’s words, face-to-face interaction included much more than that.4 In addition to what people say, their ‘expressions given’, there is other information via expressions ‘given off’ – the whole realm of what is now called nonverbal communication. Goffman’s (1969:ix) lost faith in the ‘analytical significance’ of the term communication, as he put it in the preface to SI, must be read with this point in mind (see the chapter by Leeds-Hurwitz and Winkin 2022 in this volume). Further, as for the concept of interaction, the emerging perspective of symbolic interactionism extolled the situational freedom of people in creating meaning and significance, whereas Goffman felt this perspective missed the reality of constraint in those situations. For Goffman, game theory, and especially Schelling’s version, offered a way to gain conceptual clarity on these matters. Goffman first met with Schelling in 1955 or 1956 when Goffman was working for John Clausen’s Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, DC (Schelling 2015). There he was conducting research at St Elizabeths Hospital that would become the basis for the essays in his celebrated and successful book Asylums. Then and subsequently, Goffman and Schelling formed a relationship of mutual admiration. At their first meeting, Goffman gave him offprints of his publications ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’ (Goffman 1952) and ‘On Face-Work’ (Goffman 1955). Goffman’s ‘On Face-Work’ was subtitled ‘An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’. The paper is typically identified as demonstrating Goffman’s Durkheimian bearings – an analysis of the sacred self and the rituals upholding it. It is indeed that. But the essay is also a study in game theory. Schelling very much admired the paper and said so repeatedly in The Strategy of Conflict (Schelling 1960:115–116n20, 128n8, 149n22). What is it that Schelling saw in the paper? In addition to Goffman’s unique and sometimes surprising observations, ‘On Face-Work’ creatively incorporates three elements from the emerging game theory of the time: the notion of equilibrium, the concept of move and the idea of constraint. 110 Strategic interaction Although centuries old, the idea of equilibrium became the cornerstone of multiple theoretical approaches between the 1940s and 1960s in America (Düppe 2015). It found its way into Lawrence Henderson’s biochemical and sociological writings, Talcott Parsons’ social systems theory, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and von Neumann and Morgenstern’s game theory, to name only a few. In game theory, when a mathematical model reaches equilibrium, that is considered a ‘solution’ to the problem. Famed game theorist John Nash would win a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his mathematical solution to the problem of equilibrium in non-cooperative games. Goffman too portrays the ritual order as a kind of equilibrium and ‘losing face’ as a disruption of this balance, creating ‘ritual disequilibrium’ or disgrace (Goffman 1967:19). It follows that actions must be taken to re-establish equilibrium. These actions Goffman calls the ‘corrective process’, which involves all the face-saving practices he identifies: tactful overlooking, apologies and excuses, joking and deception, and strategic withdraw. ‘The ritual code’, he writes, ‘itself requires a delicate balance’ (Goffman 1967:40). A ‘sequence of acts’ takes place during ritual disequilibrium involving at least two participants and two turns. ‘Sorry’ and ‘No problem’ is the paradigmatic interchange. Goffman proposes to call a ‘move’ as ‘everything conveyed by an actor during a turn at taking action’. He introduces a classification of four classic moves: challenge, offering, compensation to the injured party, and punishment or expatiation for oneself. ‘These are important moves or phases in the ritual interchange’, he concludes (Goffman 1967:21). Goffman’s analyses invariably include some kind of social compulsion or constraint, whether of moral obligations or norms that guide behaviour or the social structural factors that further limit or enable them. The notion of constraint plays a key role in game theory, too. This is obvious through a look at board games like chess, the classic game of Xs and Os, or the children’s game of rock paper scissors. In each of these two-person games, a sequence of moves by one player limit or set up the ongoing options of the other. A player’s ability to win, then, depends on others’ choices. For rock-paper-scissors, a simultaneous zero-sum game, the winning and losing happen at the same time with each hand. Goffman works this idea of constraint into his essay; in fact, ‘face’ itself is the constraint. Goffman describes the process by which people in encounters willingly suspend conflict and display a ‘working acceptance’ of each other’s definitions of themselves offered into play. As such, Goffman writes, the ‘mutual acceptance of lines has an important conservative effect upon encounters’. He continues, ‘once the person initially presents a line, he and the others tend to build their later responses upon it, and in a sense become stuck with it’ (Goffman 1967:11–12). Considered within the theory of games, the actor’s choice of face functions as a ‘move’ and constrains the other’s choices during the course of the encounter. This is game theory thinking at its subtlest. Goffman then takes the analysis a step further, and subtlety disappears. He writes that individuals can use their knowledge of this process for self-interested gain. Now face-work becomes an opportunity not only to preserve the self but also achieve advantage. ‘The purpose of the game’, he writes, ‘is to preserve everyone’s line from an inexcusable contradiction, while scoring as many points as possible against one’s adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself ’ (Goffman 1967:24). This is the position Goffman would advance more fully in SI more than a decade later. Chapter 5 of Schelling’s (1960) The Strategy of Conflict discusses Goffman’s ‘On Face-Work’ in glowing terms. That chapter is titled ‘Enforcement, Communication and Strategic Moves’, an area that also interested Goffman. In fact, at the 1964 conference on ‘Strategic Interaction and Conflict’, Goffman led a session on that topic. Most of the defence intellectuals around the table (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg, John Harsanyi, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas C. Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter) had already established their own approaches to game theory. In contrast, Goffman 111 Gary D. Jaworski was employing Schelling’s questions and ideas as his starting point. Goffman’s approach in that session gave some fellow conferees the impression that he was an acolyte of Schelling. One of them even called Goffman a sorcerer’s ‘apprentice’ (Archibald 1966:213; for a discussion, see Jaworski 2019). In the mid-1960s, Schelling invited Goffman to spend time as a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. Goffman was there from the fall of 1966 through the summer of 1967. Goffman and Schelling did not work together, as some have supposed. In fact, Schelling (2015) reports quite other circumstances: ‘When he was my guest at Harvard, we didn’t become close friends. He was very distant’. Goffman’s time there, however, was highly productive, as he finished writing the two long essays that went into SI, as well as ‘Where the Action Is’ (published in) and some other pieces (Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz 2013:28). To summarize the argument so far, Goffman’s work in game theory carried great intellectual significance for him. It was helping him to engage with and advance the sociological traditions of the University of Chicago; it provided ways to gain greater clarity on the sociological understanding of interaction and communication, and it offered a way to make a distinctly sociological contribution to the then prestigious and influential theory of games. Additional context for Goffman’s contributions may be suggested. Goffman’s interest in spies and espionage was not just a response to the general Cold War ‘condition of America’, as Alan Dawe suggested. It was also borne out of his specific graduate school experiences. As others (Lopata 1995) have shown, after World War II the University of Chicago was packed with students returning from military or government service who were seeking college degrees and social advance. But many faculty had also served during the war, and two of them who worked in US intelligence organizations – Edward A. Shils and Douglas Waples – had special parts to play. Both had served in the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war (Shils in the Psychological Warfare Division and Waples in the Morale Operations Division), and both emerged as cold warriors upon return, serving the interests of the national security state. From 1952 to 1953, Goffman had served as Shils’ research assistant, and Goffman reportedly sat in on the classes of faculty in Chicago’s Committee on Communication, including Bernard Berelson, Herbert Goldhamer and Waples. There was plenty of opportunity, then, for Goffman to learn about the exploits of spies and espionage (for a full report, see Jaworski 2021). One further consideration is needed to round out this section. Goffman has been bedevilled by an interpretation of his work as presenting a cynical and Machiavellian view of human beings: that people have base motives and are manipulative by nature. But it is not cynicism that is driving Goffman’s writings. Cynicism in its modern form is the disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human action and belief. But Goffman’s work is not concerned with an exploration of motives. Underlying Goffman’s work however is scepticism, a position of doubt about knowing others’ motives or intentions. For the cynic, people have nasty motives; for the sceptic there is no way of knowing peoples’ motives for sure. Are people being nice or just faking it? Are they hiding a weapon in their jacket or an attack in their words? Social interaction can be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ not because we do not like each other, but because we cannot trust one another. Goffman’s is a sceptic’s account of social interaction, not a cynic’s view.5 ‘Expression Games: An Analysis of Doubts at Play’ The first essay in SI, ‘Expression Games’, analyses the way social interaction proceeds under these conditions of doubt. Goffman examines the problems people face when others’ words and behaviour are not a reliable index of their intentions. As a way into this situation, he proposes a comparison to the world of spy versus spy. Consider the case of the interrogator and the person 112 Strategic interaction under interrogation – Goffman’s paradigm of the expression game. Both sides know that the person under interrogation will try to cover his protected information with secrecy or feinting (faked courses of action); both also know that the interrogator will attempt, through skill and trickery, to uncover the hidden secrets; and, last, both know that the person under interrogation will try to counter the interrogators’ efforts. And both know that the other knows that they know. This mutual awareness and combative back and forth of move, countermove and counter-countermove provides a model for everyday interaction. Still, Goffman understood that expression games are not unlimited. There are many ‘constraints on play’ (Goffman 1969:28–46), including the physical nature of the object to be hidden and the nature of the human doing the hiding. People have a funny way of revealing emotions (embarrassment, guilt and shame) that may accompany concealment, and secrets may be pried out through various forms of seduction, including befriending and building trust, and also through more coercive kinds of extraction, such as blackmail. Further, morality and social norms – such as against lying – add additional constraint on play. Finally, people must contend with the ‘degeneration of expression’, a decline in the ability to reliably assess a subject’s expressions leading to increased suspicion and multiplication of doubt (Goffman 1969:58–70). All the cues people use to assess a person’s sincerity or truthfulness can be corrupted. And when we find a reliable method that we think is incorruptible – a lie detector test or so-called truth serum – these too can be debased. This situation adds doubt upon doubt for both subject and other. Throughout this essay, Goffman discusses a wide range of issues in the sociology of secrecy: reflection on the meanings of the term ‘secret’; commentary on seduction as an interactional process; analysis of the rationalization and instability of intelligence organizations; investigation into spying as an analogue of postwar lives (‘we are like them in significant ways, so they are like us’). After decades of lying dormant in the essay, all of these ideas are only now being closely investigated (e.g. Jaworski 2021). Others remain to be discovered. The essay is also notable for its revealing footnotes, which refer to a veritable who’s who of individuals who served in British and American wartime agencies during World War II, such as the British Army and Strategic Information Services, and the American Office of Strategic Services and Office of War Information. A short list includes British spy novelist Eric Ambler, British author and spy E. H. Cookridge, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, CIA Director Allen Dulles, OSS Director Stanley P. Lovell, and American historian Barbara W. Tuchman. ‘Strategic interaction’ If ‘Expression Games’ underscores doubt, ‘Strategic Interaction’ examines calculation. These terms are fundamentally linked, however, as both depict interaction in circumstances where players must assess information in order to proceed under circumstances of uncertainty and end up taking a more or less combative stance toward each other. Goffman viewed strategic interaction as the broader category of activity in which expression games take place. Evidence of strategic interaction as a term emerges well before the 1969 book by that title and about the same time as the 1964 conference, although some of the basic ideas are already articulated in ‘Fun in Games’, written between 1959 and 1960 (Goffman 1961:34–35). In his classes at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early to mid-1960s, Goffman was encouraging students to employ game theory in papers and dissertations. Illustrative are a paper by Sally Davis on ‘The Interrogation Game’ (cited in Goffman 1969:33) and Marvin B. Scott’s (1966) dissertation ‘The Social Organization of Horse Racing’, later to be published as The Racing Game (Scott 1968). By this time, Goffman had produced an unpublished manuscript titled 113 Gary D. Jaworski ‘Strategic Interaction and Communication, 1965’, which Scott (1966:3, 1968:3n5) cites and describes as a ‘greatly expanded and revised’ version of some of Schelling’s ideas in The Strategy of Conflict. Scott adds there that he ‘leaned heavily’ on this unpublished manuscript in his study. This was certainly a version of the paper that Goffman had spoken from in his remarks at the 1964 conference and that would later be turned into the essays in SI. It is a perplexing chapter that obscures its linear argument within a series of dazzling conceptual elaborations and intellectual tangents. But it begins clearly enough with a statement on calculation as a basic element of human behaviour. In our daily dealing with people, how are we to know if someone is conning us, if they seem reliable but are inclined to act otherwise? So stated, we are in the territory that Goffman had been exploring since his earliest publications and we can see why Edwin Lemert pronounced it ‘more of the same’. But Goffman does have something new to say. He sought to explore and extend the analytic framework of game theory, which had been taking this matter of calculation seriously and had arrived at valuable insights. In game theory, calculation is not a matter of some inherent human cynicism or deviousness; rather, it involves, in everyday life, a great deal of assessment of other players, such as of their resolve, integrity or gameworthiness – that is, the extent of their determination to do whatever it takes to advance their position. And one’s opponents are doing the same. So, calculation in game theory involves an ongoing and recursive mutual assessment, what Goffman (1969:99) calls the ‘nub of gaming’. This insight helped him to clarify the role of communication in the interaction order. As mentioned earlier, Goffman was suspicious of the words people say, and, as he argued in ‘Expression Games’, even expressions ‘given off’ are being corrupted. Where, then, can one look for a more reliable way to examine interaction? Goffman believed game theory provided the conceptual tools to do just that. Communication plays a limited role in strategic interaction, which proceeds through moves (things we ‘do’ or steps we ‘take’), not words, altering the existential circumstances while shaping the assessment and action of others. Removing a partner’s name from the home voicemail, replacing ornaments given with ones bought for oneself, removing an email from an important address list – through all of these moves a partner will be in a position to assess a change in the domestic situation without a word being spoken. Here, then, is Goffman’s definition of strategic interaction: Two or more parties must find themselves in a well-structured situation of mutual impingement where each party must make a move and where every possible move carries fateful implications for all of the parties. In this situation, each player must influence his own decision by his knowing that the other players are likely to try to dope out his decision in advance, and may even appreciate that he knows this is likely. Courses of action or moves will then be made in light of one’s thoughts about the others’ thoughts about oneself. An exchange of moves made on the basis of this kind of orientation to self and others can be called strategic interaction. (Goffman 1969:100–101; emphasis in the original) Goffman had long been building a bridge between the classical sociology of Cooley, Mead and even Park and contemporary thought. Here, via game theory, he was not only extending the ideas of Schelling; he was developing the idea of the ‘mutuality of immediate social interaction’ (Goffman 1961:16), an area those vital founders had pioneered. A final point may now be made. In the final section of the chapter, Goffman sets out to answer Schelling’s key question: why should anyone give weight to anything that anyone ever says? In the games of life, how do we trust peoples’ verbal avowals: their promises and threats? What makes such avowals credible? The answer is not found, Goffman says, in an examination 114 Strategic interaction of an opponent’s trustworthiness or other qualities of moral character. Even individuals of moral character sometimes do not follow through on their promises, and bluffing is allowed under certain circumstances; further, tact rather than truth is preferred in much of informal interaction. So, being moral does not preclude deception. Moreover, in a social contest, words are sometimes used to unnerve or unsettle others; they are not meant to be believed (e.g. ‘I’ll just die if you do that!’ is a statement that is not usually taken at face value). How is it possible, then, to give weight to anything anyone ever says? The answer lies in the matter of constraint identified earlier. We give weight to words, Goffman contends, because of the whole system of informal and formal social control, which enters into or shapes games. This ‘enforcement system’, to use Schelling’s term for it, which Goffman adopts – from broad shared norms (e.g. thou shalt nots) to institutionalized roles (judges and jailers) to cultural dictates (e.g. fair play and truthfulness) and to ceremonial obligations (such as accessibility rules) of informal face-to-face interaction – all of these enter games and shape the play. It is through this means that Goffman was able to demonstrate how sociology is necessary to game theory, whereas he had shown earlier in the chapter how game theory can aid sociology. The limited legacy In the entry on ‘Game Theory and Strategic Interaction’ in an Encyclopedia of Sociology (Michener 2001), no works of Goffman are cited. This is a travesty, of course, and deserves correction; but it also symbolizes the relative neglect of Goffman’s book. The term ‘strategic interaction’ has taken on a life of its own independent of its creator and is employed in ways that are detached from Goffman’s writings. It would be unthinkable to exclude Goffman from an entry on ‘dramaturgy’, ‘face-work’ or ‘frame’, or many of the countless other terms he coined and/or developed. But SI was a different book. It was pronounced as ‘more of the same’ upon publication, and even sympathetic readers had critical things to say. His friend and thoughtful critic, Tom Burns (1992), for example, was not impressed by the book. He criticized its sometimes ‘tedious’ and ‘old hat’ references to espionage literature, the level of which ‘hovers somewhere between True Detective and Reader’s Digest’ (Burns 1992:59). But he also thought there was gold in Goffman’s discussion of ‘enforcement systems’ in the last sections of the book, pages that ‘outline a realistic, empirically-based, explanation of the orderliness prevailing in social interaction’. These ‘critically important’ pages highlight the multiple ‘kinds of constraint’ in society, he writes (Burns 1992:61, 62). As shown earlier, these constraints go far beyond institutionalized social control of police and courts to include those where, in Goffman’s (1969:126) words, ‘participants must themselves provide the enforcement, or where they must rely on a vague and shifting public for this purpose’. Those pages are ripe for development now, perhaps by exploring the climate of enforcement in contemporary societies along the lines of Michael Lewis’ (2019) examination of the present-day assault on rules and referees. Collins (1981:246) suggests other useful lines of development regarding those same pages. Also noteworthy is a damaging critique of SI from a phenomenological perspective by George A. Psathas (1980), who takes Goffman to task for confusing the points of view of the subject, other and third-party sociological observer. The inconsistent use of these perspectives seriously weakens his analysis, Psathas argued. More recently, an extension of Goffman’s approach to strategic interaction is being developed by an international team of scholars led by Tom R. Burns (Burns 2018; Burns et al. 2017). Burns and colleagues are articulating the differences between classical game theory and sociological or interactional game theory, the latter providing a ‘substantial alternative’ to classical game theory and one with empirical utility and potential of being developed into a general theory. But those investigations are revealing in a 115 Gary D. Jaworski different way: they are taking place almost a half century after SI was published. The heyday of game theory in sociology came and went, and the work of Burns et al. probably qualifies as a rediscovery (on game theory in sociology more broadly, see Swedberg 2001). We see the greatest legacy of Goffman’s book in the writings of several students from the 1960s. Marvin B. Scott’s (1968) The Racing Game should be mentioned again in this context. Scott had access to Goffman’s early draft of SI and was privy to the issues he was dealing with in that manuscript. And as mentioned earlier, Scott stated that he ‘leaned heavily’ on Goffman’s manuscript in his study. Robert Jervis should also be on this short list. Jervis has the unique distinction of having both Goffman and Schelling serve on his dissertation committee at University of California, Berkeley. Jervis’ (1989) The Logic of Images in International Relations offers a ‘theory of deception in international relations’ that builds on the groundwork laid by Goffman in SI and other publications, as well as on Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict. This book will remain when others are forgotten. Gary T. Marx is primus inter pares among this group. He has most fully engaged with Goffmanian questions and themes over a lifetime of scholarship. Whether he is writing about law enforcement (Marx 1988), surveillance (Marx 2016), secrets (Marx and Muschert 2009) or many other topics, Goffman’s SI and related body of work are never far from Marx’s analyses. Marx’s oeuvre does Goffman justice in the way Goffman wanted it: by doing one’s own work. Like Goffman’s ‘common intellectual project’ with Park and Burgess, Marx is engaged with his former teacher’s work as an abiding tradition of inquiry. Conclusion Erving Goffman explored game theory from his 1953 dissertation to the publication of SI in 1969 – more than fifteen years of such work. This is shown in the portrayal of the exploitation game in ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’, the classic game analysis of ‘On Face-Work’, the conceptual developments in ‘Fun in Games’, the discussion of teams and secrets in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and the final statement on expression games and strategic interaction in SI. In all of these writings, he was investigating and developing game theory concepts and themes again and again. His critics noticed the repetition and called it ‘more of the same’. But as shown earlier, there were new developments in SI. With that book, Goffman had completed his exploration and moved on to frame analysis and then to the ‘linguistic turn’ of his later years. Goffman was searching for a way to examine social interaction with a greater degree of precision than other models allowed. All models of social interaction have to deal with the problem of communication and thus the problem of deception. Schelling’s game theory provided a way to resolve the issue, as moves permit an analysis of interaction without the ambiguities of words, and when words enter in, ‘enforcement schemes’ add weight to them beyond their face value. The gambit of objectivity having been taken, Goffman next went on to explore the ambiguity itself, by analysing the keying, footings and frames of social reality in his Frame Analysis (Goffman 1974). The fortunes of ideas are seldom linear. More often, they arrive like a spring bloom, full of hope and possibility, and then fade over time. As Goffman is a perennial, we are likely to see these ideas blossom again; now is the time to create the conditions for that growth. Notes 1 Goffman (1969:3n1) notes that a ‘preliminary statement’ of his chapter ‘Expression Games’ can be found in the transactions of the 1964 conference on Strategic Interaction and Conflict in Archibald (1966). 2 Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict, first published in 1960, was translated into French in 1986. Although Goffman’s SI has been acknowledged and extended by Michel Dobry (1986:21–22) and others, it is 116 Strategic interaction Schelling’s work that has had the greatest impact on French social science. For a recent review, see Friedberg (2019). My thanks to Yves Winkin for an introduction to this literature. 3 The American journals include American Anthropologist (Lemert 1972), American Journal of Sociology (Swanson 1974), American Political Science Review (Quester 1975) and American Sociological Review (Couch 1971). The British journal Sociology published a review (Taylor 1972), and the British Journal of Sociology published a lengthy review essay on three of Goffman’s books, including SI (Dawe 1973). 4 As Goffman said: ‘I find I cannot use the interview technique much. I do not believe people very much anyway, but in an interview I hardly believe them at all’ (Goffman 1957:181). 5 This argument is adapted from David Runciman (2020) in ‘Hobbes on the State’. I believe it holds up for Goffman as well as for Hobbes. See also Missner (1983, 2000:27–34). References Archibald, Kathleen (ed.) (1966): Strategic Interaction and Conflict. 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