Early Goffman and the Analysis of Face-to-Face Interaction in Strategic Interaction

Goffman (1969, p. ix) has told us that his ‘ultimate interest [is] … to develop the study of face-to-face interaction as a naturally bounded analytically coherent field — a sub-area of sociology.’ Given this ultimate interest and acknowledging that the concepts he has presented have been widely used and cited by others in the discipline, I wish to consider how and in what ways his studies develop the field of face-to-face interaction.1