ABSTRACT
Throughout Erving Goffman’s writing runs not just an expansive view of subjects as performers but a deeply suspicious one. Repeatedly he has raised the ‘question of calculation’, as he calls it in his book Strategic Interaction (1970). For Goffman, the possibility of calculation raises fundamental doubts about the motives, feelings and manoeuvrings of performers:
When a respectable motive is given for action, are we to suspect an ulterior one? When an individual supports a promise or a threat with a convincing display of emotion, are we to believe him? When an individual seems carried away by feeling, is he intentionally acting this way in order to create an effect? When someone responds to us in a particular way, are we to see this as a spontaneous reaction to the situation or a result of his having canvassed all other possible responses before deciding this one was the most advantageous? (Goffman 1970:85)
At heart the question of calculation concerns how, and how covertly, communication is planned. The element of planning has long been acknowledged in refl ections on communication. In the classical rhetorical tradition, planning was conceived of primarily as conscious, intentional activity on the part of individual speakers. Preparation was generally considered a matter of training, the product of a teacher/pupil relationship (e.g. Quintilian 1980). The ‘mode of production’ was not a matter for refl ection, in the way we use that term today. Numerous factors have intervened since then to make production salient to planning. Two of the most important are modern forms of technology, and modern modes of organisation. These are in themselves exceedingly complex phenomena, but with one basic feature in common: they greatly extend the forms and processes of planning
communications. Modern organisations require their employees to speak on behalf not primarily of themselves but of management and of the organisation’s strategic aims. Thus the intentions and plans of individuals become incorporated and subsumed under the strategies of the organisation by means of its hierarchical lines of command. In this process plans become more standardised and codifi ed.
