ABSTRACT
This book can be said to be concerned with explicating situations where one person’s decision as to what to do depends, to a greater or lesser extent, upon what others say they are going to do. This sounds disturbingly congruent to Max Weber’s foundational defi nition of ‘social action’ (Weber 1969) as an action that ‘takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course’ and so the present didactic task may seem overweening in its apparent ambition to colonise the entire discipline of sociology. However the challenge is moderated by restricting focus to situations in which there is both confl ict and common interest between the parties, and more signifi cantly by seeking to capture the essence of those situations in terms of the stated intentions of the participants, rather than for instance in terms of social structures, practices or meanings.
