Conjointly Co-constituting Relating

Following Baxter and Montgomery’s (1996) Relational Dialectics Theory, relationships and relating are productively characterized as two or more participants engaged in both connecting with and separating from one another in everyday interacting, where connecting and separating form a yin/yang dialectic. Relating is endogenous to human communicating because conjointly co-constituting turns, actions, and meanings always involves two or more persons, who are perforce situated in relationship to one another in some way. Communicating & Relating offers a distinct account of human relating as the participant’s conjoint co-constituting of operative interpretings of connection with and separation from one another in everyday sequential interaction, as is apparent in comparing Communicating & Relating’s account with alternative accounts of relationships.

Two Projects

Communicating and relating are the two principal concerns of the book, and examining three episodes of everyday interacting makes apparent that one cannot examine the processes of relating apart from examining the processes of communicating. Developing the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating and grounding it in empirical research is the first project, and occupies Part 1: Communicating. Developing Face Constituting Theory; grounding it in the evidence of everyday talk and conduct is the second project and the focus of Part 2: Relating. Communicating & Relating offers an account of how participants themselves go about communicating with one another, and how in doing so they go about relating with one another.

Conjoint Co-constituting, Constituting Face, and Future Research

Communicating & Relating’s account departs from other accounts: it offers a new, empirically grounded model of human communicating in everyday talk and conduct, as the emergent processes that generate non-additive social systems, in which what is individual is enmeshed dialectically with what is social. These three departures provide the bases for a fourth departure: a new theory of human relating as persons constituting face as they engage social practices in connecting with and separating from one another in everyday interacting. Chapter 11 examines what is entirely new in Communicating & Relating, with no counterpart, what has been reframed, what has been avoided or eliminated, and what can be done and needs to be done in future research.

Researching Relating and Face in Everyday Interacting

One’s conceptual framework enables and constrains the procedures of observing, generating data, producing evidence, and interpreting results in empirical inquiry. Chapter 10 examines how the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating and Face Constituting Theory enable and constrain one’s methodological choices in inquiry, such choices having important entailments for ethical conduct in research that employs these conceptual frameworks. The chapter develops requirements for current and possible new methods that are both compatible with the underlying assumptive commitments, and capable of producing the evidence needed to warrant interpretations regarding communicating, relating, and face. An overview of types of data in the social sciences leads to a formal description of the data required to warrant interpretations in terms of conjoint co-constituting.

Conjoint Co-constituting’s Implications

Communicating & Relating’s account of social systems defines “non-reductive interactionism” (versus “interactional reductionism”) because it rejects not only the common assumption that what is social is separate from what is individual, but also the assumptions that what is social and what is individual can be reduced to interaction. Non-reductive interactionism has implications for conceptualizing and for grounding accounts of human sociality, and for employing key concepts like communities of practice, accountability, choice, the moral order, artifacts, agency, and scripts. Conjoint co-constituting also has implications in choosing conversation analysis as a key conceptual framework, and in focusing on the participant’s perspective in accounting for human communicating. Chapter 6 offers an ethical basis for comparing conceptual frameworks, and employs it in select comparisons with prior accounts of communication.

Conjointly Co-constituting the Social and the Individual in Communicating

Chapter 5 extends the focus on what is individual in communicating by examining how conjointly co-constituting operative interpretings is essential in generating commonality and difference in an individual’s resources for interacting, as is apparent in examining an episode of everyday interacting. The chapter also extends the focus on what is social in communicating by examining how, in recurrently engaging their system-specific resources for interacting, participants interactively organize large, stable social systems like organizations and cultures. Two new assumptive commitments capture how conjoint co-constituting is linked reflexively with what is social, and with what is individual. Conjoint co-constituting is essential to human sociality, but it is also essential to human individuality, as in the final commitment that the embodied individual systems that are human beings also emerge in conjoint co-constituting.

What Is Individual in Communicating

Prior chapters emphasize what is social in human communicating, yet what is social is linked in a yin/yang dialectic with what is individual. Chapter 4 examines what is individual in Communicating & Relating’s account of conjoint co-constituting. Two new assumptive commitments emphasize what is individual in human communicating, as bases for sketching prior psycholinguistic research on both comprehending and producing utterances, and for clarifying Communicating & Relating’s conceptualizations of meaning, action, and context. That background enables framing the Sequential Interpreting Processes and the Recipient Design Processes, from the perspective of the participants, as the individual, psychological processes integral with conjoint co-constituting. Both sets of processes are apparent in examining an episode of everyday talk and conduct.

Conjointly Co-constituting Relating and Face in Everyday Interacting

For a researcher to ground his or her interpretation of a participant’s utterance in terms of face requires that he or she provide empirical evidence both of that participant’s orientation to such an interpreting, and of its consequentiality in interaction. Chapter 9 re-examines the conversations considered in prior chapters to illustrate how a researcher “articulates” the participant’s engaging of various social practices with both connection and separation, as they conjointly co-constitute operative interpretings of face. The evidence provided reveals how and why the skill of “nexting” is central to ethical conduct in everyday interacting. Against that background, examining two further studies provides insights into finding emotions like surprise in relating and face in everyday interacting.

Face Constituting Theory

Connection with and separation from one another is a productive alternative conceptualization of what is known cross-culturally and in the social sciences as “face.” It follows that conceptualizing relating as conjointly co-constituting operative interpretings of both connection and separation is equivalent to conceptualizing relating as conjointly co-constituting face. Constituting connection with and separation from one another is a viable culture-general conceptualization of face, as apparent in considering the culture-specific construals of the dialectic in several cultural groups. Chapter 8 provides a formal statement of Face Constituting Theory, and against that background examines how researchers go about “finding face” in social practices in everyday interacting, compares the theory with six prior accounts of face, and considers participants’ evaluations of their interpretings of relating and face, of threat, and of im/politeness.

The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating

Chapter 3 introduces a fourth commitment regarding temporal sequence, and a number of essential concepts, including Communicating & Relating’s key distinction between provisional and operative interpretings. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model is framed from the perspective of the participants, as an account of how human communicating generates the non-additive properties that characterize social systems. The conjoint co-constituting conceptualization of communication departs from the closely related interactional achievement conceptualization because the latter does not account for non-additivity. Conjointly co-constituting operative interpretings of action and meaning of everyday talk and conduct does not create “intersubjectivity.” The basic triadic or three-position organization of conjoint co-constituting finds empirical support in a range of studies of everyday interacting, and is key to distinguishing between “communicating” and “communication.”