Relational Communication

An Interactional Perspective To the Study of Process and Form

L. Edna Rogers, Valent¡n Escudero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415761642
  9780805837124
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135653675
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Relational Communication: An Interactional Perspective to the Study of Process and Form brings together in one volume a full treatment of the relational communication perspective on the study of relationships. This perspective takes to heart the formative nature of communication by focusing on the codefined patterns of interaction by which members jointly create their relationship.


This book provides a strong theoretical foundation to the research approach and also offers a step-by-step guide for carrying out the research procedures. It is a complete guide for the beginner or experienced researcher. The contributed chapters are written by researchers from psychology, clinical psychology, marital and family therapy, as well as marital, health, and organizational communication. Several of the studies on marital interaction are based on both American and Spanish research samples, offering a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural application of the perspective.


Part I opens with a discussion of the theoretical foundation and epistemological grounding of the perspective and then moves on to the observational research methods involved in applying the perspective's interactional approach. Part II presents a set of programmatic research exemplars that describe the application of the relational communication approach in different relational contexts, from marital to organizational settings. Part III offers a reflective overview of the research perspective.


This book is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and researchers in communication. It will also be of interest to professionals, students, teachers and researchers in the fields of marital relations and family study, social and clinical psychology, family therapy, social work, and marital and family counseling programs.

Part
I
Relational Communication Perspective

Chapter
1
Theoretical Foundations

L. Edna Rogers
University of Utah

Valentín Escudero
University of La Coruña

Social relationships lie at the heart of our humanness, and in turn, communication lies at the heart of our relationships. In constructing the social worlds we inhabit, there is an intimate tie between communication and relationship, with each interwoven in the other. This interconnection represents an underlying premise of the relational communication perspective. Thus, while it is assumed that our relationships contextualize and influence our lives, it is also assumed that our relationships are constituted and shaped through our communication processes.

Communication is seen as the life-giving, social-sustaining essence of relationships, the interactive process by which relationships come into being, take shape, are built up or torn down in the ongoing ebb and flow of their evolutionary course. Viewed from this perspective, communication is not of a singular nature, but a joint, social adventure, with relationships continually in process, malleable and changeable, tranquil at times, and at times, tenuous. Negotiating relationships, as McCall and Simmons (1966) suggested, is often a “hazardous gamble” (p. 201), with the making and unmaking of relationships in the hands—and hearts—of the makers. Relationships form the “bedrock” of our social existence, yet rest on the “shifting sands” of our communicative behaviors.

The basic, constitutive nature of communication was captured, some years ago, in a statement by Duncan (1967), “We do not relate and then talk, but we relate in talk” (p. 249). More recently, Shotter (1993) expanded the idea that “our ways of talking are formative of social relations” (p. 10) by noting the inherent contingencies of the communicative process when he stated, “to talk in new ways, is to ‘construct’ new forms of social relation, and, to construct new forms of social relation. . . is to construct new ways of being” (p. 9). Not only do our relationships, but the very essence of our being, lie within our ways of talking. Among relational scholars, even though guided by different perspectives, there is a growing consensus on the constitutive quality of communication and the social implications of our talk.

The once, somewhat radical notion expressed by Berger and Kellner (1964) that “in a fundamental sense it can be said that one converses one’s way through life” (p. 4) such that relationships can be viewed as “ongoing conversations” (p. 3), has increasingly gained acceptance in contemporary studies of relationships. From the beginning, this idea has been central in the formation of the relational communication perspective. Rooted within the influence of system and cybernetic principles, relational communication, both conceptually and empirically, has focused on the formative, consequential processes of communication. As the name implies, relational communication represents a communication-based, interactional approach to the study of personal and social relationships.

The relational perspective, also known as the pragmatic (Fisher, 1978) or interactional (Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977) perspective of human communication, is grounded within an epistemology that places primary importance on the study of interaction, or in the words of Bateson (1979), on “the pattern which connects” (p. 8). The relational approach represents a conceptual and analytical shift from the study of individual acts, per se, to the study of system-level qualities of interactions that evolve from ongoing combinations of communicative behaviors into transactional patterns that in turn, combine into larger patterns of relational form.

With this perspective, relationships are viewed as the emergent social structurings that are created and defined by the relational members’ communication patterns with one another. Through the process of message exchange, system members reciprocally define self in relation to other, and simultaneously, define the interactive nature of their relationship. In playing out these everyday social dramas of relationships, offered definitions can be resisted, modified, accepted, or ignored. Thus, each member is seen as a necessary part of the whole, actively influencing one another with their individual lines of action, yet the “socialness” of the drama resides in the mutually constructed patterns of relationship.

Elaborating on this view, relationships are visualized as unfolding, moving “art forms,” analogous to a relational dance, creatively shaped by the temporal patterning of the participants as they flow in and around, toward and against and away from one another via their communicative behaviors. When we think of relationships, we think of a coming together, of interrelating, of acting in awareness of one another. We often speak of being involved, of connecting with others, developing common threads, forming social bonds, of being tied to one another—of being in a relationship, such that a social unity or wholeness is formed that lies beyond the individual members.

In line with these common ways of speaking, the language of relationships from an interactional perspective is a language of connectedness, temporalness, patternedness, and embeddedness. The inherent connective principle of relationships rests on the interdependency of the relational members and their behaviors, such that each simultaneously influences and is influenced by the other. Whether fleeting or long-term, the members’ interrelatedness is instantiated in the temporal, unfolding flow of communication. The jointly produced and reproduced patterns formed in the ongoing interactional processes characterize and define the members’ relationship. Enactments of the present merge into more encompassing, contextualizing patterns of relationship that influence future enactments, as well as, remembered pasts. Thus, relationships are continually contextualized by multiple levels of ecological embeddedness of patterns within patterns, which are further embedded within and influenced by the sociocultural contexts in which they take place. Grounded within this language of relationships, the relational communication perspective gives primary attention to the connective principles of process, pattern, and form.

This introductory statement on relational communication gives an initial flavor of the perspective’s epistemological stance and sets the scene for the extended discussions of the conceptual and methodological focus of the perspective in the chapters to come. In the present chapter, historical influences and conceptual underpinnings prominent in the development of the relational approach are considered, first, within the broad strokes of related social thought, and second, within the finer drawn lines of the founding legacy of relational communication.

Relational Thinking: A Broad View

The theoretical foundations of the relational communication perspective are most clearly linked to the writings of Bateson and those of the early members of the Mental Research Institute (MRI), Jackson, Watzlawick, Weakland, Bavelas, Sluzki, and others, comprising what became commonly known as the Palo Alto Group. However, before turning to these writings, a limited but illustrative selection of earlier work providing a general backdrop to relational thinking, is considered. Thus, this section presents a broad overview within which to situate more contemporary thinking about relationships.

In a recent essay reviewing historical frames of relational thought, Stewart (1998) suggested a philosophical foregrounding of relational thinking is evident in the (5th century B.C.) ontological claims of the sophists in contrast with those of the more established and long privileged, Aristotelean view. This contrast may have provided one of the earliest clashes between viewing “reality” as constructed, relative, and changeable versus objective, ordered, and absolute. These fundamental differences, as Stewart and others point out, are still evident in current communication research and continue to form the basis of contemporary metatheoretical and methodological debates.

However, in tracing a less distant past of socially oriented thought, we move much further up in history (and perhaps, more familiar territory) to Feuerbach’s (1843) philosophical view of the essential socialness of human experience. In his critique of Hegelian idealism which held that the mind or spirit (Geist) was the only true reality, Feuerbach turned Hegel’s ontology of ascending stages of self-consciousness on its head by arguing that the essence of our humanness lies not in the idealistic, higher realm of absolute reason, but in the lived, social relationships of “man-to-man.” Although Feuerbach’s argument was also subject to criticism (most notably by Marx, 1845, who argued that Feuerbach did not take the thrust of his critique far enough), Feuerbach’s philosophical views represented a pivotal move toward a human experience-based, social ontology (Theunissen, 1984). In opposition to the prevailing one-sided orientation, Feuerbach argued the alienating nature and meaninglessness of the socially separated self, and in doing so, emphasized the fundamental emptiness of the concept of self without the complementary other.

The social, relationally bound orientation expressed by Feuerbach, implicating the necessary inclusion of “the other,” has been elaborated and extended in a number of later writings, including Buber’s philosophical development of the construct of “the between.” Rejecting the traditional onefold view, Buber (1958) saw the human world as twofold, of “being-in-relation” with other. He further saw the twofold, human interconnection being located in talk, in word pairs, and argued that language, conceived of as dialogue, is the locus of human reality. In his view, the inherent “one with the other” quality of dialogue, rests not in one, nor in the other, but in “the between” (Buber, 1965, p. 203). Buber’s view is in close concert with the recently discovered translinguistic or dialogic ideas of Bakhtin (1986) and Volosinov (1973), in that words express “the one in relation to the other” much like a “bridge thrown between” oneself and the other (p. 86). Through dialogue, a one-with-other unity of differentiated self and other is simultaneously formed.

Both of these lines of thought place dialogue at the center of our “interhuman” relations with others. Each emphasizes the co-constructed, connective qualities of language. Similar to Buber, Volosinov (1973) clarified the significance of language by stating that it is not found in “the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances” (p. 94), which form “the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener” (p. 85). The turn toward viewing communication as dialogue is increasingly evident in contemporary work (e.g., Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Cronen, 1995; Rawlins, 1992; Shotter, 1993).

The foregoing ideas flow easily into those of Simmel (1950) and his overriding focus on the communicative “forms of sociation” (p. 41). For Simmel, all social phenomena find their moorings in the emergent structuring of everyday social interaction, whether taking the form of social play, aesthetics, conflict, group cohesion, or institutional ritual. And at the most general level, Simmel (1950) likewise asserts, it is only through the interactions with others that society itself is possible. Based on this view, Simmel argued that “the description of the forms of interaction is the science of society in its strictest and most essential sense” (pp. 21–22); thus, interaction was seen as the basis of social order and the legitimate arena for the study of social relations.

Simmel’s wide ranging analysis of social life was marked by a keen sensitivity of the less obvious, yet observable interaction forms which constituted principles of social unity. To capture these principles, Simmel analytically distinguished forms of sociation (interaction) from the content of the interaction. Their complementary nature was clear, but so to was the observation that interaction always presents itself in some form, whereas a particular form can be enacted in any number of ways of specific content. Thus, in order to develop conceptual level descriptions on which to construct theories of social relationships, Simmel argued the necessity of analytically focusing on the forms of sociation.

Not only did Simmel’s distinction between content and form prefigure Bateson’s duality of message level meaning, but importantly, Simmel (writing in the late 1800s, early 1900s) recognized the cybernetic principles of the recursive, multiple-leveled features of interaction. He spoke of the circularity of social life in his descriptions of the simultaneous interdependency of the visible and invisible...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Part I: Relational Communication Perspective
• Part II: Relational Communication Research Contexts
• Part III: Reflections on the Relational Perspective
• Author Index
• Subject Index