communicative interaction

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Definition

Communicative interaction describes the interactive process that exists amongst members of an organization. In this process, knowledge emerges from the social act of gesture-response. Identity is reinforced, shaped, and sometimes transformed -- as the interaction both results in continuity and has the potential for transformation. Micro-diversity in the interaction that both results in novelty and gives the organization its self-organizing nature (see self-organization).


Aspects of communicative interaction --

  • Gesture-response --gestures fit in with one another in a responsive relational manner that constitutes symbol
  • Accountability, the foundation for communication -- the very possibility of communications rests upon mutual expectations of accountability, without which is would be impossible to negotiate ongoing cooperation
  • Communication process --
    • Turn-taking -- the associative use of symbols is accomplished in turn-taking and turn-making interactions -- linking symbolic gestures to indicate the further evolution of their actions in the accounting for those actions to each other
    • Linking turns -- turns are made and taken through the use of general linking devices -- such as question and answer
    • Membership categories --One of the principal processes of categorization is that which establishes membership categories, identifying who is to take a turn, as well as how and when they are to do so

  • Evolving communication patterns -- In their turn-taking, humans act in rhetorical ways to persuade each other and thus negotiate an evolving pattern of action.
  • Communicative interaction is a self-referential process in which individual minds are formed by power relationships while they are, at the same time, forming those power relationships in both private relations with themselves and public forms of power relations with other. (Stacey, 2001, 150)
  • Power in communicative interaction -- power and the associative nature of turn taking -- (Stacey, 2001, 150-152)
    • Communicative interaction is the patterning of enabling and conflicting constraints, a central feature of any complex process. (Stacey, 2001, 150)
    • Power enables one to do what one could not otherwise do and constrains one from what one might autonomously like to do.
    • Communicative interaction is a process in which people account for their actions and negotiate their next actions.
    • Communicative interaction is a political process, the exercise of power.
  • Ideology -- membership and preserving power differentials (Stacey, 2001, 152-3)
    • Ideology is a form of communication that preserves the current order by making that order seem natural.
    • Ideology is a patterning process, narrative themes of inclusion and exclusion organizing themselves in perpetual reproduction and potential transformation -- forming ideological themes.
    • Ideology exists only in the speaking and acting of it, mutually reproduced in ongoing communicative action rather than anything shared or stored.
    • Ideological themes serve to preserve power differentials in essentially unconscious, self-organizing ways.
    • Membership -- A key aspect of ideology is the binary oppositions that characterize it and the most basic of these is the distinction between ""them"" and ""us"".
    • Organizing themes of an ideological nature establish, and reinforce, membership categories and differences between those categories.


Process of communicative interaction --

  • communicative interaction is a process of
    • perpetual construction
    • in the living present
    • between human bodies and the context they find themselves in
  • the detailed, self-organizing process of bodily communicative interaction
    • forms and is formed by itself as the same time, in a circular, reflexive, self-referential causality
    • and is the cause of the movement toward a known-unknown future
  • is self-organizing
    • self-organizing the patterns of communicative interaction between people as
      • narrative themes
      • propositional themes
    • which results in variation (novelty) when those interacting are diverse
  • produce themes, patterns of communicative interaction, having characteristics of habit and spontaneity
  • the interaction itself amplifies small differences in communication into discontinuous, novel change, so operating as formative cause
    • fantasy and imagination may elaborate and amplify small fluctuations in individual experience into unique, different forms of role play/silent conversation
    • unique differences between individual persons may be further amplified in their public interaction with each other
  • from the interactions emerges
    • meaning, or knowledge, emerges in this local communicative process in the living present
    • freedom of choice and intention within the conflicting constraints of power relations
  • knowing is the process of communicative interaction


Communicative interaction in the living present --

  • it is local in nature
    • communicative interaction consists of acts of one body directed to others in a particular situation at a particular time
    • themes in the living present
      • the themes patterning interaction are themes local to those who are interacting and attention is therefore directed to themes emerging in local interaction between people rather than thinking in terms of themes across global situations
      • global themes one might want to articulate for an organization or a society have reality only insofar as they are expressed in local situation in the living present
      • themes do not ""exist"" outside of bodily interaction and bodily interaction, by definition, has to be local

  • in their local interaction in the living present people may use highly sophisticated communicative tools, some taking the form of global systems, which have a power impact on the local interaction

  • the present has the temporal structure of communicative interaction (see communicative interaction)
    • a process in which people negotiate and account for their immediate actions to each other in ordinary conversation with its turn-taking/turn-making, gesture-response structure
    • this temporal structure takes the form of gesture-response between living bodies in the medium of symbols in which meaning arises in the social act, not just in the gesture on its own
    • ...involving turn-taking/turn-making process
    • the communicative interaction process patterns itself as narrative and propositional themes, forming while being formed by bodily interactive communication at the same time, leaving behind the traces of history

  • the present has the temporal structure of communicative action patterns --
    • a simultaneous process of sustaining and shifting ordinary everyday power relations
    • official ideological themes, sustain power relations, thereby giving rise to the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, which are associated with the evolution of unofficial ideologies that challenge the official ideology with shifting power relations, which form new official ideologies...