Culture, Ideology, and Interpersonal Communication Research

Abstract

Traditional interpersonal communication research and theory are limited, first, by a culture-specific system of understandings of the nature of persons, relationships, and communication itself that creates scope conditions for theory that generally go unrecognized, and, second, by focusing on practices and processes of communication without detailed consideration of the culturally shared understandings that make them sensible. In overcoming these limitations, ethnography of speaking is used to describe a notion of interpersonal ideology as a system of beliefs within which people live out their interactional lives. Interpersonal ideology, from this view, is a set of premises about personhood, relationships, and communication that structure negotiation of meaning through language use within a speech community. This conceptualization of ideology is distinguished from a critical approach and illustrated by way of description of three broad categories of interpersonal communication/relationships in which such premises are revealed: choices between linguistic alternatives, speech act performance, and communicative style.