Introduction

Abstract

Extract We spend a considerable part of our daily lives both communicating with and relating with one another. Communicating & Relating offers an account of how relating with one another emerges in communicating with one another in everyday interacting. There are other accounts of communicating and other accounts of relating, so one might ask “What makes Communicating & Relating’s account distinct?” The short answer is that Communicating & Relating is an invitation both to consider four key departures from customary understandings regarding communicating and relating, and to explore the implications of these departures in research on everyday interacting. The four departures are alternative conceptualizations of commonly held positions on what comprises human communicating, on what defines human social systems, on how what is social is linked to what is individual in human life, and on what comprises human relating. First, Communicating & Relating develops a new model of human communicating. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model frames communicating as the processes in which two or more individuals engaged in everyday talk and conduct become interdependent with one another in a single social system. Communicating & Relating employs this model in addressing the question “How do participants constitute turns, actions, and meanings in everyday interacting?” The account of how participants do so is framed from their perspective as participants, and is grounded in the details of their everyday talk and conduct. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model represents a substantial departure from commonly held understandings of communication as a process involving two or more independent individuals: a speaker who encodes a message for a recipient to decode.