Conceptualizing Context in Message ... - Wiley Online Library

Communication Theory

James Price Dillard Denise Haunani Solomon

Conceptualizing Context in Message-Production Research

Ten: Two

Pages 16 7-1 75

Most ctrrrent theories of message production treat context as an indeterminant, catch-all category for everything that is left unspecified by the theory. We propose that context can be conceptualized in terms of perceived empirical regularities in social reality (i.e., social densities) and the configurations of interpersonal goals that follow from them (i.e., goal structures). An illustration from recent research is provided.

The apparently simple act of producing even a single utterance is the result of an enormous number of interdependent activities operating at multiple levels of abstraction and unfolding at varying rates. Given the immense complexity of these machinations, we should take heart at the progress that message-production research has made toward disentangling this process. Among other accomplishments, previous research has provided insight into the cognitive mechanisms at work in message production (Greene, 1997; Hample & Dallinger, 1990; Meyer, 1997; Wilson, 1990); the ends to which people direct themselves (Cody, Canary, & Smith, 1994; Daly & Kreiser, 1994); the role of social constraints (Brown & Levinson, 1987); and recovery efforts in the face of failure (Berger, 1997; Ifert & Roloff, 1996). Extant theories also reveal the utility of parsing message production into four basic processes: (a)situation comprehension, (b) goal formation, (c) planning, and (d) the execution of behavior. Although these four processes capture essential elements of message production in general, message-production activities necessarily unfold within the parameters of some specific context. Unfortunately, whereas substantial attention has been given to message-production processes themselves, the conceptualization of the context is less elaborated. In this paper, we discuss a new approach for understanding context in message-production research. First, we briefly review exemplars of how context has been treated in previous message-production theories. Then, we lay a foundation for conceptualizing context in the subjective experiCopyright 0 2000 International Communication Association

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ence of message producers. In the two final sections of the paper, we suggest that message-production contexts can be meaningfully understood in terms of (a) underlying phenomenological dimensions that define social densities, and (b) the structure of goals guiding message production.

Treatments of Context in Two Research Exemplars Although we have suggested that contextual influences on message production have been relatively neglected in message production research, that is not to say that theoretical perspectives dismiss context altogether. In fact, quite the opposite occurs: Theories of message production often ascribe a pervasive role to context. However, as a brief review of two theoretical traditions reveals, the role of context is both penultimate and unspecified. In particular, the following paragraphs examine the treatment of context in exemplars from sociolinguistic and cognitive models of message production. In Brown and Levinson’s ( 1987) provocative treatise on politeness, the authors argue that message production is a summative function of social distance (D), power (P), and the size of the imposition (R). Although these variables are cast as the proximal determinants of message production, the theory is also attentive to the way in which values of D, P, and R are themselves determined. Concerning the threesome generally, Brown and Levinson note that “such factors are certainly culturespecific” (p. 76). With regard to imposition in particular, they say that “ R is a culturally and situationally defined ranking of impositions . . . .” (p. 77). In other words, context is a pervasive force that sets the values for the proximal predictors of message politeness. Beyond this, we know little about context except that it is everything except D, P, and R. Cognitive theories of message production locate context differently, but are equally encompassing in terms of its nature. For example, action assembly theory asserts that the message-production process consists of two phases: the activation of procedural records stored in memory and the assembly of activated procedures into behavior (Greene, 1984,1997). The activation of procedural records is a product of myriad influences, including the actor’s goal, the accessibility of procedural records as a function of recency and frequency of prior activation, and features of the context. Because features of context are assumed to play an essential role in determining which procedural records are activated, action assembly theory implies that message-production behavior is inherently contextualized (cf., Meyer, 1997; Wilson, 1990). As was the case for politeness theory, the relevant dimensions of context are left unspecified (but see Greene, 1989).

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Conceptualizing Context

The Subjective Construction of Context Given the pervasive role ascribed to context exemplified in the previous section, message-production research would benefit from a coherent framework explicating dimensions of contextual variability. Certainly, academic institutions and scholarly organizations implicitly organize contexts by structuring curricula and interest groups around distinct message-production applications (e.g., small-group communication, interpersonal communication, public speaking, health communication, organizational communication, political communication). Although these traditional divisions have utility for organizing institutions, behavior depends on the meaning of contexts from the perspective of individual social actors. Thus, conceptualizing context in message-production research must attend to the subjective reality of message producers. There are two reasons why we find this a viable avenue to pursue. First, we presuppose that people often know what they are doing. Although there is no question that aspects of the message-production process are impervious to introspection, it is equally true that individuals construct representations of social reality, make decisions more or less consciously about what they seek to accomplish, and develop some sense of whether or not they are succeeding. From these facts flows a second point: Individuals are valuable sources of information about their own communication behavior and that of others. Of course, this is not to say that everything individuals tell us will be insightful, or that they can be informative regarding all aspects of the communication process. However, just as individuals have some insight into the reasons for their behavior, surely they can provide some report of'those reasons. As with any form of empirical data, these reports are susceptible to certain threats to validity (Dillard, 1997). Overwhelming evidence, though, indicates that the question is not whether individuals' intentions correspond to their behaviors, but when (i.e., under what conditions; Kim & Hunter, 1993a, 1993b).' Given these assumptions, we propose that the conceptualization of context in message-production research centralize the subjective experience of social reality. In other words, we should identify message-production contexts such that they are grounded in the social regularities perceived and acted upon by social actors. The following section explicates one such framework for conceptualizing message contexts.

Mapping Context as Goal Structures Within Social Densities Perceptual systems operate to identify the covariance of events in dayto-day life. Empirical regularities in social experience produce percep-

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tions of social densities, that is, the phenomenological world is organized into clusters of events with regularly co-occurring qualities. To illustrate this point, consider the physical universe as a metaphor for the social universe. It is well established that physical matter is not distributed evenly throughout the physical universe. There are regions of space, including stars, planets, moons, and so on, in which matter is relatively concentrated. In contrast, there is a great void in the spaces between heavenly bodies and even greater emptiness between galaxies. In the same way, social experience has dense regions of relatively frequent occurrences within a conceptual space that encompasses regions of less frequent activity. Consider an investigation of individuals’ perceptions of influence episodes. Among other things, Cody and McLaughlin (1980) report the existence of a perceptual dimension that they label self- versus otherbenefit. The dimension appears to capture a social density, that is, an empirical regularity in social space. It is “dense” in the following sense. Imagine a 2 x 2 matrix defined in terms of self-benefit (high versus low) and other-benefit (high versus low). Cody and McLaughlin’s data indicate that some cells will have many more entries than will others. Common influence episodes are those in which self-benefit is high while other-benefit is low (as is the counterpart high other-benefit/low self-benefit). In contrast, high/high episodes and low/low episodes occur far less frequently. To the extent that self- and otherbenefit are natural antipodes, we can say that a region of density exists in social space.2 Despite the simplicity of the self- versus other-benefit example, it is apparent that this is not the only dimension that characterizes influence episodes. In fact, social densities should be thought of as complex configurations of obstacles and opportunities. Because individuals are cognizant of the ways in which social densities curtail certain options for them while making other possibilities more likely, it can be said that interpersonal goals arise within social densities (Dillard, Kinney, & Cruz, 1996). More concretely, people tend to form goals in accordance with that they believe is possible rather than impossible (Heckhausen & Kuhl, 1985), and they attempt to overcome the obstacles that might prevent goal attainment (Roloff & Janiszewski, 1989). In this sense, we can conceptualize the contexts for message production in terms of individuals’ perception of social reality and the goals that they subsequently generate for acting upon it. Generally speaking, goals can be thought of as states of affairs that we are committed to bringing about (Klinger, 1985). Goals may vary in status (Dillard, 1990), however. From the perspective of a given social actor, the primary goal is that which the actor is trying to accomplish. It

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imbues the interaction with meaning and enables the individual to parse the stream of behavior into coherent conceptual units. Secondary goals are other concerns that arise from considering how to achieve the primary goal. When someone wishes to arrange a date with another (the primary goal), he or she may recognize the possibility of rejection and subsequently form the secondary goal of minimizing the risk to selfesteem. In this way, primary goals bring about secondary goals. Consistent with the variable densities of social experience, primary and secondary goals are not evenly distributed throughout social space. Instead, certain primary goals tend to be reliably associated with certain secondary goals. For example, as Wilson, Aleman, and Leatham (1998) show, the decision to give advice to another (i.e., a primary goal) typically prompts a concern for the relationship with the other (i.e., a secondary goal). The term (intrapersonal) goal structure can be used to describe the set of primary-secondary goal relationships. Goal structures vary with regard to content in that they are characterized by differing primary goals and also by variation in the importance of corresponding secondary goals. Goal structures also vary in complexity in that they are composed of a greater or lesser number of active goals. The most rudimentary goal structure is one in which only the primary goal is active. As the individual attempts to coordinate other aims, the goal structure becomes increasingly complex as a direct function of the number of goals in play. Recent research suggests the applicability of the goal-structure concept to the questions of interest here (Schrader & Dillard, 1998). Participants in the study were provided with 1 of 15 hypothetical scenarios, each of which represented a subjectively distinct primary goal. They were asked to recall one of their own interactions that was similar to the exemplar, then to respond to a series of questions to assess the importance of the primary goal and five secondary goals: identity, interaction, relational resources, personal resources, and arousal management (Dillard, Segrin, & Harden, 1989).The resulting data were submitted to a cluster analysis for the purpose of examining commonalities in goal structure across the primary goals. Four clusters emerged that manifested several notable features. For one, the importance of the primary goal increased from Cluster 1 to Cluster 4. Generally, the secondary goals showed a pattern of increasing activation that corresponded to increases in the importance of the primary goal. In other words, the clusters varied in goal structure complexity. The relational resource goal was the sole exception to this pattern. It declined in importance as the primary goal ascended in importance (a pattern that mirrors the self- versus other-benefit density). Perhaps the most striking result was the superficial differences among the primary

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goals within clusters. Because a finer grained analysis is needed to make that point clearly, we turn next to a closer look at the goal clusters. The first cluster contained primary goals representing influence attempts that are common but not particularly important and that focus on issues concerning the close and collaborative nature of the sourcetarget relationship (i.e., “routine activities” and “give advice-parents”). Secondary goals were of relatively little concern in these episodes with the exception of the relational resource goal (cf., Wilson et al., 1998). We labeled these “maintenance episodes” to emphasize the habitual and relational aspects of goals in the cluster. Primary goals in the second cluster also revolved around close relationships. In this case the goals were not routine, but represented more important issues of a nonrecurring nature. Two primary goals, (a) attempting to change another’s attitude or behavior vis-a-vis a sociopolitical issue, and (b) escalating an existing relationship, are representative of the breadth of issues represented by this cluster, which was labeled “special issue episodes.” The goal structure of this cluster was more complex than that of maintenance episodes, but less complex than the remaining two clusters. “Problem-solving episodes” was the title given to the third cluster because it consisted of goals that represented either high need (e.g., “elicit support”) or high rights (e.g., “enforcing obligations”) to persuade. Such episodes tend to occur within more distant social relationships (e.g., strangers, neighbors, professors), a feature that was mirrored in the decreased importance of relational resource goals. However, overall goal structure complexity and the importance of the influence attempt were higher than either maintenance episodes or special issues episodes. The fourth cluster was given the name, “high stakes episodes,” to reflect the fact that goals in this grouping showed a dramatic increase in the importance of personal resource and arousal management goals. The primary goals included relational initiation and persuading a bureaucrat. Members of this cluster were not only rated highest in importance, but also showed the greatest number of active secondary goals, that is, the highest goal-structure complexity. This grouping provides one of the most conspicuous instances in which two primary goals, superficially quite different from one another, generate very similar goal structures. Although the Schrader and Dillard (1998) study speaks only to social influence episodes, it illustrates how contexts can be defined in terms of the goal structures that follow from actors’ conceptions of opportunities and constraints in a social episode. In general, this framework privileges the individual’s experience and recognizes the role of perceived social densities in shaping that experience. For studies of social influence, the four clusters described above are profitably viewed as a naturally occur-

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ring 1 x 4 experimental design in which episodes within clusters are seen as internal replication^.^ In a variety of downstream processes (e.g., planning and enactment) we might reasonably anticipate differences across clusters and similarities within (see Schrader, in press). In this sense, goal structures generally provide succinct summaries of the complex, multivariate configurations that define distinct message-production contexts. These summaries may not fully resolve the ambiguities inherent in current conceptions of context, but they certainly move our thinking in the direction of greater clarity.

Conclusion This essay opened by noting the pervasive role granted to context in extant theories of message production. Beyond underscoring that point, we have attempted to show that context can be treated as a something that is knowable and well defined, rather than as a nebulous container for all of the effects left unspecified by a theory. Conceptions of context should be grounded in the subjective reality of social actors. That reality is structured by perceived social densities, which themselves reflect social regularities and in turn define the opportunities and constraints for strategic action. Thus, the contexts for message production can be meaningfully defined in terms of the goal structures that arise within social densities. Enhancing our understanding of goal structures across a variety of communicative functions is likely to be a laborious and data-intensive undertaking. Yet, the potential benefits to theory development and communication pedagogy more than offset the required expenditure of research energy. James Price Dillard is a professor and Denise Haunani Solomon is an associate professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Correspondence may be addressed to either author at Vilas Hall, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin, 821 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected].

'

Questions concerning the relationship between behavior and self-reports of cognition have been the target of an enormous quantity of research (Gollwitzer, 1990; Nisbett &Wilson, 1977).Whereas the measurement of goals (as opposed to other measures of cognition) circumvents most of the problems identified by past research, this form of self-report is sensitive to a variety of processes. For example, we speculate that when goals are measured (i.e., before or after the behavior) is likely to influence the perceived importance of the goal (Schrader & Dillard, 1998; cf., Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). From our perspective these issues are not so much limitations as interesting problems to be solved. Social densities are empirical regularities, not conceptual necessities. For example, as conflict/ negotiation researchers have demonstrated so compellingly, there is great advantage to conceiving of benefit as two unipolar dimensions rather than a single bipolar dimension (Rahim, 1983). More

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Author

Notes


frequent mutually satisfying outcomes result when negotiators are thinking about how to generate solutions that are high in self- and other-benefit; however, conscious effort is required to move social actors’ conception of the episode away from the empirical regularity and toward the more productive, but less common alternative. 1

There is one ambiguity in our exposition that requires clarification. We use the phrase “social density” to reference any empirical regularity in the perception of social reality. Thus, a density might refer to the perceived frequency of occurrence of an event or feature as well as the perceived co-occurrence of events or features. Paralleling our discussion of goal structures, we think that it is usefid to conceive of situations as varying in complexity. When the situation is defined in terms of a small number ofdensities, it is simple. As the number of perceived densities increases, so does complexity. We prefer to circumscribe the meaning of density in this fashion rather than allowing density to become conflated with complexity.

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