How to Do Things With Relationships … and How Relationships Do Things With Us

Abstract

A community is made up of actively connected personal relationships. These relationships significantly shape how people come to understand their world, gain a sense of the validity and verifiability of their ideas, and become accountable for changes in their attitudes and behaviors. Acknowledgment of the relational underpinnings of such communication processes forces us to revise common understandings of relationships as places where individuals have their personal needs fulfilled and instead conceive of relationships as a form of action, which emphasizes the integral connections between the study of rhetoric and relationships. We explore the ways in which everyday communication draws substantially on these relational underpinnings that have been historically underdeveloped in theories of interpersonal influence and propose a new model of influence, the social consequences of interpersonal influence (SCIPI) model that recognizes the powerful role of one’s relational network in individual decision making and realizing attitudinal and behavioral changes. This model suggests a productive way to reconsider studies of interpersonal influence, communication, and community, as well as a number of different threads in the communication discipline as a whole, including the impact of media messages, and health communication campaigns, as well as group decision making.