Mittwoch, 5. Dezember 2007

Speech act, social structuration, and cultural dynamics

Yoshi Kashima
Department of Psychology, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Despite social psychology’s ideal of studying social behavior, contemporary social psychology often overlooks the significance of speech act, namely, what we do in saying and its social consequences. In this presentation, I will attempt to provide a theoretical framework in which to consider the relationship of speech act with social structural and cultural dynamical antecedents and consequences. Expanding on Austin, I will discuss a speech act’s representational property (locutionary effect), intended meaning (illocutionary force), and intended and unintended consequences (perlocutionary effect). Although I will touch on what social structural (both social network and group-based social structures) and cultural dynamical antecedents may constrain and enable a certain speech act, the central focus will be placed on a discussion about the interactive grounding process in the generation of a speech act, and potential socio-cultural consequences of speech acts in the production and reproduction of social network and group-based social structures and culture as dynamically evolving distributed collective representations. In particular, I will characterize grounding as socially coordinated processes in which interactants align their collective identities and collective representations, and then argue that social structuration and cultural dynamics – formation, maintenance and transformation of a social structure and collective representations – are inseparable dual consequences of grounding, and that the human capacity to form and sustain a large-scale collective is inexorably linked to our capacity to construct shared representations about the collective itself.

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