4 - Social norm approaches

Summary

We now shift away from a focus on individuals, their biological drives, and the affect–arousal link, to larger group processes, such as social and cultural norms and social exchange principles, as the guiding forces in dyadic interaction. We begin at the macroscopic level with Gouldner's (1960) norm of reciprocity, conceptualized as a societal mechanism that preserves order. This is followed by consideration of exchange theories as applied to reciprocal exchanges within relationships, and to models and research applied specifically to dyadic reciprocity within interactions. We conclude with Communication Accommodation Theory, which relies on social and cultural norms in its explanatory calculus, and incorporates a dyadic focus on communication and interaction processes.

As preface, we note that the concept of reciprocity has been in the scholarly literature for quite some time. Although some scholars trace it back to Jourard (1959) and Gouldner (1960), others credit George Herbert Mead (1934, 1964) with first directing attention to mutual adaptation processes. Mead's interest in adaptive responses, and specifically the ability to take another's perspective (which allows one to anticipate and adjust to another's behavior), can be seen to reflect an assumption about the mutuality of human interaction that resonates through much contemporary writing about shared understandings and otherdirectedness in human discourse (Foppa, in press; Linell, in press; Rommetveit, 1974). The concept of mutual other–directedness as foundational to communication implies a reciprocal orienting and attention that may be a prerequisite to all forms of social exchange.