Composing Relationships With Infotrac ─ Communication In Everyday Life

COMPOSING RELATIONSHIPS is the first textbook to address what relationship scholars have long recognized as central to human relationships: the routine, everyday communication that serves as the "glue" that holds relationships together and interweaves people's lives in personal, social, and workplace relationships. Most communication textbooks emphasize communication that is unusual, dramatic, and extraordinary—betrayals in friendship, conflicts between coworkers, breakups of romantic relationships, organizational crises, and so forth. While these remarkable kinds of communication matter, they are not the basis of most relationships. Indeed, the very fact that they are unusual tells us that they are not what typifies relationships. Rather, it is the routine interaction that we have day-in, day-out that most decisively shapes our identities and the quality and durability of our relationships. In other words, relationships grow primarily out of so-called small talk between friends and romantic partners, rituals in families, and commonplace norms in organizations. The goal of this book is to call attention to the importance of everyday communication—the kind of talk that we seldom notice, but that does such a great deal of work.