ABSTRACT
We recognize that the approach taken to explore the consequential character of communication in our chapter, as informed by social communication theory, represents the most conservative research agenda of the four presented in this book. It is conservative precisely because of its unwillingness to relinquish certain notions of a priori resources that communicators “bring” to communication episodes. Although sociocultural rules are inexact predictors of what actually transpires in real-time moments of behaving, and such real-time moments may produce both novel outcomes and revisions of rules, we are nevertheless unwilling to abandon the idea that rules transcend any particular communication event. Given this recognition, we offer here a brief analysis of how our position on rules is similar to and different from that of the other contributors. 1
