Abstract
Part IV focuses on organizational, institutional, societal, and intercultural issues. In this chapter, John Adamopoulos presents a theory of action construal with an emphasis on the emergence of social meaning. He reviews the theoretical framework within which models concerning the meaning of interpersonal behavior were generated. These models are based on the assumption that all social behavior involves the exchange of material and psychological resources, a process that is guided by a number of constraints operating on interpersonal interaction. Adamopoulos’ analysis relies substantially on research findings and insights obtained in the context of social resource theory and thus constitutes in some ways an extension and application of the theory to the area of interpersonal structure in general and, in particular, to topics like individualism-collectivism, human values, and sociality.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that any episode or social exchange can have multiple meanings, which makes interpretation a complicated process. Normally, in order to explain the meaning of any single social episode exhaustively, several different parsings using the proposed rules of action construal may be necessary.
- 2.
I decoded the 25 episodes into the elements of the four components of the theory of social construal very quickly, without any prior knowledge of their location in the multidimensional space derived in Forgas’ (1976) analysis and without second-guessing myself at any point about the correct identification of the elements involved. In all cases in this analysis, I focused only on the first, perhaps most salient, “image” for each episode that came to mind. Thus, incorrect or incomplete decoding of the episodes stemming from this fast-moving process added to the “noise” in the study.
- 3.
All episodes in this case involved giving a resource. Consequently, the number of common elements in any comparison between pairs of code strips varied from 1 to 4.
- 4.
Forgas (1976) did not provide the actual dimensional coordinates of the 25 episodes, but, rather, a detailed graphic representation of the structure. I estimated the episode coordinates from this configuration.
- 5.
The polarities of the two dimensions and the order in which they are discussed here are arbitrary and only reflect the manner in which the primary axes of the configuration described in Forgas (1976) were transferred and coded for the present analysis.
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Adamopoulos, J. (2012). The Emergence of Social Meaning: A Theory of Action Construal. In: Törnblom, K., Kazemi, A. (eds) Handbook of Social Resource Theory. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4175-5_16
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