Rules Theories

A rule is a prescription that indicates what behavior is obligated, prohibited, or preferred in a given context. Rules facilitate the process of communication and make symbolic interactions meaningful. However, rules also vary across communities, languages, dialects, contexts, and time, so what is understood or valued in one place might not be in another. Rules theorists and researchers in communication identify and describe the rules of a speech community, and they use those rules to explain and predict behavior within that community. Although there are many different rules theories in the discipline of communication, the theories share in common certain assumptions about rules, humans, and communication.

Communication rules have existed since the creation of language, with rules about pronunciation, grammar, meaning, and use. Classical Greek and Roman writings about the practice of communication and rhetoric include proclamations about what ought to happen, and elocution books of the 18th and 19th centuries are full of communication rules. From the very first commentaries on communication processes to present ones, there have been observations about the rules that do or ought to influence those processes.

A more recent beginning in the United States occurred within the Speech Communication Association (now called the National Communication Association) in the 1970s with the writings of scholars such as Donald Cushman, Vernon Cronen, Thomas Farrell, Thomas Frentz, Robert Nofsinger, and W. Barnett Pearce, who described rule-governed approaches to communication. In articulating their perspectives, they drew upon the writings of language philosophers like John Austin, Kenneth Burke, Paul Grice, Rom Harre, John Searle, Stephen Toulmin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cronen and Pearce articulated their approach to rules in many publications, including their 1980 book, Communication, Action, and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities. Their theory, the coordinated management of meaning, includes rules as a central construct.

In 1976, the Speech Communication Association held a doctoral honors conference on rule-based approaches to communication theory with Pearce as the host. Four years later, Sage Publications published Communication Rules: Theory and Research, written by Susan B. Shimanoff, one of the attendees of this conference. Since the early work in the 1970s and 1980s, communication scholars have conducted substantial research on prescriptions that govern communication under various theoretical titles. As noted below in the section on multiple rules theories and in other entries within the encyclopedia, some of these scholars would trace their academic roots differently. But before naming those different perspectives, let us first look at what these theories have in common.