Social action principles for theories and studies of mediated communication

This dissertation takes up the analysis and interpretation of media studies mounted from a social action perspective. It begins by examining the general characteristics of the social action position and then moves to an analysis of a substantial portion of the current media literature which makes use of those characteristics. This analysis examines the selected articles in terms of their principal claims, methods, and identifiable philosophical origins and sorts them into a taxonomy headed by ideologically-based studies and media practices-based studies.;Following this analysis and classification, the dissertation offers a hermeneutic examination of the philosophical bases of the social action philosophy, including (a) phenomenology (Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer); (b) pragmatism (John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman); (c) interpretive sociologies (Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, and Thomas Luckmann); and (d) action-based language philosophies (Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Mikhail Bakhtin).;Its objective is to (a) interpret the origins, arguments, and rationales of the philosophical scholarship which gave rise to contemporary social action theory; (b) abstract from this scholarship a set of interpretive principles which can be used to critique social action studies; and (c) apply these principles to the ideological and media practices approaches theories and studies, which have been conducted to date.;Each of these philosophical foundations is examined and interpreted to extract the collective social action perspective contained therein. This analysis reveals the social action themes of (a) knowledge, (b) language, (c) indeterminacy, (d) discursive practices, (e) membership routines, (f) emergent actors, (g) performances of understanding, and (h) open-ended "realities." These themes are then used to construct a set of 11 social action principles in order to return to and offer a critique of the selected media literature.;That critique concludes that (a) ideological media approaches need to reexamine the relationships between discursive structure (including that of both social actors and media content), the emergence of meaning through situated interpretive performances, and the meaning potentials of behavior as the origins of interpretation and (b) media practices approaches could more clearly identify the nature and roles of both social situations and social practices.