The Concept of Action

When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing ? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions : "requests", "proposals", "complaints", "excuses". The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but, as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labelling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to others' behaviours in order to quiz, sanction, praise, blame, or otherwise hold them to account.
This book develops a new account of action grounded in certain fundamental ideas about the nature of human sociality : that social conduct is naturally interpreted as purposeful ; that human behaviour is shaped under a tyranny of social accountability ; and that language is our central resource for social action and reaction.