Despite a growing emphasis on relationship studies in interpersonal communication, serious attention to the conceptual meaning of relationship has been limited. The purpose of this volume is to explore the meaning and use of "relationship" in interpersonal communication studies. The contributors to this volume, representatives of related, but differing perspectives, outline definitional boundaries and conceptual implications of the term stemming from their particular ontological and epistemological approaches. This volume provides an engaging and provocative examination of "relationship" by seasoned writers who are committed to seeing the field with new eyes. As such, the book will be invaluable to scholars and researchers in the field.

Conville has assembled a collection of essays that share a consideration of "structure" as it manifests itself in human communication. Personal stories, accounts of events, narratives, diaries, and unstructured interviews are ever more widely appreciated today as valid data for understanding human cognition and human interaction. Some chapters present solutions to the problem of how to analyze such materials and how to conceptualize them as data. Other chapters argue for the inevitability of structure in communication study. Still other chapters demonstrate structure in human communication. What ties all of the chapters together is the idea that structure is ubiquitous in communication literature, even in the face of postmodern and poststructuralist critiques alleging the disappearance of structure, the fragmentation of culture, and the impossibility of communicating across boundaries. As the authors demonstrate, the concept of structure enters the scholarly conversation by way of such diverse and sometimes unexpected vehicles as dialectical theory, relationship development, deconstruction, relational communication, and narrative theory.

In this practical and innovative study, Richard Conville proposes a way to think about the process of communication in personal relationships. He moves beyond rigid stage models of relational development and advocates a new, helical model with a four-phase structure of transition between relational phases. The model is based on Difference--developed as a theoretical concept--and on structural analysis of relational partners' narratives of their transition experiences. This perspective offers both a conceptual and a methodological alternative to current work in relationship development. Though its focus is only one part of the wide-ranging communication field, its principles can easily be applied to other communication contexts.

Conville opens with a description of Difference, a necessary component of current theory in interpersonal relationships, and its role in the structure of relationships. He examines narratives by partners in three personal relationships to locate dialectical differences of time, intimacy, and affect. Later chapters examine the four transition phases of relationships: security, disintegration, alienation, and resynthesis. These four phases are seen as meta-dialectics that mark the social domain in which personal relationships are played out. "Relational TransitionS" will prove to be of particular interest to scholars and students of communication, psychology, sociology, family studies, and anthropology.