Performative Listening

Communication as transaction implies the importance of listening, but it leaves room for the mistaken impression that listening fails to shape the content of the encounter. Listening scholarship focuses on the constituent elements and effects of the act but has left unaddressed the ways the listening act is entirely sufficient to fulfill duties and/or create relationships. Borrowing the elements of speech act theory, I describe three categories of illocutionary performative listening—listening toward relationship, toward leadership, and toward fairness—and call for research into such corollaries as listener credibility and meta-listening.