Bazerman presents conceptual grounds for a theory of rhetoric he proposes in terms of major schools of contemporary social scientific thought, primarily sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science. Among his topics are the symbolic animal and the cultural transformation of nature, Vygotskian traditions of active social symbolic selves, structural and structerational sociology, from the interaction order to shared meanings, utterances and their meanings, and the writer on the spot and on the line. The companion volume is A Rhetoric of Literate Action. Annotation 2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)