They punctuate accounts of rhetorical transactions with the help of rhetorical form. This constructs coherence in rhetoric around patterns in discourse rather than around the rhetor. Thus, they study the clustering of language forms in a culture. Symbolic action . These theories primarily locate rhetoric in directing the flow of social action rather than the initiation of action or theories of knowledge.
Consequently motivation is a central concern.
In the heyday of behaviorism, motivation had been understood as located in biological drives and had been punctuated as an account of the initiation of behavior. They began by rejecting the completeness of the biologically based theory, arguing that humans had essentially identical biology yet in any given situation humans react many different ways. Culture-creating power of language. In these theories, motivational patterns are tied to cultures rather than to biological individuals or the species in general. On these three linchpins developed a theory of human motivation as symbolic.