To date, there has been no comprehensive and coherent approach to determining the communicative and precommunicative processes involved in the construction of group identities. The present study fills this gap by developing a unified theoretical foundation that can be used to capture empirical construction processes. Moreover, it contributes to the domain of group communication research. It creates a basic theoretical riverbed that provides a conceptual foundation for the conception of inter- and intra-group communication, which does not take its starting point from 'objective' categories,...