Dialog vs. Social Construction

I've been wrestling over the difference between Bakhtin's idea of meaning being dialogic contra Foucault and other french postmodernists idea of meaning as being cultural/linguistic. While both views establish a very high degree of ambiguity and play, Bakhtin's seems to leave a lto more room for human agency. People in dialog create meaning, rather than just playing out the meaning structures of their cultural-linguistic system. So, part of me wants to agree with Bakhtin, finding his view more hopeful. On the other hand, I'm left feeling that the Foucaultian analysis is more accurate when it comes to contemporary western culture and society. I don't have any real answer to this problem. While the differences may seem to be minutae, they imply significantly different outcomes when extrapolated out to a social level. Moreover, Foucault's analysis provides for better understanding of social cohesion than Bakhtin's. The dialogic understanding, rooted as it is in person to person conversation fails to really provide a lot of understanding of mediated culture, particularly of mediated culture where the primary messages are ideological and designed to slip in without any dialogic engagement.