Communication Yearbook 24

William Gudykunst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135152925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

Communication Yearbook 24, originally published in 2001 comprises essays that address the current status of theory and research in each division and interest group of the International Communication Association (ICA). It focusses on the following questions: What are the parameters of the division/interest group, and what is the relationship of the division within other groups? What are the major theories used, and what research is there to support these theories?What are the major lines of research, and what are the main issues with which scholars must cope in the twenty-first century?

1 Thinking About the Future of Communication Studies

Stanley A. Deetz

ICA President, 1996-1997
University of Colorado at Boulder

Linda L. Putnam

ICA President, 1999-2000
Texas A&M University

This chapter presents the authors’ thoughts on the future of communication studies. They argue that communication scholars and teachers should direct their attention to significant problems of our times (e.g., people making choices together). The authors assert that adequate conceptions of communication and negotiation can facilitate democratic processes and better joint decisions.

OTHER writers in this volume have been asked to reflect on the past of communication studies; we have been asked to look to the future. Both projects are difficult, and the results of both are fundamentally contestable. Our goal is to initiate good discussions and evoke interesting ways of attending to communication. But looking to the future is different from looking to the past, in that the future is not simply to be described or predicted, but to be constructed. Furthermore, the most fundamental changes in society, and probably our discipline, are the least predictable. For example, who would have predicted in 1988 the fall of the Soviet bloc within a year or that the Dow Jones would hit 10,000 in 10 years? In this chapter, we address what may happen in our discipline as well as express our hopes for what could happen, if we work together. Although responses to chance events may be more important than our visions for the future, clearly, we need to be prepared to address potential changes.

The Economics of the Matter

As we have seen in the past, economic matters will influence the future of the academy in major ways. Even in the face of a strong economy, we anticipate that state support of higher education will continue to decline in the United States, and perhaps elsewhere as well. This trend will have its greatest impact on enrollment-driven programs such as communication. Similar to the sciences, communication departments will be forced to go to sources outside the university for greater percentages of their funding. Increasingly, communication programs will turn to corporate sponsors, federal and state grants, and foundation funding to support research and teaching.

This practice potentially leads to two related concerns. First, social conditions and practical issues, rather than faculty and departmental priorities, will have greater influence on the direction of instructional and research activities. This has been the case outside of the United States for some time. Gradually, we might expect greater convergence between U.S. and non-U.S. programs as non-U.S. programs respond to enrollment and occupational pressures and U.S. programs respond more to corporate and social policy initiatives. Both will lead to less faculty isolation and control. Multiple stakeholders will influence program development. Second, research will become increasingly more “pragmatic” in form. Rather than relying on our own theories and agendas, communication faculty will pose questions and solve problems that other groups have conceptualized.

To elaborate, we expect research opportunities to grow in those areas that have a close connection to regional and national priorities, specifically in domains linked to well-funded institutions removed from the academy. This trend has been clearest in new funding initiatives in communication/information technologies, health, environment, and globalization. And in these areas, much of the funding, and hence the research, will assume a pragmatic or administrative form. Clearly, this trend has characterized new initiatives in mass communication and organizational communication for some time and is now developing in public relations, health communication, and communication and technology.

This move to pragmatic agendas will not go uncontested as academic disciplines wrestle with the role of research and the nature of a “service” university. And, if this trend continues, these changes and the responses to them will engender conflicts in the field, conflicts such as those that have been productive in the past. For example, in the areas of mass communication and organizational communication, the focus on pragmatic and administrative-based research has contributed to the development of critical alternatives and to options for including less powerful groups in research agendas. Looking back, we can see that these tensions have created socially relevant research that moves us away from sterile academic topics. The tricky question for the future is how these tensions will be managed in an economic arena that favors the priorities of funding agencies. If it is managed effectively, the struggle will be less about the nature of a service university and more about who is being served and for what purpose.

If our research becomes too critical of these pragmatic interests, we run the risk of elitism and perceived irrelevance. If, however, we become too pragmatic and administrative, the field runs the risk of duplicating what other organizations already do and thus adding little unique value to a knowledge-production chain. To contribute to our own future, communication scholars need to realize that dependence on external funding can enable our influence as well as narrow our domain; hence we must take risks to make this process a two-way interaction. Implicit in this concern is a belief that communication scholarship should reach out to broad-based publics rather than merely serve our own disciplinary and university agendas. In the future, our works rather than our words are likely to become increasingly important.

Social Needs

Logically, a social science discipline makes its most distinctive contributions in response to emerging salient problems, as is evident in the role of economics in understanding the marketplace and the role of sociology in addressing issues of urbanization (Deetz, 1994). The success of a new discipline often rests on its ability to display a fresh and useful way for the public to understand how a field conceptualizes its problems rather than how it conducts programmatic research. Its theories first and foremost have to be generative—that is, they must question and reconstitute social experience (Gergen, 1994).

In the future, our field needs to crystallize the link between our scholarly activities and the wider human community. The conceptualization of communication studies needs to respond to a set of social conditions rather than to an area of academic interest. Our publications, professional associations, and classroom teachings are not the ends of our work; rather, they are the means by which we address these social conditions. In the future, communication studies needs to provide a more fruitful way of thinking, talking, and enhancing the capacity to act on social problems. Only recently has the field turned its attention to social contributions, and this work has not gained the academic credence needed to sustain it. For example, research in health communication is just beginning to address the large-scale problems arising from managed care (Miller, Joseph, & Apker, in press). This work entails an integration of the knowledge and expertise across multiple divisions of the International Communication Association—namely, the Health Communication, Organizational Communication, and Political Communication Divisions and the Communication Law and Policy Interest Group—a difficult task to undertake because of our idiosyncratic domains of theory and research.

Moreover, individuals in our field have spent considerable time in recent years debating the status of the discipline (Deetz, 1994; Reeves, 1992; Shepherd, 1993; Sholle, 1995; Streeter, 1995; Swanson, 1993). These deliberations have resulted in the development of good advice about keeping our programs healthy, generating ways to connect them to the university’s mission, and promoting the field to key constituents. Although these goals are necessary and valuable, the discipline continues to confound outcomes with the by-products of our work. That is, we resemble students who treat grades as the product of their labors and regard learning as an occasional by-product. In contrast, teachers typically believe that students should pursue learning as the product and make “getting good grades” a by-product of this process. In like manner, we need to center on the direction the field is taking and on the quality of our contributions, not simply on how to promote the discipline. Focusing our efforts on doing good works rather than on making our work look good is clearly a way to enhance the field. But what is good work? Good work, in our view, should engage the central intellectual and social issues of our time through addressing social problems and participating in intellectual debates.

But have we participated fully in the intellectual debates of our time? Although our field is clearly involved in academic debates, we have been slow to enter into the emergent intellectual deliberations in the social sciences. As a case in point, in the early stages of text theory and postmodern philosophy, communication scholars were generally absent from the scene. Similarly, many theorists stood by, focused mostly on general semantics, humanistic psychology, and behaviorism, while psychologists, sociologists, and family therapists made the earliest contributions to social construction (see Pearce, 1989, 1993; Peters, 1994; Shotter, 1993; Shotter & Gergen, 1994). In general, our field has been slow to embrace and slow to initiate major changes in the social sciences, including the recent linguistic turn in philosophy and social theory (Bakhtin, 1981; Lyotard, 1984).

We are not advocating blind acceptance of these alternatives, nor do we recommend that the field pursue them uncritically. We do contend, however, that the rank and file of our discipline need to move to center stage in these intellectual debates rather than sitting on the sidelines unable or unwilling to participate. Scholars need to understand emergent changes in social theory and their potential impacts on communication studies. More important, communication theorists need to be key players in these intellectual debates.

This indictment also applies to our field’s efforts to address the social conditions of our time. Our conferences and our classrooms are typically organized around topics rather than around social problems. In our professional meetings, we present topical papers, often without integrating or pursuing the broader implications of these studies. As an illustration, many ICA members recall the Berlin conference held 25 years ago. As members emerged from their sessions, reporters with microphones inquired of them what communication scholars had determined. The members responded that they had heard papers on a variety of topics. “But what did you decide?” the reporters asked. In most cases, the attendees could not answer, because the academic discussions they had heard centered on topics unrelated to the implications of the work for social conditions.

Clearly, some arenas of communication scholarship, such as those addressing TV violence, freedom of speech, copyright issues on the Internet, satellite communications policy, and ethical dilemmas in public relations, focus on social problems. For the most part, in our interactions that cross disparate divisions, we rarely engage in dialogues about social concerns. By articulating the relevance of particular societal problems to the field as a whole, we as a discipline can root communication in social relevance. This step, in turn, will enhance our applications for research funding and aid in keeping communication research alive.

Similarly, our teaching continues to focus on what we know rather than on what students need to know or need to be able to do. Social relevance is more than getting a job. Communication studies should help students understand the central problems that society faces and the ways in which communication scholars can respond to them. As teachers, it is our responsibility to train students to assess communication principles and to apply those principles to society’s problems.

The Role of Social Situations

Clearly, the 21st century is a significant time for communication scholars. As globalization takes shape, people throughout the world are responding to fundamental social, economic, and political issues (Monge, 1998). Old political boundaries are weakening, and people are becoming public consumers rather than “citizens” in the traditional sense of the term (Hart, 1994; Jamieson, 1988). That is, individual marketplace choices are replacing political discussion as the primary way social decisions are made (Deetz, 1992).

Not surprisingly, public decisions that influence our everyday lives appear increasingly beyond our reach and outside the realm of the democratic process. The resultant political apathy, cynicism, and self-centered opportunism are understandable and reflect the dangerously dominant attitudes of our times. If we are to rekindle a faith in our capacity to work together to produce the future we want, we must ask fundamental questions about where significant decisions are made and how the processes of making these decisions could be made effective and democratic. Although these concerns are at the root of communication questions, the field needs to address them in different ways. Several developments make it difficult to engage these concerns directly.

First, many scholars have become enamored of the rapid technological advances in information and mediated communication (see the reviews in this volume on information systems and communication and technology). Certainly these developments should not be left to vendors, engineers, and cognitive psychologists. The challenges that society faces today are clearly more fundamental and difficult than any anticipated by early proponents of the information revolutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1. Thinking About the Future of Communication Studies
• 2. Information Systems Division: Intrapersonal, Meaning, Attitude, and Social Systems
• 3. Interpersonal Communication Research: An Overview
• 4. Mass Communication Research at the Dawn of the 21st Century
• 5. Organizational Communication Research: Key Moments, Central Concerns, and Future Challenges
• 6. Mapping the Domain of Intercultural Communication: An Overview
• 7. “We Are All Natives Now”: An Overview of International and Development Communication Research
• 8. Political Communication Research and the Mutations of Democracy
• 9. Instructional and Developmental Communication Theory and Research in the 1990s: Extending the Agenda for the 21st Century
• 10. The Evolution and Advancement of Health Communication Inquiry
• 11. Ambivalence in the “New Positivism” for the Philosophy of Communication: The Problem of Communication and Communicating Subjects
• 12. Bridging the Subdisciplines: An Overview of Communication and Technology Research
• 13. Popular Communication in the Contemporary Age
• 14. Public Relations: An Emerging Social Science Enters the New Millennium
• 15. The Complexities of Feminism in Communication Scholarship Today
• 16. Language and Social Interaction: Taking Stock and Looking Forward
• 17. Core Research Traditions Within Language and Social Interaction
• 18. Underestimating Our Own Weight? The Scope and Impact of Communication Research on Public Policy
• 19. Camera as Witness, Image as Sign: The Study of Visual Communication in Communication Research
• 20. Queer Communication Studies
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors