Communication

A Post-Discipline

Silvio Waisbord

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509520121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Communication studies is a fragmented field. As a result of its roots in various disciplinary traditions, it is built on fluid intellectual boundaries with no theoretical or analytical center. Should we worry about this state of dispersion or be concerned that the discipline does not meet the basic conditions that define an academic field of inquiry?

Silvio Waisbord argues that communication studies is a post-discipline and that it is impossible to transcend fragmentation and specialization through a single project of intellectual unity. What brings communication studies together is an institutional architecture of academic units, professional associations, and journals, rather than a shared commitment to a common body of knowledge, questions, and debates. This should not, Waisbord argues, be a matter of concern. Communication studies is better served by recognizing dispersion, embracing pluralism, fostering cross-cutting lines of inquiry, and tackling real-world problems, rather than hoping to meet conditions which would qualify it as a discipline.

Communication: A Post-Discipline is important reading for scholars and advanced students of communication studies, as well as anyone interested in the state of this fascinating and vital academic field.

1
Fragmentation and Hyper-Specialization

This chapter aims to offer a stage-setting analysis and conceptual ground-clearing to assess the state of communication studies. It lays out definitions and positions. Interpretations and analytical foci are anchored in classic philosophical understandings as well as in contemporary approaches. No single definition captures the richness of perspectives about communication. Long-standing attempts to bring differences under a common conceptual roof have not been able to contain dispersion or reorganize lines of research.

Communication studies has long been fragmented into multiple lines of inquiry, disciplinary and theoretical traditions, levels of analysis, and institutional trajectories. It has been a big academic tent for various research areas, as well as disciplinary and methodological traditions (Corner 2013; Levy and Gurevitch 1993; Simonson, Peck, Craig, and Jackson 2013). The symptoms of fragmentation are many. One telling sign is continuous disagreement and confusion about what to call communication scholarship. The usage of various terms such as “communication,” “communications,” “communication science,” and “communication studies” to name schools, departments, journals, books, and conferences reflects confusion and dispersion. Disagreements about whether to call communication a field, science, discipline, or art signal fragmentation too. Underlying multiple institutional names is remarkable intellectual diversity. Also, the constantly growing number of communication journals, with different analytical foci, is symptomatic of such division. One could reasonably argue that these dynamics are not unique to communication, but they reflect broad trends in academic publishing, namely publishers’ persistent interest in expanding the numbers of journals. Likewise, the creation of new sections and divisions in professional organizations expresses schisms in thematic areas of specialization.

Over recent decades, communication has developed into an intellectually rich but jumbled field. Undoubtedly, hospitality to multiple traditions and research interests has been the source of its enormous intellectual richness and ontological diversity. Because there has been no single, unified understanding of communication scholarship “across knowledge claims, practices, and values”, communication scholarship comes in various types and shapes (Anderson and Baym 2004).

Communication has been a field manqué – too diverse, separated, and pulled in different directions to become a common intellectual enterprise. It has remained a balkanized, anarchic area without intellectual coherence. Kaarle Nordenstreng’s (2007: 12) summary of the state of communication studies in Finland applies to the field as a whole: “The nature of the discipline often remains unclear, while its identity is typically determined by administrative convenience and market demand rather than analysis of its historical development and scholarly position within the system of arts and sciences.”

The lack of a common epistemological core raises the question of whether communication is indeed a distinctive field of inquiry. Communication studies evolved into what “communication” scholars do, rather than something that is immediately understandable and clear. Given that communication scholars have wide-ranging interests and understand communication in different ways, the field has evolved into a disorganized collection of theories, methodologies and research lines without obvious, straightforward connections.

Producing a Borgesian map that covers the integrity of the territory of communication research is impossible. No cartography or abbreviated summary could do justice to the multiple ways in which research is constantly defined, (re)configured, and organized. Communication studies is an ever-expanding landscape with many sides without fixed boundaries. It is a “contradictory and mobile whole,” to repurpose the words Walter Benjamin used to define himself. It does not demand strict credentials for entry in terms of theoretical interests, analytical motivations, conceptual frameworks, and so on. Any taxonomy focused on identifying neat boxes misses the enormous diversity within research clusters as well as the connecting threads across lines of specialization.

Intellectual divisions are grounded in analytical frameworks, foci, and levels of analysis. Studies are embedded in a vast array of epistemologies, disciplinary traditions, and theoretical frameworks that cover the whole spectrum of the social sciences and the humanities (plus influences from information sciences and the “hard” sciences). Whereas some lines of scholarship are grounded in the empirical social sciences, others draw from the intellectual framework of interpretive theories and methodologies identified with the humanities. Just like in other social sciences (Steinmetz 2005), the great methodological divide between quantitative and qualitative approaches is also present in communication studies. Research focuses on different interpersonal and mediated dimensions, as well as different levels of analysis of communication processes – individual, interpersonal, community, society, and systems and structures. Also, whereas some scholars are interested in the institutional dimensions of communication, including media settings, organizations (workplace, corporations, governments, international agencies), and policies and regulations, others are primarily concerned with the psychological aspects of communicative processes.

Communication studies is also scattered over many areas of thematic specialization. This reflects the analytical focus on various “settings” or contexts where communication acts take place, be they politics, health, organizational, intergroup, intercultural, children and youth, environment, science, and risk. These thematic specializations generally exist in relatively compartmentalized quarters with few bridges connecting them. Each area has several specialized journals and is represented by sections and divisions in professional organizations.

Communication studies also pervades the “platform/technology/channel” studies that have expanded over the years with the continuous arrival of information and communication technologies. These include studies of newspaper, film, radio, television, internet, video games, and social media.

Other research clusters are organized around particular institutions and industries of “public communication,” such as journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, and entertainment. Even these traditional clusters have continued to break down into smaller areas of thematic specialization. Continuous technological innovations break up traditional “platform/technology” studies as they generate new channels, behaviors, and phenomena with their own particularities. Second screening and binge watching have emerged as a thematic focus in television studies; social media has become disaggregated into “platform” specializations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tinder, given the particularities of each channel.

It is not an exaggeration to say that all areas of specialization are multidisciplinary in nature and straddle communication studies and other fields and disciplines. A considerable body of work in political communication sits at the intersection of communication, cognitive psychology, and political science. Health communication connects communication studies to public health, social psychology, health education and promotion, community health, social marketing, and behavioral studies (Parrott and Kreuter 2011). Risk communication brings together communication scholarship with the psychology of risk and perception. Communication policy connects public policy, media and information policy, political economy, sociology, and technology studies.

Like the field as a whole, areas of thematic specialization are broken into parallel lines of research. Not only do they lack a shared theoretical and analytical corpus, many also lack a common subject of study. For example, health communication contains research clusters concerned with parallel analytical foci such as the effectiveness of message design in modifying knowledge, attitudes, and practices, the uses of digital platforms to strengthen social capital and health, and the impact of community mobilization on health indicators. Health communication is also split into clusters around specific health areas and diseases (chronic and infectious diseases, and diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and polio), as well as aspects of communication processes and dynamics such as levels of interaction (provider/patient, government/citizens, corporations/consumers), messaging (type of appeals) and platforms (e.g. mobile health, web health, gaming). Likewise, science communication is broken up into clusters that examine questions at the intersection of science and communication around specific themes such as nuclear energy, climate change, genetically modified foods, biomedicine, and pharmaceuticals.

Research in political communication, too, is split into various fields, such as propaganda studies, election communication, participation and collective mobilization, government communication, public opinion, and parallel lines of research concerned with information processing, the linkages between media and political institutions, and so on (Reinemann 2014). Likewise, mass communication studies is fragmented into questions about the impact of different elements of narrative, audience characteristics, the significance of various channels, and so on (Lang 2013). Media policy is similarly split into many thematic interests, from the political economy of specific industries and technologies to legal frameworks affecting public speech, with virtually no overlap of cross-cutting questions and arguments (Picard 2016). Journalism studies is divided into various areas embedded in different epistemological and theoretical frameworks, including reader behavior, news industry, news effect, and journalistic organization and practices (Zelizer 2004). Environmental communication comprises studies on the impact of news framing on environmental attitudes, analysis of news coverage of environmental disasters, and the role of communication platforms and strategies in environmental movements. Public relations is also separated into various lines of research, overlapping with adjacent fields and lacking a welldefined theoretical core (Dühring 2015).

Another way to envision research clusters is via the theoretical frameworks underpinning different strands of communication studies. Robert Craig (1999) produced a widely cited taxonomy of seven theoretical traditions that offer different views of communication: communication as the art of discourse (rhetoric); interaction mediated by signs (semiotics); dialogue (phenomenology); information flow (cybernetic); interaction among individuals (socio-psychology); the production and reproduction of the social order (socioculture); and the challenging of conventional beliefs (criticism). The existence of a large number of theories is a source of intellectual richness but also a sign of profound disagreement (Anderson 1996). Likewise, the number of divisions, interest groups, and areas in professional associations demonstrates the intellectual vitality and dispersion in communication studies. Multiple research clusters organized around different thematic interests, disciplinary traditions, theoretical scaffolding, and methodological approaches form the patchwork that is communication studies.

Traditionally, binary options were proposed to understand the multiple divisions and crossing lines of communication research: levels of analysis (micro vs macro), intellectual traditions (scientific vs humanistic), methodological approach (quantitative vs qualitative), and epistemological politics (positivist vs critical). Everett Rogers (1999), for example, believed that the division between interpersonal and mass communication was central to the field. Incidentally, many years before the coming of digital technologies threw it into question, Rogers (1994: xiii) called this divide a “false dichotomy,” given that they are related, complementary levels of analysis. The rise of “masspersonal communication” (O’Sullivan and Carr 2017) in recent years proved Rogers’s point. In contrast, James Carey (1988) affirmed that two different visions of communication divide the field – the transmission view, concerned with the effectiveness and influence of messages; and the ritualistic view, interested in meaning making and association building.

Other scholars, instead, emphasized the rift in communication research in terms of normative positions. Echoing Paul Lazarsfeld’s classic distinction, Todd Gitlin (1978) argued that “administrative” and “critical” approaches hold opposite normative assumptions and visions of the relationship between society and academic knowledge. For example, the dyad “critical/administrative research” refers to the normative and ideological assumptions underpinning research lines, as well as the overall conceptualization of the purpose of academic research. As formulated by critical scholars, this divide reflects the positions of two different camps: one interested in research that questions dominant power structures in capitalism, and the other uninterested in questioning fundamental political, economic, and social structures. Underlying this view is the old debate about the purpose of academic research vis-à-vis real-world conditions and the social position of scholars as “activists,” openly engaged in social action, or “detached scientists” concerned with producing evidence-based arguments. The field is also divided because of different visions of the purpose of scholarly work and its relationship to public life. The lines of normative division have been articulated in dyads, such as “administrative/critical” (Gitlin 1978), which refer to the position of researchers vis-à-vis power – namely, producing research that helps powerful actors such as states and corporations (or fails to question their position) or, instead, foregrounding the critique of multifaceted forms of power in academic research. Other proposed binary divisions include “strategic/participatory” communication, presumably divided in terms of top-down and bottom-up communication processes in relation to social change (Waisbord 2015a). Also, the division between “academic” and “activist” is based on the orientation and purpose of communication scholarship – to enrich scholarly research and debates or to make meaningful contributions to social change (Frey and Carragee 2016).

These divisions are linked to dissimilar convictions about whether scholarly research should be close to (and funded by) public and private institutions engaged in a wide array of communication activities (from public diplomacy to public relations). Other scholars contend that the main schism in communication research is between “big/small media effects” argument. Whereas some studies have shown significant media effects on knowledge, attitudes, opinion, behaviors, and other issues, others have produced more skeptical conclusions, suggesting that “the media” have limited significant impact on a range of individual and social dimensions. Instead, scholars have observed that the field has been divided between different analytical foci, namely “interpersonal/mass communication” lines of research.

Although these dualisms capture some long-standing divisions, they do not satisfactorily account for the ontological diversity of communication studies. The unwieldy ontological nature, thematic agendas, ideological tensions, and theoretical dispersion cannot be shoehorned into a simple narrative of one position versus another, or into discrete intellectual and disciplinary traditions that shape separate tracks in communication studies. Binary divisions offer a way to capture certain divides rather than provide comprehensive guidelines for understanding multiple fractures. In fact, it is doubtful that any camp outlined by these various dividing lines offers cohesive arguments about “critical research,” “mass communication,” or “media effects” precisely due to widespread fragmentation and the presence of separate, parallel lines of research. Often, studies cross analytical levels and theoretical traditions without necessarily minding traditional ontological and methodological divisions.

Why fragmentation?

Fragmentation is the result of the confluence of several factors. The multidisciplinary genealogy of the field has been a major cause. Communication was multidisciplinary before multi- and interdisciplinarity became important trends in academia. Communication studies was born at the crossroads of various disciplines and fields, including rhetoric/speech, journalism, psychology, sociology, the arts, print and broadcast media, language and literature, drama, and political science (Chaffee and Rogers 1997; Craig 1999; Dennis and Wartella 1996; Gehrke and Keith 2014; Jensen and Neuman 2013; Park and Pooley 2008; Rogers 1994). Certainly, the disciplinary origins and evolution have significantly varied across regions and countries around the globe. In the United States, the field has its roots in multiple disciplines and academic programs and units. If we take a global perspective, the field looks even more dispersed when we consider the myriad traditions and trajectories of communication studies around the world, a topic to which I return later.

Consequently, communication studies sits at the point of convergenc...