Origins and transformations: histories of communication study

Charting formation

In examining matters of formation in different national contexts, the importance of the US sociology of mass communication in its pioneer phases, albeit mediated and developed and critiqued through various national sociological traditions, is evident (see, among many accounts, Morrison, 2008; Scannell, 2007; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2000). However, I want to look first at the formative phase of ‘communication’ as a designated area in the United Kingdom, a phase also subject to historical review in the recent literature, since this shows connections but also contrasts both with the dynamics of formation in the United States and other, European and Global, lines of institutionalization.

In the early 1970s, the designation ‘communication studies’ became widely used as a label for kinds of degree course, and often, in consequence, the departmental units and teams supporting them. The recently established Polytechnics, a new tier of UK Higher Education, were seeking to develop distinctive degree programmes which could draw on the different specialisms of existing academic staff, some of whom had worked in teacher training, recently cut back. ‘Communication’ was seen as an attractive, accommodating label for combined programmes, allowing contributions from social science and humanities teachers who would not, in most cases, need to know anything about each other’s areas (a useful account of contexts here is given in Lodge, 2016). Importantly, unlike in the United States, there was no tradition of study around speech and rhetoric already laying claim to the ‘communication’ territory and no extensive use of ‘communication’ on its own to indicate study of the media. Communication as a subject grouping did not exist. When prefixed by ‘mass’, however, it indicated the focus of a growing specialism in sociology and social psychology, with research taking place at a number of universities and producing a flow of influential publications by ‘first wave’ UK-based researchers such as Jay Blumler, James Halloran, Denis McQuail and Jeremy Tunstall. Again, Lodge (2016) concisely discusses the principal developments here, including the work of the Leicester University Centre for Mass Communication Research and the Leeds Centre for Television Research, with Murdock (1975) a valuable early overview by someone who was himself a key participant.

At a London conference in 1973, convened to discuss the possibilities for future degree-level courses built around inquiry into the diverse aspects of Communication, Raymond Williams (1974a) gave a keynote paper ‘Communications as Cultural Science’, which became a much-cited publication internationally. This made the case for further and bolder interdisciplinary work around ‘communications’ giving strong emphasis to study of the institutions of press and broadcasting, following the argument about the civic and cultural need for reform pursued in his books (particularly Williams, 1962, 1974b). His focus on ‘communications’ as indicating media (he argues that the term ‘mass communication’ tends too much towards seeing people as ‘masses’, with distortive consequences) is explicitly distinguished (as a ‘significant plural’) from the more expansive territory he sees to be indicated by the singular form (Williams, 1974a: 17). At points, the emphasis on media sometimes gives way to a brief connection with this broader territory. For instance,

… the detailed processes of language and of gesture, in expression and interaction, and of course any general features of underlying human structures and conventions. (Williams, 1974a: 18)

However, attention to the broader array of communicative practice (Williams is keen always to talk of practices rather than artefacts) is not developed. Moreover, the account is essentially that about the rich possibilities of a research area not the possibilities of new kinds of teaching programme, a focus of the conference.

It is instructive to compare Williams’ emphasis with that in a document that comes close to the founding phases of one version of Communication Studies in the United States, more than 20 years earlier. In what was the first edition of the Journal of Communication, Redding (1951) surveyed the range of studies then proceeding under the designation ‘Communication’ and identified some problems of coherence. Acting as the reporter for a working group which had convened at the annual meeting of the National Society for the Study of Communication in 1950 (a body which eventually, and after rather fraught discussion and dispute, became the multi-divisional ICA), Redding (1951) noted that

The group prefers the growing usage of the term communication rather than communications. The plural form seems to connote a wider field than that of concern to us, a field which includes the mechanical media of communication rather than the essential skills. (p. 32)

Of course, the distinction implicitly made here, and more directly in Williams’ paper, in which the plural indicates ‘media’, has not become established, as the names of international subject groupings and leading journals, most of which have an emphasis on media over wider communicational issues, clearly show.

Focussing on what is described as the ‘narrower field’, Redding (1951) went on to offer his conclusions:

The group agreed that basic communication courses should aim primarily at turning out students who would function with a fairly high degree of communicative skill in modern society. (p. 33)

In contrast to Williams’ emphasis on research into media, in this perspective on what ‘communication’ study should be about (already at variance with those concurrently using the term to pursue, separately, public communication research and journalism training), a pedagogical focus is being placed on primary skills in speech and writing. However, the emphasis which course designers in the United Kingdom needed to place was finally different from that both of Williams and of Redding. Courses needed to include literature, speech, visual arts, social psychology and linguistics in order to make use of the widest range of contributing staff to the programmes. They could not therefore afford to focus too heavily on ‘mass communication’. Moreover, although designers recognized the importance of skills, they were centrally concerned with the acquisition of general analytical skills through broadly conventional modes of academic engagement rather than with specific communication skills, including media skills. In that sense, their orientation was traditional rather than innovative whatever the distinctiveness of the curricular pathways devised.

Throughout the 1970s, degree programmes in ‘Communication Studies’ were begun in institutions across the United Kingdom according to a variety of combinatory recipes, frequently determined by existing staff competence. Often, they involved a curriculum in which much of the work would not be directly concerned with ‘mass communication’, even where this was seen as a core element in the programme as a whole or the main element in courses offered below degree level (Scannell, 2007, notes developments here, drawing on personal experience).

One consequence of the academic character of this formative phase was a gap between the courses and curricula designated ‘communication’ and the research cultures and activities surrounding them and feeding into them. At this stage, research at the level of staff development and publication continued largely within the established disciplines from which staff came – centrally sociology, psychology, linguistics, literary theory and perhaps history with the Arts sub-area of ‘film studies’ also contributing. There was little development in the United Kingdom, either theoretically or empirically, of a distinctive research field of ‘communication’ embracing the range of human communicative activity. Lodge (2016) quotes Nicholas Garnham on the ‘horrendous’ mix of ingredients that went into an attempt to produce ‘disciplinary specificity’ (p. 208) but, although such specificity was sought by some, the general approach was far more about productive combinations of existing disciplines than about forging a new one. This was so, even though some attention to general ideas concerning human communication, following the work of scholars in the United States (e.g. Mortensen, 1972) was often included in the syllabus.

Meanwhile, UK research into ‘mass communication’ continued strongly, often linked, with varying degrees of harmony or conflict, to the range of humanities and critical theory informing the increasingly influential strand of Cultural Studies (here, the run of articles and papers on aspects of television, its political character and its decoding, written by Stuart Hall and published through the 1970s was significant – particularly Hall, 1973). The growth was such that, eventually, work on press and broadcasting carried out in sociology departments was overtaken in scale and prominence by that proceeding from within the institutional frames of ‘communication studies’. Transfer of staff from one setting to the other becoming increasingly common as the new courses began to strengthen their existing staff base and more institutions offered programmes under the ‘communication studies’ heading which put greater emphasis on aspects of media. So ‘communication studies’ was the broad curriculum initiative through which the research-based work on mass communication/media developed a stronger national presence and visibility.

The wider view

The global account offered in Simonson and Park (2016) shows a variety of routes by which study of the media (often within the framing term ‘communication’) becomes self-identified as a ‘separate’ area not just a topic within an existing discipline or a largely invisible part of professional induction. This often involves convergent strands developing from journalism training (in most cases, by far the strongest core element) and elements of sociology and psychology. The Arts are sometimes represented too, though less strongly than Social Studies strands and with an emphasis on a Cultural Studies–style understanding of the expressive and aesthetic dimensions of social meaning rather than direct critical evaluation of texts such as occurs in the study of film and television drama (often positioned within a film studies rather than a communication studies frame, even if in close proximity). Frequently crucial are the priorities of national development within contexts varying greatly in terms of political order and aligned to different schemes of modernization and globalization, with the relationship between research funding, government policy, perceived student demand and developing media industries significant in constructing the sites, scale and nature of academic activity. The range of variables is not only traced across geography, with strong studies from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, is it also illuminatingly tracked across historical change, as priorities shift, often radically, with new economic and political circumstances. In some contexts, these circumstances encourage developments in teaching and research supportive of official policies, whereas in others a stronger critical, indeed activist, tendency develops both in theory and empirical investigation, with Latin America showing a number of examples of this. It is clearly impossible to do more here than simply testify to the general quality of the chapters in this collection but it is impressive and it nicely confirms one (perhaps minor) aim of any comparative historiography – to feed the process by which learning about ‘elsewhere’ also greatly improves knowledge of ‘home’, wherever that may be.

Reviewing Nordic traditions in Chapter 8, Tore Slaatta notes a general tendency when he observes of media researchers in the late 1950s:

However, they still worked within other disciplines like Political Science, Social Psychology, Sociology and Economics. It would take another 20 years before Nordic researchers began to think of themselves as media and communication scholars. (Simonson and Park, 2016: 172)

Raul Fuentes-Navarro, looking at formation and growth in Latin America in Chapter 15, gives a detailed diagrammatic account of the models of institutionalization at work, including professionalization of journalists, humanist education and social science inquiry, all containing different elements and working towards different goals. Issues of categorisation become even more precise in Hu Zhengrong, Ji Deqiang and Zhang Lei’s Chapter 17 on China, where they comment on the official confirmation of ‘Journalism and Communication’ as a first-tier rather than second-tier discipline in 1997 and its listing in the ‘catalogue of disciplines’ of the national system (Simonson and Park, 2016: 388). The question of the play-off between industrial and academic priorities (discussed further below) is brought into many accounts, with varying judgements. In Chapter 20’s assessment of the present situation of the field in India, Pradip Ninan Thomas finds that ‘it arguably caters primarily to the needs of the creative industries’ (Simonson and Park, 2016: 449).

Importantly, too, the role of UNECSO, the IAMCR and the ICA are given due attention, as is the key international role performed by the pioneer scholar Wilbur Schramm, including in China.

Identity work

Historians of the area often make connections of one kind or another with the long-running matter of internal dispute, which, as ‘ferment’, was given sharp focus in a special issue of Journal of Communication (Gerbner and Siefert, 1983) and which has recently been given extensive updated review in the same journal (Fuchs and Qiu, 2018). ‘Ferment’ has its positive sides, the productive debate through which fields develop, but there has also been a strong vein of pessimism involved, classically including perceptions of ‘fragmentation’ across different topics and approaches. Of course, fragmentation presumes something that was initially whole and this presumption has not always been made, for reasons already clear. Here, a now 30-year-old paper by John Durham Peters (1986) stressed the ‘victory of institution over intellect in the formation of the field’ (p. 538), a negative reading of origins updated by Jefferson Pooley (2016) in his account of the debilitating consequences of a continuing division across strands which is ‘especially incoherent and damaging in an era of media convergence’ (p. 1).

Clearly, the more that the idea of ‘communication study’ extends beyond questions of media, the more likely it is that incoherence will be detected. There is no solution to a problem which is built-in to the diverse usages of the formative phases (and beyond) in the United States. However, as the literature clearly indicates, dispute does not go away when the focus is firmly on media.

Here, across many national histories, including that of the United States, the issue of linkage with forms of practical instruction is one common point of contention, such linkage seen either as a legitimating and perhaps necessary connection with occupational practice or a serious dilution of academic credibility by the intellectually less demanding business of ‘training’ or perhaps some awkward variant of the two.

In the United Kingdom, which in the early 1970s had virtually no undergraduate degrees in journalism or media production, the shift to significant levels of practical work, including work placements, came with a tendency through the 1980s to move away from broad communication studies programmes towards designations of courses and then of departments built around the term ‘media’. This was so even though some institutions were reluctant to see their critical studies in film and television, which might be firmly based in arts criticism, to disappear behind the more general label. Course developers felt the need to respond to the firmer career ambitions which applicants for a ‘media’ programme would have compared to those for the more expansive arts and social science territories of the older ‘communication’ model (even though some elements of this model, for example, sociolinguistics, sometimes survived the shift of emphasis). The tensions which were then set up between largely critically inflected strands of academic inquiry on one hand and, on the other, pre-professional perspectives on practice designed to allow students to work within existing structures and performance expectations, often became highly visible institutionally (see Corner, 1995, for a brief account of the resulting ‘knowledge problems’). Again, Pooley (2008), perhaps the most vigorously critical of historians of US developments, observes how ‘faculty who work under the ‘communication label are normally expected to produce scholarship and impart skills to industry-bound students’, noting that this leads to ‘polarized departments or else schizophrenic faculty’ (p. 59). Yet this comment, although surely right about the risk of ‘polarized departments’, perhaps underestimates levels of success internationally in making productive connections across academic and industrial/professional priorities, success aided greatly by dialogue and joint involvement in curriculum design and research initiatives.

A related factor which also features strongly in the British case is the low level of esteem initially accorded to undergraduate work on media and communications, despite it being taken up by many ‘traditional’ universities in the 1980s following its origins in the newer institutions. Many commentators in press and broadcasting made firm judgements about the ‘worthless’ nature of such programmes. That the overwhelming majority of journalists and broadcasters held degrees in traditional humanities and science subjects and, in most cases, had never engaged with any academic work in media analysis let alone that offering a critical view, was clearly a factor in the extensive flow of derision. Here was the case of an occupational group being loudly unhappy about the very existence of college courses placing their focus on its own area.

Such wholesale disparagement does not seem to have occurred on quite this scale in the United States, perhaps primarily because the sense of academic propriety was less rigidly traditional, and also because the idea of degrees in which people were trained to be journalists or take up roles in media production was well established. Nevertheless, Pooley (2008) perceives a ‘deficit in legitimacy’ following partly from ‘vocational taint’ (p. 60). And in Anat First and Hannah Adoni’s account of the growth of activities in Israel (Chapter 23 of Simonson and Park, 2016), it is observed how, during the early phase of Elihu Katz’s work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

[T]he Department of communication was considered less prestigious because its faculty had to include professionals whose status was not necessarily based on their academic achievements. (p. 299)

Overall, however, levels of prejudice appear to have been lower than in the United Kingdom, obviously so in national contexts where professional training was involved from the beginning. Nevertheless, as remarked earlier, in many settings, the relationship between the academy and the industry remains an issue requiring careful negotiation both at the level of research and of teaching and it would be good to see more focussed historical work on this particular dimension. Of course, in many national contexts, the relation to ‘training’ and to ‘applied research’ now draws on new ideas of academic ‘usefulness’ and related funding and sponsorship models. In respect of these, departments and their staff may be variously cooperative (perhaps eagerly so) or suspicious to the point of reinforcing a stance of ‘critique’ (see Noonan and Lohmeier, 2017).

Going digital

As several of these histories acknowledge and the current research literature amply shows, the phased emergence of ‘new information technology’ – a varied set of structures, practices and forms shifting through the designation ‘new media’ into ‘social media’ – has radically changed the nature of what is studied and the modes of study, impacting on the ‘old’ as well as adding a rapidly expanding ‘new’. Although interest in aspects of ‘media’ was clearly shown in departments other than those self-described as being about ‘communication’, a concern with ‘social media’ extended rapidly across the University and college curriculum as part of the expanded engagement with the digital information order and ‘digital culture’. This has sometimes led to institutional disputes, in different national settings, about quite where media/communication units figure in the expanded pattern, especially when it comes to funding opportunities.

As it has grown in the scale of the applications and consequences examined, there is a way in which research and teaching on social media returns ‘media studies’ to at least some parts of that broader agenda indicated in some uses of ‘communication studies’. This is an agenda to do with the practical skills and public implications of everyday communication and the orientations and forms, including forms of writing and of the still image, through which information circulates at ‘amateur’ rather than ‘professional’ levels. In these circumstances, there is more to be written on the history (some of it clearly very recent) of the routes through which the funding and visibility of research has been obtained and through which teaching, variously analytical and practical, has appeared across the college and university curriculum. In what ways has this aligned with different professional, governmental and corporate agendas? Here, Carsten and Thevenin (2017), on the history of French Internet studies, provides a good model for focused accounts alongside more general surveys like Dutton (2013) and Tsatsou (2014).

International inquiry using the label ‘communication’ (on its own or in combination) is likely to continue to have an ‘open borders’ character, in a way that verges on no borders and the attendant problems this can bring. This will be in a context where other academic groupings have an increased interest in researching aspects of the media flows which are its principal focal point. As it moves forward as an aggregation of diverse analytic interests, debating its priorities and approaches and indeed its identity, historical accounts such as those noted here will be instructive. They make us more sharply aware of the various and sometimes precarious modes of institutionalization by which study of public communication has developed, breaking out of older professional and academic frameworks while continuing selectively to draw upon them, its progress matching the massive growth in scale, variety and significance of its objects of inquiry.