Abstract
This special issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) explores the promises and challenges of civil sphere theory for the study of communication and journalism in democratic societies.
In 2006, Jeffrey Alexander, a cultural sociologist at Yale, published The Civil Sphere, the culmination of several decades of work exploring the “cultural structure at the heart of democratic life.” Concerns about justice and democratic institutions animate Alexander’s theory of the civil sphere, which takes seriously the roles that culture and communication play in struggles for justice in democratic societies. The theory focuses on communication and examines “real as compared to ideal civil societies.” The theory is thus empirically grounded, offering a new conceptual framework for scholars in their analyses of the role of journalism and communication in social struggles.
The essays in this special issue began as remarks for a panel on civil sphere theory at the 2014 annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Sponsored by the Cultural and Critical Studies Division and the History Division of AEJMC, the panel featured all the scholars whose essays appear here. This collection adds another voice with an essay by Rick Popp, who served as the panel’s moderator. The essays make for an intellectually challenging read as they represent a range of perspectives on the value and validity of civil sphere theory for the study of communication’s role in democratic life.
My essay serves as both primer on and apology for civil sphere theory. I suggest that scholars of both sociology and political philosophy have recently focused attention on the role of culture and emotion in political and social change, and I argue that they are right to consider culture (and communication) as a powerful structure in social life. I highlight important distinctions between civil sphere theory and public sphere theory and suggest that journalism studies would benefit from a greater analytical focus on the civil sphere concepts of civil society, social struggle, solidarity, and justice.
John Nerone challenges what he views as the theory’s insufficient attention to the hegemonic orders in which institutions of journalism exist. Along the way, he wittily (and brilliantly) invokes Plato’s Thrasymachus (Alexander’s exemplar of material hard power). His essay reviews Alexander’s theoretical and historical moves and challenges his analysis of the role of journalism in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, suggesting other historical forces and conceptual frameworks that might provide a fuller, more viable explanation of the movement’s success. In the effort to explain the empirical role of the media in our own era’s political and social struggles, Nerone prefers Gramsci—and if the effort is to suggest how the media ought to operate, he prefers Habermas.
Dave Nord, too, has serious reservations about Alexander’s theory. In particular, he suggests that the theory is too narrowly focused on one particular “face of power” and slights other types of power in the social world that political scientists have long credited. “The Civil Sphere is a political study with the political science and mass communication research left out,” Nord writes. Perhaps, he suggests, the civil sphere is simply discourse, a political vocabulary.
Sid Bedingfield is more hopeful about the normative and empirical capacities of civil sphere theory, particularly in analyzing the role of communication and journalism in political contests. After reading Tea Party political rhetoric through the lens of the theory, Bedingfield takes on the skeptics, tracking closely the theory's attention to the dark, destructive, decidedly anticivil power of culture. With attention to historical and contemporary examples, he demonstrates how shared cultural ideals have consistently structured political struggles.
Rick Popp appreciates civil sphere theory’s attention to media culture but argues that it does not adequately account for the business institutions and consumer practices of media. For Popp, capitalism has its own culture, and media are part of capitalism’s “built environment.” Those who live “amid capitalism’s inherent tumult” interpret media and struggle for or against solidarity and justice within this tumult. This understanding, he argues, must be attended to in analyses of “the making and unmaking of solidarity.”
As the organizer of the AEJMC conference panel and the guest editor of this special issue of JCI, I thank my fellow essayists (who are also treasured friends) for agreeing to take on the substantial intellectual work of reading, analyzing, and writing about The Civil Sphere. Alexander’s book is almost 800 pages in length, and the response of his fellow sociologists adds many more pages to the analytical task. No one in this group had read Alexander until I asked—and after the extensive reading and thinking required to produce this work, they are still my friends.
Sid Bedingfield, John Nerone, Dave Nord, and Rick Popp—thank you for saying yes when I asked you to join me in this endeavor. I hope readers of this special issue will find your intellectual company as enriching as I have.