Communication studies at the crossroads: What do we stand for?

Warnings of crisis are commonly heard in the humanities and social sciences. Sometimes they are overblown and hyperbolic, but often times they are sincere concerns about the current state of affairs. So it is worthwhile periodically having these discussions about disciplinary deficiencies, and for this reason Servaes and Anderson’s invitation is welcomed. Communication studies, like all disciplines, occasionally needs to recheck it’s orientation. Certainly, there are problems so it would be foolish to sweep them under the rug. What follows is a suggestive but certainly not exhaustive list of things to consider from the vantage of an emerging scholar based in North America for the time being.

To start, given the production induced by the incentives in the contemporary academy, there is so much being produced that at times it can be over-whelming, if not impossible, to keep up on multiple fronts. Momentarily setting aside the ‘publish-or-perish’ whip and its implications, this increased production is not a problem per se. Scholars writing more about more is to be welcomed. This provides opportunities to put additional issues on the table; other ideas to see the light of day. Indeed academics writing, blogging, tweeting is all practice, and can lead to better composition. Again, setting aside production quotas, this is a positive development as far as I can tell.

For skeptics worried about the uneven quality of all this scholarship, even if one must mill a considerable amount in order to bake, time, like wind, will take the chafe away. Still one must judge the best, not the worst. So I worry about the extent to which critics disproportionally notice the worst over the merely ordinary. And I worry about a discipline where the ordinary is maligned and disparaged.

Still, even if one doubled down on a belief that a good portion of current communication research is trite, it would be a mistake to lose sight of the conditions of work. It is worth underscoring that often apparently poor research is a by-product of rushed work to meet the aforementioned institutionally mandated quotas but without the requisite institutional processes to support those expectations or research imaginations. While an adequate response requires national organizational coordination that goes beyond just one institution or one discipline it nevertheless does start in these settings.

Where I do think is a problem is people writing about similar things. This is not because these things are intrinsically important. They may or may not be. Rather it is because people write and argue based upon the incentives to do so. Currently, this intense concentration of effort is driven by relatively narrow hiring practices. Every department wants to hire roughly the same kind of scholar so emerging scholars are using inverse sequence planning to become that kind of hire. This labor market does not actually encourage a real diverse faculty, and it is disciplinary self-limiting. I am not optimistic that this will change, and the consequences will have a long tail.

This brings me to my second point. Aphoristically, the world is richer than one method. This means communication studies should necessarily be eclectic in theory and research practice. This plurality allows us to undertake the creative collection and analysis of evidence and link it with theory. To do so well, one should not accept the stale division between these two areas, or even allow that kind of division of labor to emerge in the first place. This is because it allows theorists to speculate without empirical discipline and empiricists to produce findings that cannot meet general epistemological criteria, and so these results do not contribute to a larger understanding of society, the economy, or politics. So separation of theory and research practice simply cements mutual ignorance to the detriment of both.

One remedy is hiring faculty that know and understand the diverse corpus of communication theory, not just their speciality within a subfield. This allows faculty to be conversant in several theoretical vernaculars, and so can express their ideas clearly to other branches of the discipline. It also helps them listen to what others are saying, and has spillover effects for mediation between different theoretical traditions. As an analogy, communication researchers should speak multiple languages. Part of this is attitudinal: That there be a willingness to talk with and listen to one another. But mostly it concerns wide training in graduate programs and you cannot have that unless you have diverse hires.

The risk of a near-totalising discipline such as communication is extreme pluralism. However, we cannot let this become fragmentation that keeps scholars talking to discrete groups, or where they feel they have no need to talk with others who do not share set priors. Or allow pluralism where scholars superficially pick and choose what appeals to them without deeper engagement. Or where appeals to pluralism become means to advance one’s interests. Or let tokenism masquerade as pluralism, where others presence is tolerated, but there has been a prejudgement that there is nothing important to be learnt from them.

Rather, the kind of pluralism I have in mind is one where advances the best position possible all the while maintaining a sincere willingness to listen to others without denying or suppressing their views. It means treating other positions seriously. Conflict and disagreement will occur. Indeed, given the social stakes of research, they must. So even if a genuine consensus would form, it would probably be undesirable. While one should never be satisfied with vague claims, point-scoring and grandstanding are of little use either. Instead we must offer constructive criticism to strengthen the other’s point to see if it may indeed be plausible. This practice helps to pinpoint the issues in dispute, find the difficulties that need to be overcome, and as well set clear criteria for critical case studies. This requires practiced hermeneutical skills.

To my mind it also entails that one not write for citations counts, but rather to understand distinct problems. This kind of literature is cumulative, convergent, and inter-related. This is a body of thought that is both mutually supportive and adaptive. It invites others to extend and apply it, while relating that work back to those who attempted before. It is worthwhile preserving the continuity of communicative thought while clearly showing in what respects our work is new. This kind of research is the pre-conditions for a broader positive disciplinary identity.

My third point concerns broader public benefit. Many social science academics aspire to practical impact beyond the university, hoping to create good social consequences. While informed by conceptions of praxis, this sentiment also expresses itself in the wider advocacy for evidence-based-public policy. My remarks are more precautionary than prescriptive, and anticipate aspirations of communication researchers who seek to produce ‘policy relevance’ material. I suggest that this orientation changes not only the conception of the value of their research, but it also introduces professional and ethical conundrums.

Regarding relevancy, researchers must be aware that this is defined and judged from the perspective of whether it concords with the aims, preferences, and goals of the ruling class. Certainly this does not guarantee that the material will be used against the interests of the basic general public, but neither does it guarantee against that practice either. In short, while couched in neutral technocratic terms of assisting the general public good, the specific conception of ‘policy relevancy’ is often defined by those same aforementioned class. As far as I am concerned, there is no compelling normative justification to cater to the desires of the ruling class and their agents, and indeed there is risk of courting current ideological fashion by becoming co-opted as an agent, or being used as a prop in a legitimation or public relations exercise.

Still, if ‘policy relevancy’ is useful to governments, then governments ought to pay for it. But at least in North America, government funding for social science research has declined; so the desire to create policy relevant work in an easy to digest form is to extend the workload without commensurate compensation. More insidiously it creates conditions where projects are assigned from above. This makes political efficiency the criteria for judging whether communication research is useful or relevant. So it is worth remembering that policymakers are not disinterested actors devoid of interests they seek to maintain or advance; and that they have antagonistic relationships with research that does not instrumentally suit their aims.

Moreover, it leaves open the possibility that policymakers can curtail funding unless the research satisfies government officials, and perhaps petty mid ranking bureaucrats who are not even remotely qualified to evaluate that research. The trade between conditional funding on the one hand, and the loss of autonomy, the ability to publically dissent, and limited contention on the other does not seem to be particularly attractive.

Inadvertently, adhering to policy relevancy criteria means is that scholarship can only be successful if success depends on making it matter in public consequence and advances the interests of the ruling class. However, the nature of policy is that is defined by a class that has captured it, and because of that capture, can prevent being written about. So most commissioned and acceptable policy analysis averts direct discussions of ideology or the role of the ruling class in social life. This is the cradle for the domestication of critique. Playing by these rules is antithetical to the critical heritage of communication studies. So it is important to not be naïve when dealing with power.

My last point concerns disciplinary crisis. Before providing my view on the matter I think there is much value to be had from turning to recent intellectual history. In the early 1970s American sociologists, in lines with domestic upheaval in social, economic, and political beliefs and institutions, found that the excessive abstraction of functionalist sociology made explanations nearly entirely devoid of contextual historical processes, that its implicit assumption that social systems have reached stability in the composition of institutions that govern social life and which seek to bring about maximum social utility, but made it inherently difficult to deal with social change. So functionalist sociology was ill-equipped to understand and explain the most features of American life in the post-Vietnam War era such as mass protest, racial inequality, urban poverty, and maladaptive political structures.

Following the collapse of structural-functionalism, Americans sought to import social theory from Germany (Habermas, Luhmann), France (Foucault, Bourdieu), Britain (Giddens), India (Subaltern Studies) and as well cultivating the revivals of pragmatism and feminism, communitarianism and critical race studies to enlarge conceptual, methodological, and political discussion. These new sources, new entrants in general, led to call for interdisciplinary hoping that cross collaboration would help understand the rapid changes to social organization and civil life. Much ink was used in the 1990s addressing these kinds of problems within communication and media studies and produced many handbooks and sourcebooks, theoretical manifestos and programs. Boundary policing and disciplinary politics about inclusion and exclusion, canon wars, methods all played out at the level of individual appointments, search committees, and journal acceptance letters.

Presently there seems to be a relative entente characterised by efforts to offer a diagnosis of contemporary social conditions. But much like the 1960s, there is some recognition that the intellectual resources at our disposal are insufficient to deal with post-recession social inequalities, looming environmental catastrophe, and systematic oppression of women and persons of color.

To the extent to which communication scholars hope that projects like critical media literacy will bring our discipline into national conversations about the aforementioned issues, or justify appeals to increase the supply of tenure-track positions as students declared themselves communication and media majors, the problem I fear is that this is happening under the umbrella of shrinking humanities and social science departments. So while enrolments are up, there needs to be solidarity and connections forged with other disciplines, otherwise they will not be anybody to be interdisciplinary with. And that leaves far fewer scholars to study the general and specific harms of global capitalism and other structural injustices. So with all this said, the crisis is not disciplinary per se, it is about broader institutional, systemic, and economic legitimacy. The question for me then is, which side of the fence do we stand?