The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

* Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. James W Carey. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 205 pp. James W. Carey collected essays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s into a volume titled Communication as Culture, originally published in 1989. Carey died in May 2006 after a long and influential academic career. This re-publication as a "revised edition" comes with a bibliography of Carey's lifetime production of 170 or so essays and book reviews, compiled by his son Daniel, and an insightful forward by G. Stuart Adam, a journalism scholarship fellow at The Poynter Institute. Shortly after Communication as Culture first appeared twenty years ago, as Adam points out, American Journalism devoted an issue to scholars' commentaries on Carey's essays. In the year he died, a book of essays by scholars, titled Thinking with James Carey, examined his life's work. So perhaps there's not much left to review and learn from a new reading of the work of a prodigious intellect whose ideas have already received a thorough engagement by his academic peers. What follows, therefore, is not so much a review in the classic sense as the reflection of one who practiced newspaper and magazine journalism for twenty-five years before spending a decade in a university working at the intersection of public policy, politics, and journalism. As media companies struggle with difficult challenges posed by technological change and severe economic shocks, publishers and editors, as well as journalism critics, teachers, and students, would find no better guide to thoughtful analysis of the future than Carey's case study of the telegraph and how it transformed not simply "communication" but society itself. Indeed, Carey's central insight is profound in its simplicity: that communication is both "a structure of human action" and a "structuring set of social relations." Thus, he argues, people inhabit the culture they create by and through their communication with one another. This leads to an important lesson for professionals and would-be journalists: They cannot see themselves solely as observers somehow apart from the dynamics they report and analyze, because the act of communicating itself shapes the community in which they live and work. One of the strengths of Carey's work is that it emerged from a moral core. He drew comfortably from religious intellectual traditions and applied lessons to today's secular issues. Fundamentally, Carey sought through his thinking and writing to contribute to building a good society. A second strength, related to the first, is Carey's devotion to democracy. In this devotion, he comes across as an idealist; he recognizes the factionalism and disagreements of a continental democracy, but he tends to celebrate person-to-person conversation that creates common ground for decision making. Though no provincial American, Carey clearly had in mind the shaping of democratic conversation in the United States. Still, it is important that in developing a theoretical construct for understanding communication, he seemed to have as a goal the building of a good, democratic society. Carey's approach to the news in a democratic society led him to delve into the intellectual conflict of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. …

Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S153759270999171X

Response to Ellen Mickiewicz's review of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina

Public diplomacy is a political instrument with analytical boundaries and distinguishing characteristics, but is it an academic field? It is used by states, associations of states, and nonstate actors to understand cultures, attitudes, and behavior; build and manage relationships; and influence opinions and actions to advance interests and values. This article examines scholarship with relevance, usually unintended, to the study of public diplomacy and a body of analytical and policy-related literature derived from the practice of public diplomacy. Ideas, wars, globalism, technologies, political pressures, and professional norms shaped the conduct of public diplomacy and the literature of scholars and practitioners during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, thick globalism, network structures, and new technologies are transforming scholarship, governance, and state-based public diplomacy. An achievable consensus on an analytical framework and a substantial scholarl...

Public Diplomacy: Sunrise of an Academic Field:

Understanding, planning, engagement and advocacy are core concepts of public diplomacy. They are not unique to the American experience. There is, however, an American public diplomacy modus operandi with enduring characteristics that are rooted in the nation’s history and political culture. These include episodic resolve correlated with war and surges of zeal, systemic trade-offs in American politics, competitive practitioner communities and powerful civil society actors, and late adoption of communication technologies. This article examines these concepts and characteristics in the context of US President Barack Obama’s strategy of global public engagement. It argues that as US public diplomacy becomes a multi-stakeholder instrument and central to diplomatic practice, its institutions, methods and priorities require transformation rather than adaptation. The article explores three illustrative issues: a culture of understanding; social media; and multiple diplomatic actors. It concludes that the characteristics shaping the US public diplomacy continue to place significant constraints on its capacity for transformational change.

American Public Diplomacy: Enduring Characteristics, Elusive Transformation

Radical changes in diplomacy’s global environment challenge traditional categories in diplomacy’s study and practice. The “foreign” and “domestic” divide is blurred beyond easy recognition. Public diplomacy is no longer a separate instrument of diplomacy. The term marginalizes a public dimension that is now central in diplomatic practice. This article examines four boundaries that both separate and connect: (1) a distinction between diplomacy and foreign policy that benefits diplomacy studies and clarifies choices in practice; (2) a framework for diplomacy’s public dimension that connects types of diplomatic actors with process variables; (3) a separation between diplomacy and civil society that distinguishes diplomacy from other relationships between groups; and (4) characteristics of diplomacy and governance that explain how they differ from other political and social categories. Diplomatic and governance actors are categorized in trans-governmental and polylateral networks. Civil society and private sector actors are categorized in cosmopolitan and private governance networks.

Mapping Boundaries in Diplomacy’s Public Dimension

Public diplomacy, a term once known only to a handful of practitioners and scholars, is now part of a global conversation. Foreign ministries from London to New Delhi to Beijing use public diplomacy as an instrument of statecraft. Rare is the government today that does not require its diplomats and other professionals to understand, engage and influence global publics. Significantly, public diplomacy is no longer confined to the realm of statecraft. International and regional organisations employ public diplomacy to advance multilateral objectives. Non-state and sub-state actors engage in public diplomacy while pursuing governance activities that were once the domain of states. Concerns about what publics think and do are central to the way political actors compete, collaborate, communicate and govern.

Public Diplomacy and Governance: Challenges for Scholars and Practitioners

Understanding, planning, engagement and advocacy are core concepts of public diplomacy. This chapter examines the concepts and characteristics of American public diplomacy in the context of US President Barack Obama's strategy of global public engagement. It argues that as US public diplomacy becomes a multi-stakeholder instrument and central to diplomatic practice, its institutions, methods and priorities require transformation rather than adaptation. The chapter then explores three illustrative issues: a culture of understanding; social media; and multiple diplomatic actors. It finally concludes that the characteristics shaping the US public diplomacy continue to place significant constraints on its capacity for transformational change. The Obama administration's 'joined-up government' global engagement strategy reflects an understanding of the power of network connections and a world in which multiple actors within and outside of government shape diplomacy. Keywords:Barack Obama; multi-stakeholder diplomacy; Public Diplomacy; social media; United States (US)

Bruce Gregory

Papers

Public Diplomacy: Sunrise of an Academic Field:

American Public Diplomacy: Enduring Characteristics, Elusive Transformation

Mapping Boundaries in Diplomacy’s Public Dimension

Public Diplomacy and Governance: Challenges for Scholars and Practitioners

American Public Diplomacy