Showing papers in "Communication Theory in 1992"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a systematization of the diverse definitions and understandings of communication, proposing a widening metatheoretical framework, a broad classificatory scheme.
Abstract: We argue that the ways in which communication scholars explicitly or implicitly define and characterize communication, the terminologies used and the assumptions employed, guide the ways in which they define and utilize communication theories and practices. We provide a systematization of the diverse definitions and understandings of communication, proposing a “widening metatheoretical framework,” a broad classificatory scheme. Taking into account the interpretation of communication as essence or appearance, we classify communication definitions as a priori or a posteriori, as essentializing or as questioning preestablished communicative patterns. Considering the approach of communication as static or dynamic, we classify a priori communication definitions into product and process, and considering the approach of communication as cultural or political, we categorize a posteriori communication definitions as ritual and praxis. Then, we discuss the forms and implications of a priori communication definitions, planning to explore a posteriori definitions of communication in a further study, in an attempt to unsettle the ways in which “What is communication?” in asked and answered.
248 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the interplay of communication and the basic human need to integrate probabilistic and evaluative orientations, focusing on communication in four experiences where it is difficult to satisfy the need: diverging probability and evaluation, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility.
Abstract: This essay examines the interplay of communication and the basic human need to integrate probabilistic and evaluative orientations. The analysis focuses on communication in four experiences where it is difficult to satisfy the need: diverging probability and evaluation (e.g., unlikely happiness or likely sorrow), ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. The aims are to (a) present a rudimentary theory of communication and the problematic integration of probability and evaluation, and (b) establish the significance of the interplay of communication and problematic integration. In so doing, the essay offers a set of ideas that synthesizes and extends understandings of a wide range of communicative phenomena, from the mundane (commiserating on day-to-day concerns) to the momentous (debates about war and peace), from the idiosyncratic (coping styles) to the common (dynamics of attitude change), and from the intimate (parent-child relations) to the mass public (responding to natural disaster).
182 citations
125 citations
TL;DR: The authors posits lists and stories as the central ingredients of organizational communication and suggests that their ratio, rate, and order of occurrence are problems for research and theory, and elevates the story to a position equal to the list.
Abstract: This article examines how two communication types, lists and stories, structure organizations and claims that all organizational communication is composed of these two types. The list is rooted in science and presented as a formula for action leading to controllable outcomes. It represents standards, accountability, and certainty. Conversely, the story is romantic, humorous, tragic, and dramatic. It unfolds sequentially, with overlays, pockets of mystery, and the addition or deletion of performers. This article posits lists and stories as the central ingredients of organizational communication and suggests that their ratio, rate, and order of occurrence are problems for research and theory. It reaffirms the list as organizational communication and elevates the story to a position equal to the list. Lists are technical communication, progressive, public; and once shared they extend a power base. Stories are communications about personal experience told in everyday discourse. They reject local knowledge, give coherence to group subcultures, change over time. and contain multiple voices. The lists and stories thesis contributes to organizational communication by providing another avenue for considering structuration. The contrasting qualities of lists and stories direct focus to the question of how individuals organize. How much structure and variety are there and how much are culturally optimal?
87 citations
TL;DR: Hall compares three theoretical perspectives on culture and communication: the traditional postpositivist paradigm, the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) paradigm, and the Ethnography of Communication paradigm.
Abstract: In this chapter, Bradford ‘J’ Hall compares three theoretical perspectives on culture and communication that have been predominant since the 1980s: (1) the traditional postpositivist paradigm, (2)
the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) paradigm, and (3) the Ethnography of Communication paradigm. He elaborates on the conceptualizations of culture and communication and
clarifies the research goals from these paradigmatic perspectives, paying particular attention to how
each research tradition conceives the forms, functions, and locus of culture and communication. He
also characterizes the relationship between culture and communication in the three approaches as
synecdoche, irony, and metaphor. Hall finally explores practical implications of the postpositivist,
CMM, and Ethnography of Communication paradigms for understanding and analyzing communication competence and acculturation.
73 citations
TL;DR: The concept of ecology of games was introduced by as discussed by the authors as an approach to the study of communication policy and its application to the United States telecommunications policy in the 1990s and 2000s.
Abstract: A game is an arena of competition and cooperation structured by a set of rules and assumptions about how to act in order to achieve a particular set of objectives. An ecology of games is a larger system of action composed of two or more separate but interdependent games. Defined in this way, the idea of an ecology of games is a sensitizing concept, developed within a participant-observer, case-study mode of inquiry. It helps make sense of the dynamics of communication policy processes. Aspects of an ecology of games—games, rules, strategies, and players—offer a grammar for describing the system of action shaping public policy. As a framework for analysis, it overcomes some limitations of sector-specific policy studies and some weaknesses of other frameworks for the study of public policy, including group, pluralist, and elite theories of decision making. This article develops the concept of an ecology of games as an approach to the study of communication policy. It also illustrates its application by sketching the ecology of games surrounding telecommunications policy in the United States and some of the principal ways it differs from the ecology of games in other nations.
66 citations
63 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that valorizing ethnographer-authors as individualized personas and psyches, this formalism both directs attention away from research subjects and what they are trying to say, and fails to account adequately for the political subjectivities of researchers.
Abstract: In this essay, I propose that strategies for avoiding, obtaining, and managing research interviews are data and that treating interview strategies as data enables the researcher to see how the researched are active participants in, rather than passive objects of, the ethnographic interview. This analysis is grounded in feminism and used to critique the recent focus on ethnography as literary form. I argue that in valorizing ethnographer-authors as individualized personas and psyches, this formalism both directs attention away from research subjects and what they are trying to say, and fails to account adequately for the political subjectivities of researchers. Ultimately I argue that the kind of political accounting I call for is as necessary for feminism as for other analytic standpoints if we are to come to terms with how theory and methodology preserve and extend social and cultural hierarchies.
59 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a reading of Hall's encoding/decoding model through his later work on articulation theory is presented, which analyzes the underlying assumptions of the model, accounts for the criticisms made against it, and points out ways in which the theory of articulation is an advance over the earlier model.
Abstract: This article is a reading of Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model through his later, more mature work on articulation theory. It analyzes the underlying assumptions of the model, accounts for the criticisms made against it, and points out ways in which the theory of articulation is an advance over the earlier model. While the notion of articulation is emergent in the encoding/decoding model, it is not adequately theorized. One of the consequences is the problematic equivalence between the preferred meaning of the text and dominant ideology. Limitations such as these can be overcome through the present reading. By situating the model within the movements of Hall's intellectual history, the article furthers the task of recasting the model for the analysis of encoding and decoding practices.
45 citations
40 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that the practical moral basis for evaluating communication needs to reside in how the process affects our human experience and what it affords us in the choices we have available and the opportunities for action.
Abstract: This article is concerned with the question of what we might take to be good communication theory and good communication practice within a new paradigm. The metatheoretical assumptions of this new paradigm are used to show that the setting aside of truth in favor of morality is one of its radical distinguishing features. It is then argued that the practical moral basis for evaluating communication needs to reside in how the process affects our human experience and what it affords us in the choices we have available and the opportunities for action. Four criteria are generated out of an understanding of communication in this new paradigm: constitutiveness, contextualness, diversity, and incompleteness. The article focuses on how these criteria might be used to make judgments about good and bad communication theory and practice.
TL;DR: The essay offers a perspective on the problem of how language users both converge on meaning, and thereby establish stability and predictability in interaction, and develop individualized semantic scripts that are activated in interaction.
Abstract: This essay argues for the existence of two codes termed pragmatic and syntactic. A code is a system of signs that are interactionally relevant to contexts, appropriateness, genres, and situations. The essay offers a perspective on the problem of how language users both converge on meaning, and thereby establish stability and predictability in interaction, and develop individualized semantic scripts that are activated in interaction. The codes are positioned along a psycholinguistic—sociolinguistic continuum. The pragmatic code is theoretically and linguistically linked to the oral style in which context and shared background are very important. The syntactic code is less context driven and more explicit and differentiated. The two codes are distinguished on the basis of issues in meaning, comprehension, reasoning, context, fragmentation-integration, involvement-detachment, and the level of planning.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors turn to Swedish and American acknowledgment tokens in interaction for conversation universals and comparative theory, and find that they are useful in the context of comparative theory.
Abstract: Conversational universals and comparative theory: Turning to Swedish and American acknowledgment tokens in interaction.
TL;DR: Studies in the US, Colombia, and Peru point to the didactic, educative, or instructional potential of television in general and of melodramatic serials in particular.
Abstract: Melodramatic serials such as American soap operas and Latin American telenovelas work with the narrative logic of myth and can be endowed with the cultural and performative power of myth. The properties of melodramatic serials, historicity, collectivity, syntagmatic flexibility, and paradigmatic parsimony, are in important ways common to mythical narratives. The textual affinity between melodramatic serials and mythical narratives suggests that melodramatic serials might function as myth, that is, as a pedagogical and enculturating discourse. Important implications for the practice of education-development and entertainment are derived. It is suggested that the opposition between entertainment and education might be ideological and logical but not performative. Entertainment and education continuously overlap into a general activity of social enculturation that does not recognize the formal boundaries of ideological discourses.