Showing papers in "Communication Theory in 1997"

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Communication Studies: A Rereading of an Ongoing Debate

Abstract: Recent writings in communication studies have tended to represent the relationship between modernist and postmodernist thought as bifurcated and oppositional in character. Such representations, I argue, result from inadequate characterizations of both the modernist and postmodernist projects and of the various conceptions of communication therein. I therefore suggest a move beyond a simple modern-postmodern dichotomy and articulate in its place four discursive positions that embody different assumptions about the relationships among communication, identity, and knowledge formation. These discourses are: (a) a discourse of representation (positivist modernism), (b) a discourse of understanding (interpretive modernism), (c) a discourse of suspicion (critical modernism), and (d) a discourse of vulnerability (postmodernism). Finally, I adumbrate a set of “postmodern communication conditions” as a way of illustrating the connections between postmodern thought and communication studies.

Organization as an Effect of Mediation: Redefining the Link Between Organization and Communication

Abstract: How can we explain a phenomenon as general and as central as social organization? This is the question discussed in this article. Starting from the analysis of uttering, and more generally, communication, it attempts to demonstrate the profoundly organizing nature of communication. Speech act theory (Austin, Searle, and Vanderveken) is used and reformulated in a new analytical model based on the concept of “modality” borrowed from the Greimassian theory and the Semantics of Modality Theory (Palmer, Bybee, and Fleischman). Through this analysis, the concepts of “interobjectivity” and “mediation,” presented by Latour as the foundations of the collective, are translated and extended to all enunciative activity. This parallel allows us to present communication as an activity of mediation which consists of illocutionarily distributing and perlocutorily fixing enablements and constraints which form the basis of all organizational structure. Key words: organization, communication, mediation, speech acts, Austin, Searle, semiotics, Greimas, semantics of modality, sociology of translation, actor-network theory, transformation, structure, interobjectivity.

Persuasion Processes Across Receiver Goals and Message Genres

Abstract: In persuasion and message effects research, involvement is simultaneously one of the most theoretically and empirically useful concepts, and among the most problematic Involvement is typically invoked to characterize audience members' relationship to the content of a message as well as to explain how that relationship influences their processing of that message, thereby determining message effects The problem of audience members' relationship to message content and its processing consequences is here recast in terms of the active audience Audience members are assumed to be goal-directed in exposing themselves to and in processing messages Six typical goals and associated message-processing strategies —patterns of response to various elements of message presentation and content, source attributes, and persuasive intent—are described, and their implications for predicting message effects and persuasion outcomes are illustrated The utility of this approach for integrating audience-centered perspectives with empirical persuasion and message effects research and for integrating persuasion research with other message and media effects research contexts is discussed

Constructing Paper Dolls: The Discourse of Personality Testing in Organizational Practice

Abstract: Recent developments in managerial theory and practice practically ensure the continued widespread use of personality testing (Miller & Rose, 1990). In this article I argue why communication theorists ought to attend to the ontology of personhood implied in the discourse of personality exams and the biopolitics associated with the exams, implementation in organizational life. I specifically focus on how the exams function as a form of government by providing authorities with a technique for engineering the workplace and for disciplining unruly employees. I also address how personality exams function as a subjectifying technology by providing individuals with a formalized discourse for “self-knowledge.” I conclude by discussing the tensions that follow from the exams' simultaneous invocation of autonomous individualism and race-, class-, and gender-based articulations of the normal individual.

Beyond Strategic Research: A Value-Centered Approach to Health Communication Interventions

Abstract: Research on health communication interventions tends to focus on achieving the intervention sponsor's goals. Thus, it can be characterized as strategic. Client and sponsor values, though recognized as important by researchers who adopt this approach, tend to be treated as independent variables that might serve as barriers to behavior change goals, or as dependent variables that can be manipulated to achieve those goals. This paper adopts the proposition that values have a pivotal role in the analysis and design of health communication interventions and that analyses that focus on values embedded in the intervention process can contribute to theory development. Instead of focusing exclusively on health-related objectives, the paper proposes that analyses can also examine the extent to which certain values might have contributed to both problem definition and intervention strategies. The rationale for focusing on values, distinctions between a strategic and a value-centered approach, and the importance of ethical issues in the analysis of health communication interventions are presented through a series of eight propositions. The propositions address six main areas: (a) the locus of analysis, (b) definition of the problem, (c) values, (d) intervention strategies and behavior change models, (e) program evaluation, and (f) ethical concerns.

Mass Media Impact on Voter Response to Women Candidates: Theoretical Development

Abstract: This paper reviews cross-disciplinary literature concerning political representation by women, of which mass media effects are an essential component. Much of the literature is insightful but atheoretical. Gender schema theory is introduced as a framework within which to interpret and extend past findings.

From the I to the We: Discourse Ethics, Identity, and the Pragmatics of Partnership in the West of Scotland

Abstract: In Habermas's formal-pragmatic theory of discourse a rational (emancipated) society will be one which tends towards institutionalizing procedures characteristic of an ideal speech situation. Particular strategic interests are to be subsumed, for the purposes of rational discussion of social ends, in a larger process of rational will formation. This involves a movement from the I or the Us of the particular individual or group interest, to the we of the general interest. The problem of institutionalizing the procedures which are to facilitate such a movement raises two sets of questions. The first is to do with formal procedures and invites us to “measure the gap” between the ideal and the actual. However, the problem of institutionalization requires also that we explain this outcome, and seek to identify obstacles to the desired movement. This second question of explanation raises issues to do with the social identities of participants in the process. This paper seeks to address both of these questions in the context of one, at least apparent, attempt to institutionalize procedures similar to those advocated by Habermas in our locality.

A Theoretical and Methodoloical Critique of the Principle of Relative Constancy

Abstract: This article revisits the theoretical assumptions of the principle of relative constancy (PRC). This principle, or hypothesis, holds that consumers spend a constant fraction of their income on mass media over time (constancy assumption), although they are expected to alter their spending patterns within mass media categories in response to the introduction of new mass media products or services (functional equivalence assumption). But application of demand theory to the PRC reveals that whereas the functional equivalence assumption can be phrased in economic terms, there is no such validation for the constancy assumption. That assumption was found to be inconsistent with the Engel law/curve in that this traditional microeconomic model of consumer choice does not posit, as does the PRC, a proportional relationship between expenditures on mass media and income. Furthermore, the empirical literature reviewed here suggests mixed support for the PRC, casting more doubts on the validity of the PRC as a theoretically grounded, empirically determined hypothesis. The article identifies and discusses five methodological factors that may explain why PRC studies offer conflicting evidence. Finally, it proposes a series of theoretical and methodological recommendations for conducting future research on consumer mass media expenditures.

Refusing Individuality: How Human Beings Are Made into Subjects

Abstract: If we are to justify normative communication, we must contend with the question of “why, other than as a response to force, should I accept those norms that are not of my own devising—especially in light of contemporary scholarship which claims that any warrants offered for them are inextricably linked with systems of power?” I respond to that question here through a critical appropriation of resources in the work of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. To counter what I see as a tendency toward individualism in Foucault and a tendency toward totalization in Habermas, I supplement their accounts with a phenomenological description of the actual process by which human beings are made into subjects.

Communication and Eschatology: The Work of Waiting, an Ethics of Relief, and Areligious Religiosity

Abstract: This article begins from an understanding of critical theory as being in need of something. The arguments made here develop a series of related concepts — the work of waiting, an ethics of relief, and areligious religiosity — that begin to address this need at the heart of critical theory. Built around a series of philosophical circumscriptions that sketch the outlines of these concepts, I argue that to participate in the radical continuation of the Enlightenment we need to return to an unlikely place — religion. To achieve this return, I offer an explication of Heidegger's address, The Principle of Reason (1996), focusing on his discussion of calculative reason, and Freud's Future of an lllusion (1961). This gives the vital context for understanding the various meanings comported by the metaphor of an ethics of relief. In light of this, I demonstrate that there is a space reserved for these ideas within contemporary critical theory as represented by the discourse ethics of Habermas. By intersecting the position I develop with two points in Habermas's work, I show that the concepts of the work of waiting, an ethics of relief, and areligious religiosity can begin a response to the need identified at the heart of critical theory.

Frankfurt School Marxism and the Ethical Meaning of Art: Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension

Abstract: This article takes up the ethical meaning of Herbert Marcuse's aesthetics, especially as espoused in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). In it, Marcuse responds at both an ethical and aesthetic level to three versions of Marxist/Frankfurt school theory of art: realism, negation theory, and formalism. The first part of my article situates The Aesthetic Dimension in a tradition; the second part lets it speak for itself as a synthesis of the three ethical/aesthetic traditions; and the third part queries and develops Marcuse's synthetic efforts.

Communication without Constellation? Habermas's Argumentative Turn in (and Away from) Critical Theory

Abstract: This article contrasts the recent communicative and epistemological conceptualizations of Jurgen Habermas with those provided by earlier critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. I argue that Habermas's “argumentative turn” breaks sharply with certain basic assumptions about language, discourse and knowledge common to his predecessors. While the earlier theorists were operating with assumptions derived from the “declarative” rhetorical lineage of German early romanticism and Hegelian Marxism, Habermas has returned to the hegemonic assumptions of Western “demonstrative” rhetoric. His prioritizing of oral argumentative discourse over written forms of nonargumentative “indirect communication” leaves little space for the kind of “constellational” cognition and “combinational” articulation considered essential by the earlier theorists. Some of the theoretical and political implications of Habermas's argumentative turn away from declarative critical theory are then discussed.