COMMUNICATION AS A FIELD-HISTORICAL ORIGINS, DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS,

ORIENTATION TOWARD RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST:

54 BRIEF RUMINATIONS FROM FIELD GRANDPARENTS, PARENTS, AND A FEW FEISTY GRANDCHILDREN

A BACKGROUND PAPER PREPARED FOR "STRENGTH OF OUR METHODOLOGICAL DIVIDES:

FIVE NAVIGATORS, THEIR STRUGGLES AND SUCCESSES" PLENARY AND POST-PLENARY DIALOGUE

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING,

NEW ORLEANS, MAY 27-31, 2004

Edited by:

Brenda Dervin

Ohio State University

Columbus, OH, USA

dervin.1@osu.edu

and

Mei Song

Ohio State University

CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:

Cite as: Dervin, B. & Song, M., eds. (2004). Communication as a field -- historical origins, diversity as strength/weakness, orientation toward research in the public interest: 54 ruminations from field grandparents, parents, and a few feisty grandchildren. Background paper for the "Strength of our methodological divides: Five navigators, their struggles and successes" plenary and post-plenary dialogue, International Communication Association annual meeting, May 27-31, New Orleans, LA.

©Brenda Dervin & Mei Song, 2004.

ABSTRACT:

This paper was prepared as background for a plenary session and post-plenary dialogue focusing navigating methodological divides in the communication field, held at the 2004 annual meeting of the International Communication Association. The paper presents the "30 second" answers of 54 communication field scholars -- mostly field grandparents and parents and a few grandchildren -- to these questions: *In what historical situation(s) did communication as a field "spin off" from other fields? Why? *How do you account for the field's many approaches, foci, methodologies, methods? Is this diversity strength and/or weakness? *In your view, what is the historical relationship of communication studies (however you define it) to this year's ICA theme -- research in the public interest?

Dedicated to George Gerbner,

who provided a model

with the special 1983 issue of the Journal of Communication

focusing on "Ferment in the Field."

With thanks to the contributors:

the intersections of your responses form a blissfully unhomogenized synergy

* George Barnett * Sam Becker * Jim Bradac * Sandra Braman

* Henry Breitrose * Judee Burgoon * Joseph N. Cappella * Richard F. Carter * Don Cegala * Robin Cheesman * Kathleen D. Clark * Celeste Condit

* Wayne Danielson * Michael X. Delli Carpini * Jose Marques de Melo

* Wolfgang Donsbach * Edward L. Fink * Cindy Gallois * Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. * Bradley Greenberg * Bruce E. Gronbeck * Lawrence Grossberg

* Hanno Hardt * Randall Harrison * John W. Higgins * Youichi Ito

* Klaus Bruhn Jensen * Astrid Kersten * Hak-Soo Kim * Mark L. Knapp

* Gary Kreps * Klaus Krippendorff * Dan McDonald * Ed McLuskie

* Denis McQuail * Bella Mody * Horace Newcomb * Kaarle Nordenstreng

* Ed Parker * Linda L. Putnam * Ron Rice * David Ritchie * Holli A. Semetko

* Lawrence Sarbaugh * Jan Servaes * Majid Tehranian * Phil Tichenor

* Joseph Turow * Angharad N. Valdivia * David Weaver

* D. Charles Whitney * Rolf Wigand * Julia T. Wood * Barbie Zelizer

One of the plenaries scheduled for the May 2004 meeting of the International Communication Association focuses on "The strengths of our methodological divides - Five navigators, their struggles and successes". Featured navigators are senior scholars Youichi Ito, Denis McQuail, Dan O’Keefe, Scott Poole, Barbie Zelizer, representing between them different foci and approaches and within their own projects struggles and successes dealing with the multiplicities of methods/methodologies that have captured terrains in the study of communication. A post-plenary session features 11 doctoral students from 11 different universities in the U.S. and Europe who will enact a kind of meet-the-press dialogue with the navigators.

As background for those participating in these two events, on April 21, 2004, we emailed 150 scholars and researchers who are now or have been in the field -- all at least associate professors, most full, and some retired; 54 responded. The sample was purposive, drawn insofar as email exigencies and short turn-around time permitted from the rosters of: ICA presidents past and present, ICA fellows, senior members of ICA divisions, and admittedly a roster of persons whose writings and discussions have usefully challenged the thinking of the senior editor about "field issues" over the years. Any reader – grandparent, parent, grandchild, or even great grandchild -- may add an entry to this document by following the format shown for the entries below and sending it to dervin.1@osu.edu. If you do so, you are asked to not argue with, affirm, or otherwise respond to any of the entries below. Rather, submit your entry insofar as possible as if these entries from colleagues did not exist.

Each contributor was asked: "If you had 30 seconds each to share your thoughts with an assembled world-wide group of doctoral students in our field, how would you answer each of these questions:

1. In what historical situation(s) did communication as a field "spin off" from other fields? Why?

2. How do you account for the field’s many approaches, foci, methodologies, methods? Is the diversity strength and/or weakness?

3. In your view, what is the historical relationship of communication studies (however you define it) to this year’s ICA theme -- research in the public interest?"

This document compiles their answers, arrayed alphabetically by last name of contributor. Some responders took the 30-second approach; others could not contain their enthusiasm and wrote longer entries. Contributors are identified both in terms of their current locations, the years they received their doctorates, and who served as their advisor(s)/mentor(s). The editors apologize for any inaccuracies in these listings and will make corrections as soon as notified. Minimal editing has been done on the contributions in order to preserve as much as possible the unique style and character of each voice.

This document has been circulated to all the contributors and the relevant participants in the ICA sessions. It is also available on-line as a pdf at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/zennezICA/ICA30secondanswers.pdf

THE CONTRIBUTIONS –

IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY LAST NAME OF CONTRIBUTOR:

Your name: George Barnett 

Your title: Professor & Chair, Communication

Your institution: University at Buffalo (State University of New York) 

Your city, state/province, country: Buffalo, New York, USA 

The year you got your PhD: 1976, Michigan State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Joseph Woelfel 

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I don’t know. 

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: There is no agreed upon definition of communication. Thus, it includes everything from drama and rhetoric to electronical engineering. This is a weakness. It really is many fields studying a variety of different subjects from a variety of different epistemologies while sharing common labels. This has created a situation where no one reads anything anyone else has written and everyone thinks they’ve invented the wheel. It’s simply not true that each perspective informs the others. For example, intercultural communication is not cultural studies. 

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Historically, a number of scholars have studied communication ideologically. We could go back to Schramm and developmental research, Lazwell and the study of propaganda, to Schiller, Smythe, Katz, Nordenstreng and others that form the foundation of critical and international communication. But, this doesn’t include all the media effects and health communication research. Increasingly, a lot of the research in the public interest is driven for the need to get funding for research from whatever source is willing to pay for it. Personally, I rather be left alone to do basic scientific research rather than applied social engineering. 

Your name: Sam Becker

Your title: Professor Emeritus of Communication

Your institution: University of Iowa

Your city, state/province, country: Iowa City, Iowa, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1953, University of Iowa

In what field: Communication Studies, with an emphasis in media.

Who was your advisor: Clay Harshbarger

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The historical situation was that it was a time of growth in higher education--subfields breaking off from larger fields, etc. Administrators, especially in the state universities of the midwest, were willing to try new things--to experiment. They wanted to be different than the private universities of the east--especially those in the Ivy League. In addition, the teachers of oral communication--public speaking and debate--wanted their independence from English, just as in more recent times, speech pathologists and audiologists wanted their independence from Speech departments, or teachers of cinema wanted their independence from Speech or from Radio and Television. This is the way fields have proliferated in American universities for a great many decades. 

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The early scholars in our field were not bound by any traditions. They were free to try any approaches or methods that they thought might be productive. I would also note that a great many fields in the traditional liberal arts were trying all sorts of approaches and methods over the past fifty years--psychology, sociology, political science, even history. I see this diversity in each of these fields as a strength. These fields, including ours, are not hidebound--they are still growing intellectually. 

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: There is a very strong relationship, going back to classical times. As the rhetoricians in our field put it, rhetoric is a practical art. The research in every part of our field since its beginnings has been aimed at the solution of practical problems. The snobs in our field have always looked down on research or scholarship that has practical ends, but that is foolish. Society will not long support teaching and scholarship that is useless.

Your name: Jim Bradac

Your title: Professor of Communication

Your institution: University of California, Santa Barbara

Your city, state/province, country: Santa Barbara, California, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1970, Northwestern University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Roy Wood

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Probably in a climate of hostility to the study of mundane communication in favor of literature, and hostility to scientific methodology. About 1920 and beyond in speech and journalism.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Historical accident. the fact that communication did spin off from other fields. Methodological diversity is not at all unique to communication. Mainly a strength.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication has always been relatively strong in this regard because of its roots in applied fields. Theory construction has suffered as a result.

Your name: Sandra Braman

Your title: Professor, Department of Communication

Your institution: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Your city, state/province, country: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1988, University of Minnesota

In what field: Journalism and Mass Communication

Who was your advisor: Donald Gillmor

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In my view the field is actually disappearing now in the sense that its boundaries are even less clear than they’ve been in the past as issues involving information, communication, and culture spread across the university. The late 19th and early 20th century saw a number of fields in the social sciences/humanities distinguishing themselves from each other and becoming articulated as disciplines. Thinking about "political economy," for example, resolved into political science (with an interest in power) and economics (which specifically excluded power from its analyses). As a general part of this restructuring of the morphology of higher education, though coming at the tail end of the process, communication programs began to appear by the 1920s.

On the skills side, these programs were responding to the trend towards professionalization; on the theoretical side, there were stimuli encouraging research into various aspects of persuasion fueled both by government interests in propaganda and by corporate interests. Interestingly, however, in this period the most important theoretical and conceptual advances regarding communication -- from John Dewey and his cohort -- remained associated with the older field of sociology rather than immediately migrating to the new "discipline." ollowing World War II, there was a second surge of interest in communication in response to the diffusion of broadcasting technologies, the beginnings of the convergence of computing and communication technologies in the military and then commercially, and the importance of communication to "operations research," or management practices. With the appearance of doctoral programs, the field took the intellectual turn away from questions about the role of communication in social and cultural processes and towards their utility and mechanistic "effects." A third transformation of the field began to take place in the 1990s, when departments were threatened by administrations concerned about what role they played if they were unable to help society respond to and cope with the qualitative changes being wrought by informatization. We are still in this phase of reconceptualizing just what the field is about, since today much of our subject matter is now being taught elsewhere in the university.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The sociological explanation for the diversity you know well, though I’d add that. In part this is a public relations problem -- physics hasn’t yet achieved a consensually acceptable "theory of everything" but it is well accepted that there are numerous theories explaining diverse phenomena. The same consensual acceptance of specialized theories rather than a general theory for communication hasn’t yet been successfully sold. My conceptual explanation is that the concept of communication has never been fully explicated sufficiently to permit its isolation from other social processes. This is in large part, I believe, because so many different phenomena and processes are grouped together under that label. In a sense, communication has never undergone the taxonomic treatment -- beyond the very gross and clearly no longer entirely tenable distinction among levels of analysis from interpersonal to mass -- that fields in the physical sciences went through 100 and more years ago. There are two reasons I believe this multiplicity of approaches has been damaging to the field. First, as operationalized it may contribute to the actualities behind the perception that communication has the worst quality control for publications across the social sciences. We may be not paying enough attention during the peer review process to ensure that those evaluating manuscripts use evaluation criteria appropriate to the work under review, and that criteria across subfields all approximate the same standards in terms of quality of work. Second, the lack of clarity of the field has kept some very good people out of it. Craig Calhoun, for example -- a sociologist who is currently head of the Social Sciences Research Council and whose work is very important to many scholars in communication -- has admitted that it is for this reason that he doesn’t publish in communication journals and has warned graduate students away from important topics such as those arising from the impact of digital technologies because of perceptions of the field. Whether or not Calhoun’s position demonstrates either courage or leadership (neither, in my view), it isexemplary and instructive.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication research serves the public interest in a general and relatively abstract way because it deepens our understanding of the nature of the public, and of community, and how best to build and participate in both in ways that serve social, political, cultural, and economic goals. Communication research

of all kinds COULD serve the public interest if it were used to inform policy-

making that results in laws and regulations dealing with information,

communication, and culture, and sometimes it DOES succeed in doing this. And communication research that results in the development of new policy

alternatives, critiques existing policy, and/or provides insight into the

policy-making process serves the public interest in yet another way.

Your name: Henry Breitrose

Your title: Professor Emeritus, Communication

Your institution: Stanford University

Your city, state/province, country: Stanford, California, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1966, Stanford University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Nathan Maccoby, ably assisted by Wilbur Schramm, Edwin Parker, Richard Carter and other heavy lifters.

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: If I’m not mistaken, Stanford had the first...or one of the first...Communication departments, founded in 1965. The historical situation was probably the realization in the early 1960’s that researchers from seemingly disparate fields (Journalism readership studies, Public Opinion research by political scientists, Audience research by Broadcast programs, International Communication and Communication and Development, etc.) found that they had more in common with each other than with the colleagues in their traditional disciplines. It’s as though the interests of Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, Schramm, and at least some of the Samuel Stouffer "American Soldier" people had congealed. Why? The early 1960’s were a time of great optimism about the ability of the social sciences to engineer change in society, and I believe that many of the founders of the field as a discipline (George Gerbner, Wilbur Schramm, Nathan Maccoby, et al) really wanted to change the world.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Have a look at the first 50 years of any discipline, and notice the lack of discipline. Consult your local Physics department, for that matter, and see if there is any more agreement or orthodoxy than in the Comm department. I believe that it was Euclid who wrote "there is no royal road to mathematics." It’s the same with Communication. I think that there’s another issue as well, having to do with the rejection of reason by the Humanities in the past couple of decades, and the adoption of a series of "theories of everything," which aren’t theories at all, in the sense of accounting for observations, or as Steve Chaffee once defined our work, "making sense of things." I think that empiricism has been under a certain amount of attack, and qualitative studies have been in the ascendancy. My own feeling is that they both deserve attention, and they both require modesty about their claims. John Peters, who is a star qualitative scholar was one of the most competent students we’ve ever had, and excelled in empirical research methods courses. Whether he ever "believed" any of it is moot, but he understood and respected that kind of scholarship.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I believe that changing the world for the better is a very worthwhile goal, and I read "research in the public interest" as meaning precisely that, albeit more modestly stated.

Your name: Judee Burgoon

Your title: Professor of Communication; Professor of Family Studies and Human Development

Your institution: Eller College of Management, University of Arizona

Your city, state/province, country: Tucson, Arizona, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1974 

In what field: Communication and Educational Psychology 

Who was your advisor: William B. Lashbrook and Rogers McAvoy  

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: It has many tributaries from other disciplines because of its unique position at the intersection of so many fields that also concern themselves (albeit not centrally) with verbal and nonverbal messages/displays: rhetoric (which is really "ours" to claim), psychology, journalism, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, ethology, family studies. Depending on what part of the discipline you come from, we lay claim to many of these areas as originating with us. But many other disciplines also claim communication as their purview--testament to the centrality of communication as a fundamental facet of human behavior.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The diversity can be a strength intellectually because we as a field tend to do a better job of seeing the big picture and of trying to synthesize apparently disparate lines of inquiry and methodologies. But it is also our Achilles’ heel because it appears that we have no coherent center, either substantively or methodologically.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Every aspect of what we do can be linked to the public interest, broadly construed, although most may think more in terms of sociopolitical issues. But even work on nonverbal communication and its analysis can be linked to homeland security and therefore, in the public interest.

Your name: Joseph N. Cappella

Your title: Professor

Your institution: U. of Pennsylvania

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1974, Michigan State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Gerald R. Miller & John Hunter

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: This is a long and complicated question. I have seen two treatments of this topic that are of interest and radically different. One is a chapter by Jesse Delia and other a short book by Chaffee and Rogers. The first is an intellectual history that ignores the impact of rhetorical studies and engineering on communication research; the second is a personal history that ignores the intellectual roots in sociology, social psychology, rhetoric, and ag journalism.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The field has roots in both humanities and social sciences. The methods in these two areas are broad and diverse involving textual analysis, empirical observation, quantitative assessment, and historical and cultural criticism. In my judgment the diversity is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength when researchers are not hide-bound to answer only the questions that their tools allow. It is a weakness when some researchers use their methodologies as an ideological weapon to attack the work of others, demean their research and personalities, and transmit these ideologies to their students as a part of their intellectual "training." Intellectual disagreement does not require attack; intellectual disagreement can offer perspective but only if paradigms are treated with respect.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The discipline of communication has much to offer the public through research and criticism about media, health, political process, etc. Historically the field arose from applied questions (e.g. about speech, diffusion, and organizational practices); it has tried to become accepted into the intellectual community by emphasizing theory. Maintaining a clear balance by completing theoretically motivated research in the public interest will advance the field most quickly and make its place in the academy unshakeable.

Your name: Richard F. Carter

Your title: Professor Emeritus of Communication

Your institution: , University of Washington

Your city, state/province, country: Seattle, Washington, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1957, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In what field: Communication Research

Who was your advisor: Malcolm S. MacLean

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Even with the historical restriction, 30 seconds is out of the question. And, of course, there is nothing which is not historical. So use what you will of the following....

*World War II’s bringing together of American and refugee social scientists brought an interdisciplinary mode into being, exposing them to each other as they worked on communication problems (aka: troop orientations), bringing communication to the surface as a field of problematic consequence and, I gather, a prospective field of study in its own right -- especially as there had already been academic studies of communication phenomena (effects, e.g.).

*The federal support of research and the emergence of "research

universities" put a premium on graduate programs, making them attractive to undergraduate vocational programs in journalism and speech that wanted to expand and gain status in these universities.

*The search for faculty for these new graduate programs turned to PhD’s from fields and disciplines that had already shown an interest in communication -- ala Schramm’s "Crossroads." (The UW’s program was interdisciplinary by design, and its faculty all had degrees from other fields.)

*"Spinoff" mistakes the process rather badly. A healthy opportunism and collegial endeavor is more like it.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: "Diversity" has the potential to be a strength, but not if we fail to develop a productive interdependence. The field is very fractionated, with little attention to what each other is doing (sometimes espoused as relativism), defensive argumentation (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative), and lacks an intellectual center (aka: paradigmatic core). Historically, given the contributors to the field’s early development, and our failure to advance as a discipline, the situation is more one of variety than of diversity. We give ourselves more than we deserve if we think ourselves diverse rather than various. (Doesn’t diverse imply some common vector[s]?)

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST:

*Both journalism and speech had histories of a concern for public affairs

long before they became involved in academic setups in communication. (I recall a mid 20th century study that reported the two motives most evident in prospective journalism students were interests in personal expression and public affairs. Wouldn’t speech students have looked pretty much the same then?) They saw it as professionalism. I think intellectuals generally have an interest in public affairs.

*The lack of research applicability is not in the public interest. The methods and theories borrowed from other disciplines have tended to be somewhat barren with respect to the worldly problems implied by an interest in public affairs. Too much "topic plus method" to gain one’s acceptance into the academic community. Not enough attention to the problems which do or should concern the public. (QED, I think. Lacking a foundation in behavioral science, the other disciplines had little to contribute to problem solving. Criticism has emerged instead, but that doesn’t do much to solve problems.)

*Aren’t you glad you asked? I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for an awful long time, so 2 minutes was as reasonable as 2 days. My projected "answer" at this point is four volumes.

Your name: Don Cegala

Your title: Professor of Communication

Your institution: Ohio State University

Your city, state/province, country: Columbus, OH, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1972, Florida State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Robert J. Kibler

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I don’t see communication as a spin off field because our historical roots are as old or older than other field’s.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I think we have such great diversity in part because communication is so complex, requiring many perspectives to be adequately studied. Our diversity is both a strength and weakness. It’s a strength in part because our multiple perspectives keeps us from getting locked into one approach. It’s a weakness in part because we lack a center, or at least appear so to other disciplines.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I see our historical roots grounded in rhetoric and persuasion. In a democracy, persuasion is critical to the "marketplace of ideas."

Your name: Robin Cheesman

Your title: Senior lecturer, Communication Studies

Your institution: Roskilde University

Your city, state/province, country: Roskilde, Denmark

The year you got your PhD: 1975, Roskilde University

In what field: Sociology

Who was your advisor: primary mentors, Karl Erik Rosengren, Ulf Himmelstrand, James Halloran

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: WWII - "The American Soldier" etc - need to understand propaganda. And simultaneously: Propaganda as marketing, Lazarsfeld ("administrative or ciritical" theme?)

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: It IS multidisciplinary by nature: communication is psychological, sociological, organizational, linguistic ... cannot be understood by any single apporach. And yes ;-) - it is a necessary strength and weakness - as representatives of different approaches seldomly understand each other, compete rather than cooperate.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Again: Lazarsfeld! But my own starting point would rather be the "public sphere" approach (Habermas and followers).

Your name: Kathleen D. Clark

Your title: Associate Professor

Your institution: University of Akron

Your city, state/province, country: Akron, Ohio, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1995, Ohio State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Brenda Dervin

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Communication in the form of rhetoric has been with us in the West since the ancient Greeks and is similarly ancient in China and India. In the 20th century, communication as a distinct focus of social science came in the aftermath of WWII at mid-century as scholars began to try to understand the powerful consequences/effects of mass mediated messages and the conditions that led to the war(s). This move involved every level of communication from interpersonal through organizational, institutional, public, national, international, and global.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Any field that involves humans interacting means that communicating is instrumental. Thus, the questions, methods, foci, approaches, etc. of that field may be brought to bear in researching communication phenomena. The diversity is generally a strength as long as there is some self-reflexivity about underlying assumptions, an awareness of what the epistemology of the field will tend to emphasize and exclude.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Any study of communication is involved in critiquing communicative systems and practices with the intention of discovering what is wrong, what works, and/or what could work better for the benefit of human existence, i.e. the public interest.

Your name: Celeste Condit

Your title: Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Speech Communication

Your institution: University of Georgia

Your city, state/province, country: Athens, Georgia, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1982, University of Iowa

In what field: Speech Communication

Who was your advisor: Bruce Gronbeck

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Communication "spun off" from English literature at the turn of the 19th century, because literature was not focused on the real world. Speaking, whether by great individuals or in interpersonal settings was a way of demarcating a kind of language use that was not well respected by English departments, with their focus on "high" art. People interested in such issues needed an independent venue for exploring them where they wouldn’t be constantly deprecated by comparison to the rules and norms of literature.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Communication is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon and therefore requires a complex, multi-faceted approach. Methodological diversity is not just a strength, but a necessity.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: From the time it spun off from English, "speech" communication was focused on PUBLIC discourse, and was pursued because this group of people thought the "public interest" was broader and more pressing than training elites in the sophisticated reading of great literature. Still mostly true.

Your name: Wayne Danielson

Your title: Professor emeritus of journalism

Your institution: University of Texas at Austin

Your city, state/province, country: Austin, Texas, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1957, Stanford University

In what field: Mass communication research

Who was your advisor: Wilbur Schramm

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I think the "spin off" began soon after the beginning of specialized programs of study in speech, journalism, publishing, radio, television, film, etc. Teachers in these specialties came to understand that their intellectual homes were now in the university. To succeed, they needed to do the same things teachers in other fields did. They needed to get organized, set up curricula, do research, write books and articles, present papers at national meetings, achieve national recognition. They realized that they would be judged not by the careers they may have earlier, but by what they did in the university setting. The trend accelerated in the 50s along with the development of schools and colleges of communication, bringing together on campus related and not-so-related programs dealing with communication. The driving force for change came from the faculties, in my opinion, and their desire for acceptance on campus and in academic life in general.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Communication is the hallmark of our species. It is the result of thousands of years of evolution. It is by its nature highly complicated. It is unlikely that we will understand it any time soon. Its study, accordingly, is marked by vastly different methodologies and theories. The diversity is probably a strength in the long run, although it makes communication among scholars difficult and even contentious from time to time as the popularity of different approaches ebbs and flows.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication studies has an enduring interest in public communication and, in particular, with public communication that is supposed to function in the public interest. The mass media of communication are good examples. The mass media are supposed to operate with the public interest in mind. Do they? Could they do a better job? How? Widely accepted criteria are hard to come by in this area of research, and some studies wind up sounding a lot like scolding. We all hope for new ideas, new concepts, new methods and new theories. ICA’s theme for the year is an excellent one, and could, indeed be a theme for the lifetime of the organization.

Your name: Michael X. Delli Carpini

Your title: Dean, Annenberg School for Communication

Your institution: University of Pennsylvania

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1980, University of Minnesota

In what field: Political Science

Who was your advisor: John Sullivan

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: A hard question to answer as no field is "born" at an exact moment and Communication has several discrete lineages, but I’d say the mid-1940s-to-1950s, with earlier roots going back to rhetorical studies, critical studies, and other areas of inquiry from often much earlier times. Answering “Why” the field was born is even harder, but largely the result of a mix of factors: the growth of mass media; fear of their propagandizing effects; concerns about the stability of democracy; and the emergence of new techniques for studying social phenomena.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Our field’s diversity comes largely from its roots in the humanities (e.g., rhetoric), social science (e.g., political science and anthropology), sciences (e.g., information technology, cybernetics, psychology) and professions (e.g.,, law, policy, journalism). So Communication reflects the methodological diversity of the full range of disciplinary approaches and topics. I think this is largely a strength, though I think we could do more multi-method approaches/conversations, rather than be silos. In essence, we are “multi-disciplinary” rather than what we should be, which is inter-disciplinary.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication study has a long history of doing applied work, but I think as a profession we could do much more explicit work aimed at improving the role of media/communication in uncovering, articulating and addressing the public interest. This does not mean only “applied” work, but having a concern/commitment to democratic values inform more work of all kinds in the field.

Name: José Marques de Melo

Title: Emeritus Professor of communication

Your institution: University of São Paulo

Your city, state/province, country: São Paulo, State of São Paulo, Brazil

The year you got your PhD: 1973

In what field: Journalism

Who was your advisor: Rolando Morel Pinto

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In the case of Latin America it occurred around the 80´s with the building of an academic community labeled Comminucation Sciences. The foundation of ALAIC (1978) was a decisive step, preceeded by INTERCOM (Brazil, 1977). Latin American Communication Scholars were fighting to achieve intellectual autonomy because the theories and methods imported from the Social Sciences were insufficient to understand the full complexity of media phenomena. They were wishing to improve mass communicaation in order to create a public consciousness to strengthen democracy.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Diversity is indeed our weakness as a new academic field. We are proud in Latin America of our hybridism (mestizaje), combining the heritage of European humanism and the innovation of the American pragmatism. We contemporarily call this phenonomenon  the utopian pragmatism.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Unfortunately communication studies became at the end of XX century (impact of the declining of Cold War?) too far from the needs of commom people. The institutionalization of our field of studies created an academic elite, too globalized, distant from or biased to the popular cultures. This is generating what I call in my lst book "The Media Sphinx". So, it is very appropriate and suitable that ICA chose this theme in order to rescue the liaison between communication research and the public interest.

Your name: Wolfgang Donsbach

Your title: Full professor, Department of Communication

Your institution: Dresden University

Your city, state/province, country: Dresden, Germany

The year you got your PhD: 1981

In what field: Communications

Who was your advisor: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Besides the fact that the "field of communication" is anything but well-defined: It was a long struggle and began, in different countries in different historical phases, with the recognition of how important public media were. The strongest impulse came from questions on effects of media, e.g. the American Soldier studies on persuasion, or the Lazarsfeld studies on radio use and effects. The more questions arose from the social role of the media, the more the discipline underwent a process of professionalization and identity.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: It is ambivalent. I adhere strongly to the belief that any discipline needs epistemological and methodological borders, if science as a system wants to build and/or maintain its identity and social legitimization. Therefore: Diversity is a strength when it means different topics, different methods, different societal goals that science wants to achieve. It is a weakness if it ends up in a "anything goes" approach where every assertion about reality is perceived as having the same legitimization. I see our field drifting a little bit in this direction recently.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I believe that communication studies started predominantly with questions on what we need to know in order to make democracy, society or the individual "work" along the norms accepted at a given time in a given society. However, today I see many "l’art pour l’art"-studies where scholars just want to do any research that falls into a somewhere accepted given paradigm and that is often irrelevant in terms of its "social value".

Your name: Edward L. Fink

Your title: Professor and Chair, Department of Communication

Your institution: University of Maryland

Your city, state/province, country: College Park, Maryland, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1975, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In what field: Sociology

Who was your advisor: Archibald O.Haller

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: There are a few branches of COMM: 1. The classical rhetoric branch came from philosophy; this split started pretty soon after Greek philosophy was developing. 2. The public speaking branch was developed as a practical tool to help rural folks become "citified" and preachers become better. It was part of rhetoric, but, in the U.S., flourished when it became tied to Midwestern land-grant universities. 3. The social science branch came as social psychology had impact on academic work, starting in the 1950s. It was a way that was felt would garner "new" academic respectability to (1) and (2) above.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: COMM is taught at the elementary and secondary school level. Teacher certification in COMM involves performance, and is often associated with theater and debate. However, at the college level, performance is a part (typically a small part) of COMM, and rhetorical and social scientific approaches predominate. Thus, an association like NCA tries to represents all these branches. Is this a strength? Yes and no. Yes: I learn from colleagues who have other approaches, and who are aware of other literatures. No: Many of the "softer" approaches are chosen by those less willing to be rigorous. In other words, an ethnographer like Goffman spends YEARS working on a problem, and writing with great insight. For some qualitative colleagues that often becomes two focus groups of 8 people each one afternoon! Not all COMMies need be quantitative, but they all need rigor and high standards. 

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Recall Kurt Lewin’s "there’s nothing so practical as a good theory." COMM started as an applied area: How to persuade and influence within the city-state. Preaching continued that emphasis, as did COMM folks helping the (WWII) war effort. The problem is when theory no longer is an essential part of the enterprise.

Your name: Cindy Gallois

Your title: Professor and Director, Center for Social Research in Communication

Your institution: University of Queensland

Your city, state/province, country: Brisbane, Australia

The year you got your PhD: 1976, University of Florida

In what field: Psychology (and communication)

Who was your advisor: Norman Markel

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I would emphasize

-communication scholars like to trace communication back to Aristotle -this reflects the roots of communication in rhetoric

-arguably, communication studies as a field spun off from rhetoric (to the extent that it did - rhetoricians still consider themselves in communication, and many areas of communication are still close to rhetoric) in the 1950s, with the setting up of the organization that became ICA

-there was a desire to give a stronger empirical (data-driven) base to the field, in line with the US emphasis in other social sciences (particularly psychology and sociology) at that time

-this was a US phenomenon - in Europe, the links between rhetoric and communication remained close

-communication studies can also trace its roots in social psychology, sociology, sociolinguistics, cultural studies (to some extent), and political science - I think this was not so much a spin-off as an absorption of these perspectives into various parts of communication, combined with a recognition by some scholars in those disciplines that they needed different theories and methods to study the communication processes they were interested in (so, there are many people in communication departments and centres whose training was in other disciplines - me and most of my students included)

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I would emphasize the multi-disciplinary roots of communication, combined with the importance of communication to almost all the social sciences (and other sciences and humanities as well) - to me, the diversity is a strength, because it allows for multiple approaches to research questions, broad research training for students, and a very synthetic base for theory - downside is that there is endless conflict within the field (robust debate?)

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: In the olden days of rhetoric, the public interest was probably the main focus of communication (at least the public sphere and politics) - more recently, communication went through a period of not being that concerned with applications of research - in the past two decades, however, the public interest has been a strong aspirational focus (viz the many ICA conference themes around this area since this 1980s), not always achieved, but more and more prominent

Your name: Oscar H. Gandy, Jr

Your title: Herbert I. Schiller Term Professor

Your institution: Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1976, Stanford University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: William Rivers

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I have no idea!

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I have no idea!

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: There has certainly been a role for communication scholars in the public policy real; one only needs to recall George Gerbner and his testimony regarding television violence. Of course, there were earlier forays with regard to the ‘threat’ of film, etc.

Your name: Bradley Greenberg

Your title: University Distinguished Professor of Communication, Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media

Your institution: Michigan State University

Your city, state/province, country: East Lansing, Michigan, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1961, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In what field: Mass Communication

Who was your advisor: Percy H. Tannenbaum

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: From journalism sprang mass communication; from speech and rhetoric sprang interpersonal communication and non-verbal communication; from television and radio sprang telecommunication; from libraries, computer studies, business programs sprang information sciences; from small/large groups study in sociology and social psychology sprang organizational communication....etc.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: As a discipline/field matures, new issues arise and new perspectives develop to deal with those new issues in alternative ways. However, inasmuch as ‘communication’ is an amalgam of multiple fields or would-be disciplines, each brought along its own foci, methods, etc. It is a weakness in that there is no core approach recognizable to those inside or outside our field. It is a strength in that it is not intellectually limiting.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The study of mass communication phenomena always has had a base in contemporary public events, i.e., what do the publics get to know and feel from their mass media experiences. Ergo, ot what extent is that knowledge, feeling, and behavior in the public interest?

Your name: Bruce E. Gronbeck

Your title: A. Craig Baird Distinguished Professor of Public Address

Your institution: University of Iowa

Your city, state/province, country: Iowa City, Iowa, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1970, University of Iowa

In what field: Speech and Dramatic Art

Who was your advisor: Donald Cross Bryant

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I take the central question that has driven American moves to conceptualize and theorize communication as the e pluribus unam question: how can a traditionless society create a one out of many without becoming either repressive or fragmented? That question gets answered again and again in American social theory, with "communication" as its central construct.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Because theories arise as answers to a great variety of specific questions asked in highly variable historical circumstances--immigration floods, wartime (decoding, constraining, etc.), technological innovation, etc.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The drive, at least since John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot’s essays, to create spaces for public voice and to motivate citizens to use that voice.

Your name: Lawrence Grossberg

Your title: Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies

Your institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Your city, state/province, country: Chapel Hill North Carolina, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1976, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In what field: communication research

Who was your advisor: James W. Carey

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Communication as a field in the United States is something of an assemblage struggling to continually constitute its fragile unity. It has appeared in different guises (rhetoric, social psychology, media, persuasion, mass communication, to say nothing of performance, or journalism) in any number of different situations. And in different situations, it appeared in different ways--sometimes spinning off, sometimes emerging out of a social concern or a theoretical paradigm. Why--it probably has something to do with our concern for democracy, our fear of totalitarianism, and our ambiguous sense of identity

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: This is the same question as the first, in another guise.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication has always been or is supposed to be a discipline "in the public service" although of course, it is involved in defining and constructing the public as much as it is responding to preset public agendas.

Your name: Hanno Hardt

Your title: Professor of communication

Your institution: University of Ljubljana

Your city, state/province, country: Ljubljana, Slovenia

The year you got your PhD: 1968, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

In what field: journalism/mass communication

Who was your advisor: James Lemert

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Each national environment has its own answers; for the United States it was commercial support (media) and government contracts (WWII and the cold war) with specific, communication-related issues to settle.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Communication is a fundamental, existential process at both, individual and social levels. thus many disciplines confront its workings. There is strength

in diversity.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Again, in the U.S. American context, the social sciences have developed as participants in the building/improvement/reinforcement of society; this includes communication studies as an offshoot of sociology, in particular, (e.g., the progressive era); and "research in the public interest" is an old progressive theme, albeit under new conditions (e.g., against commercialization and privatization).

Your name: Randall Harrison

Your title: Former Research Psychologist and Adjunct Professor of

Communication

Your institution: University of California Medical Center, San Francisco

Your city, state/province, country: San Francisco, California, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1964, Michigan State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Malcolm MacLean

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: There are political, economic, and intellectual reasons. You want the whole nine yards? Well, this does relate to the theme "research in the public interest" so -- here goes... The early U.S. universities, on the east coast, were modeled after the British rather than continental universities. The Ivy League was where the young of the elite went to learn about literature and art, to learn how to think and debate, and prepare for their roles as future leaders. In those early days, the primary "media" were the pulpit, the stage, and the newspaper. And a number of the early universities were private, often with religious backing. As the U.S. empire moved across the continent, each state invested in public universities where the future leaders of that state could get a "higher" education. Typically, each state also had a number of "normal schools," which trained teachers for elementary and high school. In the 1800s the federal government stimulated universities with the "land grant" act. Tracks of land were granted to states so they could do agricultural research and foster the training of a largely agrarian population for the rapidly developing industrial age. As a result, a number of midwestern and

western states ended up with a University of (State) and then a (State) State University, e.g., the University of Ohio and Ohio State University. After WW II, we saw another rapid growth spurt. The GI Bill provided college funds for many veterans who, otherwise, would never have enjoyed (or suffered) a higher education. Some of the State Universities especially were able to expand during this period because they had open agricultural fields while many of the older universities were landlocked into expensive urban settings. The Korean and Vietnam wars stimulated a further flow of students. Males could often get deferred if they went to college. And those who did serve got some GI Bill type assistance when they got out. Similarly, the federal government began providing student loans -- to be paid back later, when the new grad was presumably more affluent. By the 1950s, communication was embedded in many different university programs. Rhetoric, Public Address, and Elocution had increasingly given way to "Speech" departments. (Though when I started teaching in the University of California system in the 1970s, "Rhetoric" was still in the department name -- a nod to the Ivy League tradition.) Meanwhile, most midwest and western schools had a "Journalism school" or a "Department of Journalism." In part, what communication training was called reflected the view that educators had about how best to learn how to be an effective communicator. Traditionally, you learned by finding an experienced mentor and working and training under such a person until you became an acceptable "professional" yourself. Rhetoric and Public Address, of course, drew on Aristotelian logic, and the great discourses of the past. Similarly, in Journalism you were likely to learn a bit about the history of the field, but mostly it was a matter of practice, practice, practice. By the 1950s, social science was increasingly being explored for insights about the communication process. "Communication" evolved as a way of talking about that whole process -- for example, the encoder, whether someone using speech or the written word. It also drew attention to the receiver of the message -- and the broader question of communication impact. Finally, "communication" encompassed all media, not just speech and journalism, but also the rapidly emerging fields of radio, television, the computer, cross cultural exchanges, et al. As a political sidebar, some universities found it advantageous to re-organize their various communication-type activities into Departments or Colleges of Communication. It helped them with their funding problems -- and it attracted innovative students. In the 1950s, the main paradigm in psychology was the one provided by B. F. Skinner. Psychology itself was on the threshold of change, however, and increasingly, it and the other social sciences provided new theories and methodologies that "Communication" could borrow, adopt and expand. One early example might be the "semantic differential." Suddenly, the young research scholar had a tool that would produce numbers -- and that allowed him (or increasingly her) the opportunity to do all sorts of things that seemed very scientific indeed. Increasingly, you had a generation of communication scholars and

researchers -- folks who never themselves planned to use communication except to teach students and write papers about their research. They were not aiming for a career in the news room or in the halls of congress. When ICA was launched, it took the Communication label -- and in an expansionist gesture, it included International, though at the time it was more wish than fact. Researchers who had been trained with a social science, research

orientation were likely to feel very much at home in ICA. Though

increasingly the old Speech Association of American and the Association for Education in Journalism were by then including solid, data-based research in their programs.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: It’s an evolutionary process -- driven by human ambition and curiosity. Someone explores a new approach -- like a tree sending our a new shoot. That gains attention and acceptance -- like the new shoot getting sunlight and nourishment and eventually developing into a sturdy branch. Then others are encouraged to follow. But eventually, that branch may get lopped off -- someone comes up with a particularly cutting analysis or demonstration of it’s infertility for future growth. Or attention moves on -- higher branches of the tree now begin to shade out the old flourishing undergrowth. Then new shoots and branches start elsewhere. I don’t think diversity is a weakness. I do suspect that -- returning to Topic A -- that the "public interest" becomes a strong pruning tool for a field like Communication. If you are using public resources and can’t demonstrate that somehow what you are doing will not only enhance your own notoriety but will also serve some public good -- then you are in danger of ending up "out on a limb."

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: At the dawn of the atomic age, Einstein remarked sadly, "Everything has changed but the way we think." That sage thought was probably never more pertinent than it is today. Unfortunately, what scholars have learned about communication is not always used in the "public interest" in the broadest sense -- our ability to sustain life on this small planet. All too often, it seems to have been purloined by "spin doctors" who try to convince the populace that their (candidate, product, approach, etc.) is best. The real challenge for the future is: Are we going to be able to use what we know about communication to help us learn how to think differently -- rather than to just reinforce our traditional prejudices? Indeed a worthy challenge for the bright young minds that I hope are entering our field.

Your name: John W. Higgins

Your title: Associate Professor of Mass Communication

Your institution: Menlo College

Your city, state/province, country: Atherton, California, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1994, Ohio State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Brenda Dervin

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Early part of 20th century, around the time of the introduction of electronic mass media: Radio. Rise of authoritarianism in Europe and, to a differing degree, in US; rise of socialism, fascism. Increasing bureaucracy and centralization of organizations. Did the rise of these forces connect in some way with electronic mass media? Rise of Lazarsfeld, Chicago School, Frankfurt School -- and the phenomena they were investigating stem from this time period & foci of attention.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Computers are no longer only in computer science. They are mainstreamed. In the same way, communication is a human enterprise the investigation of which is entered into from many different pathways. It’s a strength . . . and a weakness. Strength in diversity also means it will not be totally focused in one direction.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Frankfurt school and Critical Cultural Studies and Latin American Critical scholars -- all point to the praxis of practice and reflection . . . for changing society . . . rooted in everyday world. Connections between practitioner/scholars and scholar/ practitioners are crucial to this praxis. However, this was before Critical Theory/Cultural studies became just another ivory tower jargon-filled academic exercise, removed from the day to day struggle to change the world.

Your name: Youichi Ito

Your title: Professor (Policy Management)

Your institution: Keio University - Shonan Fujisawa

Your city, state/province, country: Higashikaigan Minami, Japan

The year you got your MS & MA: 1973, Boston University; 1978, Tufts University

In what field: mass communication, political science

Who was your advisor: Francis Earle Barcus; Robert R. Smith; H.A. Ryan

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The question itself seems to include some "Western bias" (probably for the better in this case). It is true that the history of academic disciplines in the West has been the history of "spinning off" from larger or more comprehensive systems of knowledge such as philosophy, history, and science. Outside of Western civilization, however, this has not necessarily been the case. As I cannot spare the time to write a long explanation, let me limit the subject to science only. There has existed "scientific knowledge" outside the West since ancient times especially in the fields of astronomy, botany, zoology, natural history, and even economics. However, the situation outside the West (before the Western influence in the 19th century) was like that in Europe before the "scientific revolution" in the 17th century. Scientific knowledge outside the West before the 19th century was a servant of some practical or pragmatic purpose such as calendar making, medicine, machinery, or public policy. In other words, although scientific knowledge existed, THE SCIENCE as a "system of knowledge" did not exist. Outside the West, scientific knowledge has existed independently as fragmented knowledge in various fields without being systematized or connected to each other. Therefore, there has not been the "spinning off" process. As for scientific knowledge regarding communication, the oldest

would be rhetoric. However, as it is too old, let us start with a more

modern knowledge. In late 19th and early 20th century Japan, many books were written on journalism, the idea of freedom of speech in the West, and so on, but as these subjects are normative rather than scientific, let us skip them. Many communication historians in Japan write that "scientific" (in the non-Western sense) research on communication started right after the First World War (1914-1918) as studies of propaganda and public opinion and had an additional spurt of growth right after the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) as studies of rumor and panic. In other words, serious studies on these subjects started in Japan as early as in the West. However, what researchers actually did was to examine successful cases and failed cases and try to acquire insights regarding effective methods for achieving their goals. The "scientific way of thinking" or "rigorous scientific methods" such as hypothesis testing, detailed theorizing, experimenting, and statistical processing, was not fully known or used by Japanese experts at that time. It would be only after the Second World War that Japanese social scientists caught up with the West in these "scientific processing" techniques.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The diversity of foci is caused by the nature of communication, that is, communication has to do with a large variety of social phenomena. As for the vast variety of approaches, methodologies, and methods, I don’t think it is limited only to communication studies. It is common to almost all human and social studies. One of the most important reasons for the vast variety, especially when compared with the natural sciences, is that humans cannot change the rules of nature but can modify at least to some extent social rules. In other words, be it good or bad, studies on human and social phenomena can be easily "ideologized" unlike the natural sciences. In the field of ideology, there exists a vast variety of "truth". The diversity is probably a weakness, but we will have to live with it anyway because the social sciences are not perfect.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I am sorry, I don’t have an answer now. I will think about it.

Your name: Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Your title: Professor, Department of Film & Media Studies

Your institution: University of Copenhagen

Your city, state/province, country: Copenhagen, Denmark

The year you got your PhD: Dr.phil (this is Europe :-) 1986, University of Aarhus, Denmark

In what field: Media studies

Who was your advisor: primary mentor, Hans Arndt

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In Europe, largely from the 1960s, with consolidation in the 1970-80s. The background was partly the increasing and evident centrality of media in culture and society (you cannot not study the media), partly the reassessment of ‘culture’ which was then taking place across the high-low divide, as associated in part with ‘68.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Being sources of power, money, as well as meaning, the modern media require humanistic, social-scientific, as well as engineering approaches. I’m a firm believer in the strength of diversity beyond either disciplinary imperialism or apartheid.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I see media and communication research in the public interest as a responsibility of intellectuals and of the academy as such which follows from mediated modernity.

Your name: Astrid Kersten

Your title: Professor of Management

Your institution: La Roche College

Your city, state/province, country: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1989, University of Pittsburgh

In what field:communication

Who was your advisor: Trevor Melia

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: See 2 below, perhaps - I am not sure I can really give a reliable account of the historical facts.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I think that diversity is definitely strength - however, I am not convinced that there really is that much diversity. Or perhaps, more specifically, I think that the diversity that exists, exists in a segregated, separated fashion -- people with different scientific convictions, practices and approaches "live" in separate departments, journals and conference panels and rarely connect with each other. This is of course not unique to the communication discipline but it has been a disappointing outcome of the dialogue efforts spearheaded by people such as yourself [senior editor of this document] 2 decades ago. The diversity itself I think was generated more than anything by the field’s inherent interdisciplinary nature - communication is most usefully understood as a process/behavior/practice that involves psychological, physical, cultural, political, economic and structural elements. This interdisciplinary origin was a wonderful opportunity in that the greatest creativity usually emerges at the intersection between perspectives, peoples and practices.  However, I think its persistent efforts to define itself as an independent, autonomous discipline has cut it off from its multidisciplinary origin and has resulted in a much more narrow, isolationist and parochial view of the world.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I am not sure. One could read it positively as a revival of some of the ongoing thematic of critical studies and their persistent interest in improving the human condition. However, I am not sure that that was the intent and I don’t know that the discipline as a whole, or ICA for that matter, has a consensual reading of what constitutes " the public interest".

Your name: Hak-Soo Kim

Your title: Professor

Your institution: Sogang University

Your city, state/province, country: Seoul, South Korea

The year you got your PhD: 1982, University of Washington

In what field: Poltical and Science Communications

Who was your advisor: Merrill Samuelson

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I think that both media affluence and influence, real or perceptual, made our field’s spin-off from sociology, political science or English, beyond the wartime emphasis on communication effects. This applies to South Korea, too.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Many approaches are constructive unless we are captive in the Kaplan’s "trained incapacity." However, aren’t we captive in that "the more we are trained one way, the more we don’t try the other ways"? I am so often frustrated by facing those researchers.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication research has long been well funded by and prospered with sponsors’ perspectives. It is needless to say that those sponsors are the government, political parties, private corporations, and so-called powers. This is attested by rampant media or communication effects studies that are mostly futile. Now, it’s time to bring back the public’s point of view. We may have to give up effects. Instead, we may have to respect the public’s active inquiry more seriously; that would serve to the public’s interest in the genuine sense. Then, we have to re-define functions of communicating, don’t we?

Your name: Mark L. Knapp

Your title: Jesse H. Jones Centennial Professor in Communication & University of Texas Distinguished Teaching Professor

Your institution: University of Texas

Your city, state/province, country: Austin, Texas, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1966, Pennsylvania State University

In what field: Speech or Speech Communication

Who was your advisor: Harold Zelko

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Scholars from different fields of study (psychiatry, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, business, etc.) focused their research and writing on communication issues and were eager to pair up with scholars from speech and broadcasting/journalism in edited volumes and at conferences. They took ideas from each other--a fertilization process--and spawned a new generation of scholars with their intellectual DNA. The easy part was an inherent interest in some form of human and/or animal communication by individual scholars; the more complicated part of the process was bringing them together in various ways (edited volumes, conferences, citing their work) and blending their ideas in a way that these diverse scholars and their progeny identified with an emergent set of ideas that could be called "a field"--and identified strongly enough to consider it their primary field of study.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Diverse approaches/methods seems compatible with a diverse field and diverse ideas, but diverse approaches/ methods also make a lot of common sense if you acknowledge that any given question can be examined from a number of different perspectives. Diversity is a strength, in my opinion, from the perspective of seeking answers to questions. It has been a weakness from a public relations perspective--that is, getting other entities (administrators from other fields, government granting agencies, etc.) to recognize "what we do." And to be honest, our diversity makes it hard for some of our Communication colleagues to speak articulately about what is is that we in Communication "do."

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Not everyone who came to Communication in the early days had a "practical" or in a related sense, a "public interest" orientation...but most did. So from the beginning Communication has had a strong focus on the processes of getting everyday work done...answering questions that are in the public interest--including questions that involve less public behavior which is still in the public interest--e.g., marital communication.

Your name: Gary Kreps

Your title: Chief, Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch 

Your institution: National Cancer Institute 

Your city, state/province, country: Bethesda, Maryland, USA 

The year you got your PhD: 1979, University of Southern California

In what field: Communication 

Who was your advisor: T.Harrell Allen 

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In the 60’s and 70’s the communication field began to assert its independence and create independent departments, breaking away from fields like English and Journalism, with a focus on speaking, rather than writing. During the same time-frame, the field broke off from psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, with a focus on messages and meanings, rather than on personalities and social structures. It also broke away from political science and public opinion, with a focus on media, rather than on political forces. In many ways this was a movement to establish unique communication departments and educational programs in colleges and universities. I believe the move for independence had as much to do with the opportunity to focus directly and exclusively on communication phenomena, as well as to build legitimate organizational structures to employ communication scholars and teach communication students. This move for disciplinary independence coincided with the growth and diversification of modern universities, as well as with growth in external funding for communication research, particularly for mass communication scholars, from the US Department of Defense, who were interested in propaganda and the use of media as channels for persuasion and social influence. There was also growing interest in information channels and information dissemination with the growth of radio, television, and other mass media channels.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The different approaches come both from the many generative fields of study from which communication derived, as well as from the many influences and applications of communication knowledge in different aspects of life and social organization. I think this is a very good thing that makes communication a most relevant and important area of inquiry.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: This is a very relevant topic for communication scholars, especially given our multidisciplinary history and the extremely broad range of potential applications for communication knowledge. Communication is such a very relevant area of inquiry because it is a central process that influences modern life and social organizations. Research on communication can provide insights into the uses of communication in public life. It behooves us, as engaged communication scholars, to use the information gleaned from the best communication research, to address significant social issues and help to enhance the quality of modern life.   

Your name: Klaus Krippendorff

Your title: Gregory Bateson term professor for cybernetics, language and culture, Annenberg School for Communication

Your institution: University of Pennsylvania 

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1967, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In what field: communication

Who was your advisor: Howard Macklay, Ross Ashby, etc

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The inability of journalists to cope with the new media, the emergence of information theory as a hoped-for scientific theory, and the foresight of a few scholars like Schramm to create an institute for communication research 

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Can be both. But i tend to see it as a loss of a clear paradigm. The early communication paradigm did not quite work. Communication scholars looked elsewhere and other disciplines looked for communication studies as a new panacea, alas in vain, but here they are.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Mass communication research is naturally tied to the public, to citizenship, not necessarily to corporations. i do not know how other colleagues will interpret the conference theme but they could see it as a turn to not merely do effects studies but also consider how communication research could serve the wider good. i doubt though that many attendees will be as critical as they could.

Your name: Dan McDonald

Your title: Professor, School of Journalism and Communication

Your institution: Ohio State University

Your city, state/province, country: Columbus, Ohio, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1983, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In what field: Mass Comm

Who was your advisor: Jack McLeod

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: A tricky question - and I guess it depends on if you mean spin out or spin off. I guess if we’ve got to say spin off I’d put a date on it as Berelson’s field obituary in 1959, but that’s more of a reaction. You could say the end of WWII is a better date because after the war there was still a pretty intense feeling that communication needed to be studied, but the sense of urgency that brought psychologists and sociologists to the study of communication had passed. So, it had a sense of legitimacy as something that could be studied, but people from other fields did not feel a patriotic duty to study it. 

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Primarily, I attribute it to insecurity. People are generally afraid of appearing close-minded, so the field in general tends to accept anything and everything as valid. The cost is evident in the lack of acceptance as a discipline in many universities, by many funding agencies, etc. If we were narrower, more strictly defined, subfields, we could progress more rapidly within each subfield and have a way of knowing something that fit within a particular approach. Insight provided by other approaches could then be described as fitting within that other approach, and as a separate way of knowing, not something to be integrated until knowledge in each subfield had progressed to the point where it was necessary. Instead, calls to integrate leave the field in a jumbled mess. Different approaches provide different answers. Paradigms cannot develop. That may be good, or it may be bad. As an academic field or discipline, I believe it hurts us tremendously; as individuals, it may be a good thing.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The earliest empirical research on communication that I’m aware of (1890s) was concerned about the public interest. The public interest led to research efforts during both world wars and afterward, and, if you accept my answer to #1, that would lead directly to the founding of the field.

Your name: Ed McLuskie

Your title: Professor, Communication

Your institution: Boise State University 

Your city, state/province, country: Boise, Idaho, USA 

The year you got your PhD: 1975, University of Iowa

In what field: Mass Communication 

Who was your advisor: Hanno Hardt 

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The short answer makes the "situation" long: the relation between capitalism and professionalism. J-schools were born in 1905 in the Midwest at the behest of what we know today as commercial PR people. Chris Simpson locates it in the vanilla revolution of Lazarsfeld and the rest of the "Big Four" to conceal psychological warfare through the launch of Public Opinion Quarterly and its cousins. We can all quibble. But it’s hard to deny the linkage in the academy to specialization and career-ism. In fact, that history remains an agenda item. Why not solicit the young & old to write that one?

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Easy. We have failed to actually create, for scientific approaches, a genuine "paradigm" (paradigm dialogues sometimes work, but not always, and only then when "paradigm" is treated as a non-Kuhnian metaphor); or, for philosophical approaches, we have failed to create a discourse over the philosophy of communication. Instead, we have allowed society -- i.e., capitalism -- to create what is in fact a cafeteria. One might as well ask what a cafeteria’s Sushi has to do with a hamburger -- beyond protein, that is. That’s our problem. Postured as specific PhD programs might be, there is not a "field" or "discipline" when the academic world enclaves discourses as specialized.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Well, there is none except to create the acceptance of a paper at an incestuous conference. Glossed over by the theme is the point that there is no such thing as a "public" -- except as a methodologist’s construct for "data." As you know very well, there is no public sphere today. Against that background, what the hell does "public interest" mean? All of which leads to the necessity to lecture -- yes lecture -- PhD programs on their failure to deliver reflexive minds to the field. In universities like mine, the consequences are a grand giving up on the critical-theoretical-empirical-philosophical potential of the young entering increasingly technical institutes masquerading as universities.

Your name: Denis McQuail

Your title: Visiting Professor, Politics and International Relations

Your institution: University of Southhampton (Retired Professor of Communication, University of Amsterdam)

Your city, state/province, country: Southhampton, UK

The year you got your PhD: 1967, University of Leeds

In what field: sociology

Who was your advisor: unknown

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Circumstances of new media perceived as bringing new problems, uncertainties, opportunities coincided with new methods of social sciences and new thinking about society. Probably correct to link social science of the time (where communication largely belonged if anywhere) with social problem solving. Public interest initially defined in terms of these ‘problems’. Why communication acquired own identity less clear, but it was a gradual process which went hand in hand with expansion and differentiation of the academy. In that view it was quite a normal

development. It is no more or less capable of independent existence than most other fields.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Diverse character of issues to deal with. Many relevant other disciplines. The topics had intrinsic interest for diverse people and offered a number of unexplored frontiers to cross and explore. To some extent this opening up has continued to ‘move west’. Diversity is probably inevitable in this field and has strengths and weaknesses. Intellectually, I think the strengths outweigh the weaknesses.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: In early days as noted the social problem solving goal was more less clearly defined as or claimed to be in the public interest, whether benefits delivered or not. The field has developed at a time of great change and uncertainty in the communicative area of social organization. This is a problematic topic, since public interest can be claimed for many different kinds of fundamental research, whatever the ostensible topic. Most of us I suppose have worked at the public expense in universities and the goals of the ICA are formulated in a compatible way. However, as said, this needs some further exploration.

Your name: Bella Mody

Your title: Professor of Communicatiion

Your institution: Michigan State University

Your city, state/province, country: East Lansing, Michigan, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1980, Gujarat University

In what field: Psychology

Who was your advisor: C.T. Bhopatkar

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: What historical institutional conditions enabled Wilbur Schramm, Dallas Smythe and others to start the first Dept of Comm at in the 1950s?

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Context-specificity of communication as human and social study.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Habermas defines it best for me.

Your name: Horace Newcomb

Your title: Lambkin Kay Chair for the Peabodys; Professor of Telecommunication

Your institution: University of Georgia

Your city, state/province, country: Athens, Georgia, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1969, University of Chicago

In what field: English (American Literature)

Who was your advisor: John Cawelti

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In my view, the "field" developed primarily on conjunction with the rapid development of electronic mass media. Some attention paid to radio research, etc. and certainly some to the influence of propaganda and PR between the two wars. But it was with television’s spread that many comm studies programs really grew. The relation to interpersonal ("speech departments"), journalism, and media productions programs (radio-TV-film units/ departments) was also reconfigured. This has remained much the same with development of newer electronic technologies.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The multiple approaches derive in part from the histories of the combined fields listed above and from the ways research projects were altered by the interactions. The reliance on more traditional social scientific approaches was driven, in part, by the need to have "empirical" evidence to present to social planners, policy makers, and granting agencies, as well as on assumptions that the conclusions reached by these techniques explained much that needed to be explained. Approaches developed from traditional humanities fields (literary, film, philosophical, historical, some sociological approaches), suggested that there were more complex questions at play, questions not easily answered by social scientific approaches. My sense is that the diversity is strength. Much good work is done on the "margins," where different approaches and methods address the same problem and force researchers to reconsider their conclusions. This is an advantage of being a "field" and not a "discipline."

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The historical relationship is one of minimal success, tending toward failure. It is very difficult for academic researchers to "make a case" for much of their work, especially that with no immediate visible "utility." This also tends to push toward "usable" results that are sometimes flawed. Another problem comes from close examination of what some in the "public" arena consider trivial. A larger problem comes in trying to the "public," and even more so, public "interest." In my view, questions surrounding "the public" are central to social life from mid-20th century on, but without serious attention to the core concept, there is little reason to assume that anyone in any field can seriously claim to contribute to the public interest.

Your name: Kaarle Nordenstreng

Your title: Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication

Your Institution: University of Tampere

Your city, state/province, country: Tampere, Finland

The year you got your PhD: 1969, University of Helsinki

In what field: Psychology

Who was your advisor: Kai von Fieandt

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF THE FIELD: In Finland it happened as early as in the 1920s when journalism was established as an academic field in the predecessor of my university, a college of social sciences -- four decades earlier than in other Scandinavian countries (give me a break to explain why). But this was rather an educational than scientific emergence. The real distinction took place in the 1960s when my university redirected its professorship according to the American pattern of mass communication research. The academic copying was inspired by the spirit of modernization and the growth of television which began to support audience research (I was there since the beginning in 1965).

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Both. But today I mostly warn about diversity turning into surfing. The rapidly expanded field has become more and more differentiated and the recent development of convergence has not stopped this tide. Rather the contrary, new media, internet, etc have given further grounds for specialized approaches in media studies, often gaining the status of another major subject and discipline in academic nomenclature. With such a trend the field is both losing its healthy roots to basic disciplines

(sociology, political science, linguistics, literature, etc) and is also

coming more and more dependent of empirical and practical aspects of reality. This means typically applied research serving existing institutions,

i.e. admninistrative instead of critical research. It is an unhealthy illusion to celebrate the popularity of media studies with the distinction of an independent discipline or several disciplines. I would call for serious

soul-searching and critical examination of the identity of the field. It is

time again to return to the crossroads of Schramm, Berelson & al.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Sure, social communication means by definition strong links to public interest. But the direction and political significance of the relationship is another story, which goes beyond the 30 seconds limit.

Your name: Ed Parker

Your title: President

Your institution: Parker Telecommunications (former Stanford Prof)

Your city, state/province, country: Gleneden Beach. Oregon, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1960, Stanford University

In what field: Communications

Who was your advisor: Wilbur Schramm

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The primary origin was the need for journalism schools and departments in major universities to develop a research orientation and PhD programs in order to retain academic respectability (and successfully compete for academic budgets). To a lesser extent speech departments suffered the same problem and the result was often an academic merger of speech departments into schools or departments of journalism.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The professional associations for the field of communication had origins in either the Association for Education in Journalism or in the professional association for faculty in speech departments. The group that originated in the behavioral research side of AEJ tended be more statistical and quantitative, possibly because of the connections to public opinion polling and survey research, even though there was a separate association for that group (American Association for Public Opinion Research). I believe the diversity is a strength. Even though I am personally committed to a rigorous quantitative and statistical approach, I don’t believe in any "One True Religion."

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST:

The origin of much public interest research was the post world war two development of scientific public opinion polling--stimulated in part because of the dramatic failure of presidential election polling in the election of President Truman. That strain has continued and evolved since then, but has its origins in the AEJ and AAPOR branches of early communication studies.

Your name: Linda L. Putnam

Your title: Professor, Department of Communication

Your institution:Texas A&M University

Your city, state/province, country: College Station, TX, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1976, University of Minnesota

In what field: Organizational Communication

Who was your advisor: Ernest Bormann

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: It seems that the field developed in several waves with multiple strands. The early development of speech spun off from English departments in the early 1920’s through hot debates about oral communiation and its relationship to written communication. Rhetoricians also debated the role of language, praxis, and the art/science of public persuasion as part of this process. A second strand of communication scholars appeared in the studies of attitude change, media, and audiences--emanating from social sciences--Lasswell on persuasion, Schramm on mass communication, Lewin on groups and social systems, Lazarsfeld on mass communication effects, and Wiener/Shannon on cybernetics. A third strand is less identified as the foundation of the field per se, but clearly has had great influence in the theoretical thinking of scholars through the Chicago school of sociologists (Simmel, Mead, Cooley--symbolic interactionism, Marx and critical schools,Dewey and pragmatism, and Darwin and evolutionary theories of communication). These latter schools of thought were influences rather than fundamental pretext for the development of a field. Hence, scholars who have a primary interest in communication per se adapted and drew from these thinkers.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The history of the field, as delineated above, offers one explanation for the many approaches, foci, and methods in the field. Each of this founding areas has spun off into a number of branches that have led to new content and problem areas of the field as well as sub-areas. Given the different roots of the field it is not surprising that the discipline (as an intersection of diverse schools of thoughts) has developed a myriad of approaches. I personally think that diversity is a strength. The concept of requisite variety (borrowed from cybernetic theory) would support this stance. Basically, a field must be as complex as the phenomenon it studies. Our requisite variety in many ways reflects the complexity and pervasiveness of the concepts, processes, and patterns of communication that we study.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I track the historical relationship of research in the public interest back to the rhetorical roots of our field in that oral communication was the primary means of interacting socially, developing community, and promoting collective action. Classical rhetorical scholars remind us regularly that communication was the public interest. Although I think we have broadened what we mean by the public interest since early rhetorical practices, I think our field has remained rooted in praxis--whether it is policy making, public consumption of the media, media effects on public opinion, public relations, health information, and technological dissemination. In effect, the public interest has been a driving force in the research questions we ask and in the role of scholarship we play.

Your name: Ron Rice

Your title: Rupe Professor, Department of Communication

Your institution: UC Santa Barbara

Your city, state/province, country: Santa Barbara, California, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1982, Stanford University

In what field: Communication Research

Who was your advisor: William Paisley

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Concerns about propaganda from both WWI and WWII; rise of audience research with introduction of radio; influx of European sociologists and social psychologists during and after WWII; growth urban studies and concern over transformation of communities and rise of anonymous, mass society; possibly rise of grad education with WWII needs and G.I. bill; philosophers of meaning and education early/mid century; influx of immigrants after turn of century and thus increased concern for language, culture, training; spread of telephone, cheap newspapers, increased public literacy, muckraking, government regulations, corporate organization, all around turn of century. Etc.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I see diversity as a strength. I like to say: think of two dimensions: rigorous/good research and weak/poor research on one dimension, and "qualitative" and "quantitative" on another. (We could easily add other dimensions, such as theory/applied, etc.) Many people collapse these two dimensions, trying to impose the "good" "bad" dimension onto one of the approaches. But we want rigorous/good research no matter the approach, and there are PLENTY of examples of weak/poor research in ALL approaches. Paisley argues that Comm is a process, not a content field, so we are interested in ways of understanding common processes across many domains. So we learn, and like, and need, to use multiple approaches. Because of that, and the inherently murky boundaries across the humanist/rhetoric/language/interpretative aspects, and the social scientist/behavior/attitude/analytical aspects, of communication processes, there is naturally an integration as well as conflict among very different epistemological approaches. It’s also due to different traditions of communication schools and departments -- from speech, rhetoric and drama; radio, TV and journalism; telecommunications and production; social psychological/social science; and policy (thus economics and law).

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Many would argue that the study of communication INHERENTLY should be oriented toward the public interest, because it is inherently social, based on interaction among actors. Also because images and symbols have potentially strong influences (from culture to marketing) so that all communication has potential implications. Possibly much more relevant to the US is that the Constitution places great emphasis on the role of speech, the press, informed citizenry, and a marketplace of ideas. So communication is a fundamental component of the public interest, from media industries to individual opinions.

Your name: David Ritchie

Your title: Professor

Your institution: Portland State University

Your city, state/province, country: Portland, Oregon, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1987, Stanford University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Steve Chaffee

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Back when it was unfashionable to be applied, English didn’t want Journalism. Then they didn’t want public speaking. Now they’d like to have them back. Meanwhile, Psychology studies much of what I think really interesting about communication, and they are happy to keep doing it. That’s why we are interdisciplinary. 

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Many people including myself are attracted by the freedom and open-endedness of the concept, communication. That is a great strength. It is also a great weakness. We are so many disciplines that we often seem like we’re not really a discipline at all, at least not in any sense compatible with the multiple definitions of the word "discipline."

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: All research is in the public interest if it is intellectually honest, because it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Your name:  Holli A. Semetko

Your title: Vice Provost for International Affairs, Director of the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning and Professor of Political Science

Your institution: Emory University

Your city, state/province, country: Atlanta, Georgia, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1987, London School of Economics & Political Science

In what field: Political Science

Who was your advisor: Jay Blumler, Colin Seymour-Ure (and Tom Nossiter)

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Election campaign and campaign effects research originally conducted in the US in the 40s and 50s by political sociologists, and in the 60s by communication scientists interested in campaign effects broadly defined to include not only becoming mobilized to vote (turnout), or vote choice (party/candidate), but also knowledge gain, awareness of issues, issue-salience (agenda-setting), etc.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Just as everyone has something to say about television because they watch it (or don’t), scholars can be found in all disciplines who think about communication aspects of their topic. Diversity is nevertheless definitely a strength in my opinion.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: As the media nowadays are increasingly focused on the bottom-line, which may or may not coincide with "the public interest", communication researchers should feel even more of an obligation to conduct research in "the public interest."

Your name: Lawrence Sarbaugh

Your title: Professor (Retired) of Communication

Your institution: Michigan State University

Your city, state/province, country: East Lansing, Michigan, USA (now residing in Ann Arbor, Michigan)

The year you got your PhD: 1967, Michigan State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: David Berlo, with committee members Hideya Kumata, Irv Bettinghaus, and Malcolm MacLean.

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: When I went to U of Ill. for my masters, I had a course with Wilbur Schramm. I tend to think of him as the one who pulled the various disciplines together into something called human communication. If you look at his books, they contain chapters by people from various disciplines. -- psychology, sociology, political science, mass media, anthropology. In the seminar there were professors from each of these fields sitting in and contributing. It was intimidating for a little old agr extension person who had just become an agr editor in the extension service. I’ll try to remember some names: William Albig from Sociology- public opinion formation; Charles Osgood from psychology ( work on meaning); Charles Swanson from the mass media area. At Michigan State, of course we had Iwao Ishino, anthropology, Eugene Jacobs, psychology, Bruce Smith from political science to name a few .

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I think the diversity is a strength. I’ve always thought one risk in scholarship was for it to become to specialized and insulated from related fields. As for the diversity of methods , foci and methodologies, I always felt one of the best SCA conferences we had on intercultural was when we asked a half dozen different persons to lead work groups on the application of different theoretical approaches to communication questions. We had rhetoricians, systems theorists, group process theorists, mass media panel, etc....One of the intercultural books put out each year in the 70’s contained a summary of the work of each of the groups. I had felt that too much of intercultural writings and teaching was based on anecdotal reports with no effort to construct a theoretic base to guide our study and research. The philosophy of science courses at MSU gave a push in that direction. I think too many programs lacked the philosophy of science perspective in their work, and probably still do.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: I think all communication studies are, or at least should be, in the public interest, interpreting that term broadly. The basic question I believe is how individuals and groups relate to one another to meet their needs and resolve conflicts peacefully.

Your name: Jan Servaes

Your title: Head, School of Journalism and Communication

Your institution: University of Queensland

Your city, state/province, country: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

The year you got your PhD: 1987, Catholic University of Louvain

In what field: Social Sciences

Who was your advisor: L. Boone

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Commmunication is as old as human existence. However, as a field of study in the ‘West’ it emerged sometime in the early 20th century. In Europe it has different country-based origins: in Germany from hermeneutics, sociology, Frankfurter Schule and Publizistik (journalism); in France from existentialism, semiotics, film studies...; in Holland and Belgium as a mixture of Germany/France. Time frame: just after WWII in reaction and response to the nazist/fascist propaganda and first attempts to come to grips with an emerging consumer society.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Let 1000 flowers bloom. It’s both a strength and a weakness. A strength thanks to the diversity of ..., a weakness to establish a discipline and profession... That’s one of the reasons why communication scholars are (almost always) bypassed by political scientists, sociologists etc.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: No response.

Your name: Majid Tehranian

Your title: Professor

Your institution: University of Hawaii at Manoa

Your city, state/province, country: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1969, Harvard University

In what field: Political Economy and Government

Who was your advisor: Albert J. Meyers

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Communications as different from journalism may have assumed its importance following World War II which propoganda (Lasswell) and public opinion (Lipmann) became central issues in public and academic discourse.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: In the interdisciplinary character of communication, two factors seem to stand out: First, the fundamental nature of the problem that touches everything from signs to interpersonal relations and societal problems. Second, the rapidly changing communication technologies have constantly changed the boundaries leaving little time for gaining stability and focus.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: The field as a whole, with few exceptions, has developed without a historical perspective. To gain depth, it desperately needs that. The notion of public interest itself must be understood as relatively new concept.

Your name: Phil Tichenor

Your title: Professor Emeritus, Journalism and Communication

Your institution: University of Minnesota

Your city, state/province, country: Minneapolis, MN

The year you got your PhD: 1965, Stanford University

In what field: Communication Research

Who was your advisor: Wilbur Schramm

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: The field spin off during the 1950s, when, in the post WWII period, there was a universal concern about communication for the betterment of mankind as well as (and many would say including) the achievement of commercial ends. The widespread interest in diffusion theory exemplifies this concern. A facilitating condition was the advent of television and related media technologies. When Berelson and Schramm argued over whether the field was "whithering away," it was in fact just being launched. The decade following that little debate saw an accelerating rise in doctoral degrees in the field.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Communication is at the heart of a wide range of disciplines, from sociology and psychology to anthropology, biology, agricultural technology, and physical science. Everyone wanted to get in on the academic act. While agricultural journalism was fading as a discrete specialty, other specialties such as science journalism, business journalism, and health communications were taking root. Such diversity gives strength, in the sesse of offering a variety of approaches that appeal to a multitude of student interests. It is something of a weakness for those who content that there ought to single, "unified" theory of communication. But why worry about that? Where is the unified theory of economics, sociology, psychology, or anthropology?

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: That burst of activity in the 1950s, followed by the explosion of work in the next two decades, owes much more than many realize to the Westley-MacLean concept of "purposive communication." While advertising is also purposive, much of the early thrust of studies dealt with poverty, including the third world, agriculture, children and telvision. All of these areas of study were justified as being in "the public interest." Today, many of these same fields get the major funding. Witness the fact that Harvard now has people concentrating on health communication.

Your name: Joseph Turow

Your title: Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication

Your institution: University of Pennsylvania

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1976, University of Pennsylvania

In what field: communication

Who was your advisor: George Gerbner

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: In an important sense, the communication field dates way back to the study of rhetoric and oratory. When it comes to "mass communication" (my area), sociologists, political scientists and social psychologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries were the first to ask the important questions about the implications of these processes for the life of society. Journalism schools and departments began to study the content and the activities of newspapers in the first half of the 20th century. It was only in the 1950s, though, that systematic research attention to a wide range of questions about process, content, and effects of media began to be paid in speech communication departments, radio and TV departments, journalism schools, and new interdisciplinary communication institutes or schools, such as the ones at Illinois and Penn. Their enduring concern with media issues took on particular importance as political science and sociology departments turned away from communication as a central topic of concern in the 1960s.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Researchers have always sliced into the world in different ways, with different lenses. This diversity is a strength when researchers and their students realize that there can never be only one way of understanding things and so respect the multi-perspectival mosaic. It is a weakness—in fact, it can be destructive to the academic enterprise--when researchers and their students fetishize particular ways of seeing to the point that they

refuse to allow for the credibility of methods and understandings that do not match theirs.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: To me, conducting research "in the public interest" means asking questions and presenting findings that encourage discourse by both academics and non-academics on topics of social importance. The best communication research projects have always done that. In fact, I would argue that encouraging non-academic as well as academic discourse is an affirmative responsibility for media researchers. That is because so many issues involving media, power, and institutions that swirl around this area are critical to contemporary society’s understanding of itself and its future.

Your name: Angharad N. Valdivia

Your title: Research Professor, Institute of Communication Research

Your institution: University of Illinois

Your city, state/province, country: Urbana, Illinois, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1991, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In what field: Communications

Who was your advisor: Willard Rowland & John Nerone

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Both in situations of moral panics [whether these concerned "our children" or violence] and in post-war situations [such as the growth of international communications as a research field following Daniel Lerner’s "Passing of Traditional Society" and the Schramm corpus, etc.]

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: I definitely think there is strength in diversity-- this is precisely why our field can speak to the issues of the day from a wholistic [non-narrow] perspective. When talking about communications in general and mass media in particular you cannot reduce the analysis to content [whether from a humanistic/literary or social scientific perspective], you have to take context into consideration, etc. We need many theories and methodologies-- one is not enough for the whole field though certainly individual projects can deploy one...

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: It has been a weak and sometimes stronger relationship-- theoretically it should be absolutely strong but so much of what goes on in communications research [broadly defined] is administrative and with corporate profit in mind. Critical research is sometimes very self-absorbed though it need not be. And the academy itself does not really reward public service-- right now my own institution has started a new office [in an age of tax cuts] of "entrepreneurial faculty" which basically means, how can we turn your research into private profit-- they do not have the public interest in mind

Your name:  David Weaver

Your title:  Roy W. Howard Research Professor, School of Journalism

Your institution: Indiana University

Your city, state/province, country:  Bloomington, Indiana, USA

The year you got your PhD:  1974, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In what field:  Mass communication research

Who was your advisor:   Donald L. Shaw

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: It spun off from other fields such as psychology, sociology, and political science in the 1950s as Wilbur Schramm and others begin to create institutes and programs of communication or mass communication that included scholars from a variety of fields who were interested in communication processes and effects.  This happened, I believe, because these scholars began to recognize that they were interested in many of the same phenomena even though they came from different fields.  These programs and centers of the study of communication were also encouraged by federal funding in the wake of fears about the use of propaganda in the two world wars, the possible harmful effects of mass advertising, and the growth of television and its effects on elections and politics as well as urban unrest.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: This is mainly an outgrowth of the interdisciplinary nature of this field, which is of interest to scholars from the humanities as well as the social sciences.  This diversity is more a strength than a weakness, in my view, but it can produce conflicting findings and interpretations and terms that are difficult to reconcile or even understand at times.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Communication studies has been concerned with publics and public opinion for a very long time, dating back at least to the 19th century and European scholars.  More recently, empirical research on media effects has been motivated by concerns over possible harmful effects of emerging media such as films, radio, and television.  Much of this research focuses on the public interest, and the possible beneficial and harmful effects of various media, as well as the role of communication in democratic societies.  Thus the public interest has been a long standing and continuous concern of many communication scholars for many decades.

Your name: D. Charles Whitney

Your title: Professor, School of Journalism

Your institution: University of Texas

Your city, state/province, country: Austin, Texas, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1978, University of Minnesota

In what field: Mass Communication

Who was your advisor: Donald M. Gillmor

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: See Delia’s 1982 essay in Berger & Chaffee; it’s pretty close.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Precisely because it’s a field, not a discipline. Comm/media studies bears about the same relationship to communications/media as political science does to politics. Whether the diversity is a weakness or a strength is more or less beside the point: it’s obviously both but basically inevitable.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: See Wartella & Reeves, 1985: Seems to me that the field (at least the media studies end of it) seems to make its greatest practical contributions (and arguably its most interesting conceptual advances) when it pays attention if not to the public interest, then at least to the concerns the public has about media.

Your name: Rolf Wigand

Your title: Maulden-Energy Professor of Information Science and Management

Your institution: University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Your city, state/province, country: Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1975, Michigan State University

In what field: Communication

Who was your advisor: Vince Farace

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I am not sure that I can point a finger at historical situations across our field, but the entire field is a spin-off all the way. At times we even claim people from other fields as being our own, even if their particular disciplinary origin was in another established field (e.g., Percy Tannenbaum). In terms of historical situations … did Ev Rogers accomplish this in his book? There may be some situations in which he did. e. g., check on the evolution of the Frankfurt School and see how the circumstances of and the threat of WWII triggered the adoption of this perspective in the U. S. Also Hitler’s persecution of Jewish scholars and people clearly brought about some historical developments in our field (Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin and several others) that may not have happened otherwise necessarily. I helped Ev translate quite a bit from the German original writings of these scholars, but also some German scholars who captured that history. Similar things can be said for information theory (Neumann and others).

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Since we love our field, we will argue that this is a strength of course, just as Europe argues that the diversity of cultures is a strength and an asset of Europe. On the other hand, this diversity in languages, rules, laws, tastes, preferences, etc. can also and very quickly be a detriment depending on one’s aims. The problem, it follows, is that communication as a field is so diverse that we have few foci, concentrations, clear theoretical homes that communication is everything to whoever wants it … sort it, stretch it, milk it, dice it any way you want. Which perspective (strength or weakness) is right? … beats me.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: No response.

Your name: Julia T. Wood

Your title: Lineberger Professor of Humanities; Professor of Communication Studies

Your institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Your city, state/province, country: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1975, Pennsylvania State University

In what field: then it was Speech Communication

Who was your advisor: Jerry Phillips

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: I’ll offer a few comments on two of the questions you posed.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: Areas (interpersonal, rhetoric, performance, etc) reflect distinct (though not necessarily incompatible) intellectual traditions and theoretical frameworks. Given this, it would be UNsurprising if there were not different methodological inclinations. For instance, interpersonal and small group communication historically are more aligned with social sciences whereas rhetoric is more closely tied to humanities. Different methods are adept at addressing different kinds of questions and, thus, an interdisciplinary field such as communication benefits by having a broad repertoire of methods to tackle an equally broad range of questions. In some cases, different methods can complement one another (e.g., triangulation) to allow a researcher or research team to get at more facets of a research question or topic than any single method would.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Ever since the birth of rhetoric (and, thus, the field) on the Isle of Syracuse, the field has been committed to the public interest. Ancient links between rhetoric and participation in civic life have been broadened into a range of ways in which the field addresses and works for "the public interest." For example, some rhetorical scholars today focus on whose voices are heard (and whose are not) in so-called public hearings about environmental issues; some feminist scholars study how sexual harassment is normalized (and challenged and changed); some interpersonal scholars are looking at the ways in which hate groups attract and cultivate new people, especially children; media scholars are studying how media affects individuals and collective life and trends.

Your name: Barbie Zelizer

Your title: Raymond Williams Professor of Communication

Your institution: University of Pennsylvania

Your city, state/province, country: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The year you got your PhD: 1990, University of Pennsylvania

In what field: communication

Who was your advisor: Larry Gross

HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF FIELD: Other than the obvious cirucmstances in which the field germinated -- post world war II, development of social science research councils, gravitation toward funded research on effects of media, the increasingly present role of the media as a new actor in the public sphere created a need for an academic intervention that reflected such a growing presence.

DIVERSITY AS STRENGTH/WEAKNESS: The field reflects the varying fields from which it grew: in that it is not a traditional discipline, it has not had as much time as other disciplines to evolve into a set list of methods, approaches, foci in a way that is typical of other fields. On the other hand, it may never evolve as such, because its areas of analysis of foci are themselves so fast-moving that they seem to take up much of the energy involved in keeping the discipline/field vital and coherent, and so aspects like methods and approaches may remain interdisciplinary for the long run. The diversity, in my view, is a strength.

RELATIONSHIP TO RESEARCH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Public interest has always been at the underside of communication, regardless of the degree to which it is articulated. If we define public interest in a broad sense, we find that an interest in the affairs of public life could be construed as characterizing everything we do in the field. That is not, of course, how research in the public interest is always defined, and particularly of late it seems to often take the form of research questions that are recognized by grant-giving institutions. but research in the public interest goes further than this and includes writing columns and op-eds on public events, activism, consulting with trade and professional organizations, lecturing to trade associations. In this regard, public interest remains at the core of the field.