The Field of Communication |
In their Communication and Human Behavior, Brent D. Ruben and Lea P. Stewart trace the "field of communication studies" back to the Greek rhetorician Corax, his student Tisias, and the Sophists of 5th Century B.C. From this point of view, the study of communication began with the analysis of speeches. In Ruben's and Stewart's view, prior to the 20th century the fields of speech, rhetoric, and journalism established the study of communication (21-24). Rhetoric, it must be noted, has had a far more extensive history than journalism and, until the 19th Century, was not easy to separate from the study of speech. However, tracing the "field"—such as it was—prior to the 19th century factors into our current institutional identity only to the extent that thinkers from those periods appear in our syllabi. The mid-19th century altered the study communication scholars have inherited.
ABSTRACT In the late 19th century, American universities were organized by disciplines, fields, and departments. The "field" of communication studies emerged in the American university at the turn of the 20th century. It took on the character of a discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 21st century, the academic study of communication tilted toward the study of new media. While this is an obvious and sensible shift of emphasis in the composite "fields" of the study of communication, the pattern of development traced by Ruben and Stewart reveals a tendency to favor the techniques and technologies of communication rather than the personal aspects of communicative situations which is consistent with their "knowledge contract." |
In the late 19th Century, the American university changed dramatically from a religious institution to a secular institution. 
In the process, the university was reorganized into departments which were designed to house specific disciplines which were distinguished from each other by their "fields of study." To be incorporated as a department (with a budget) into the university structure, an argument usually had to be advanced that the new department studied a field that no other departments did.
Downing's "Knowledge Contract"
As David Downing points out in his The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace, the secularization and professionalization of the American university is intimately tied to a "knowledge contract" formed by a "bond between the work of the university and the particular society in which it functioned" that set parameters on what counted as knowledge.
Even though there was considerable latitude with disciplinary parameters, many different kinds of human understanding were excluded from the modern discourse of knowledge, but these exclusions were thought to be acceptable because the contract also registered certain obligations for the general improvement of social and cultural life. (22)
Downing's conception of a "knowledge contract" underlying the evolution of disciplines in the American university sheds light on the development of the fields of communication in that they are closely tied to the socioeconomic trends of the times during which they emerged or shifted.
Accompanying the move toward departmentalization and disciplinarity, was the correlative movement toward professionalization.
The point at which the field of communication first emerged as a profession could be 1892, the date of the formation of The National Association of Elocutionists. However, an event more closely linked to the university as an institution was the founding of the Eastern States Speech Association in 1909, which suggests that "speech" was institutionalized as the initial field of Communication Studies. Five years later, the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking was founded (Ruben & Stewart, 24).
Subsequent changes in the names of these two professional societies suggests correlative changes in the field. The Eastern States Speech Association became the Eastern Communication Association. The the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking became The Speech Association of America and the Speech Communication Association. It is now the National Communication Association. In both cases, the names of the professional societies changed from "speech" to "communication," a significant change in professional identity.
Changes in the publications of associated with public speaking reflect a similar pattern. The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking (1915) was followed by The Quarterly Journal of Speech. But in 1934, Communication Monographs, "unlike previous publications which emphasized speech practices, ... stressed research" (Ruben & Stewart, 24).
In parallel, the field of "journalism" was institutionalized in 1905 when the University of Wisconsin offered a course in this area. The field grew rapidly between 1910 and 1940, embracing the advent of radio (1920) and television (1940), later integrated as mass communication.
In A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach, Everett M. Rogers gives a detailed account of "Wilbur Schramm and the Founding of Communication Study" (1-29). Although his PhD degree with in English Literature and although he was the founder of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Schramm was invited to direct the educational division of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF) in Washington during WWII. There he worked with a group of social scientists on the problems inherent in persuading the American public to support the war efforts. Their work centered in "communication effects" and was deeply influenced by Harold Lasswell's model of that phenomenon. When Schramm returned to the University of Iowa in 1943, he established the first PhD program in communication studies based on the work done in Washington which was mostly based on social science methods.
The Office of Facts and Figures is the forerunning of communication study as we have inherited it in the sense that not only did Schramm re-create its basic research program but Ralph O. Nafziger, head of OFF's Media Division, returned to the University of Minnesota and introduced communication study in its School of Journalism. These two, almost single-handedly shaped communication research as an outgrowth of OFF's agenda.
The fact that Schramm instituted the first communication program as the director of the School of Journalism is an important aspect of this history. Because of the impact of the work he had done in Washington, Schramm in effect turned journalism into a subfield of communication. It became the study of mass communication and was paralleled by the study of interpersonal communication. The academic politics of the situation was reflected in the fact that the University of Iowa offered two separate degrees in communication, one in communication and another in journalism and mass communication.
Rogers notes that the founding of doctoral programs was usually followed by the by the founding of a communication research institute in the mold of Paul Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University established in 1943, echoing the OFF research endeavors.
- 1944—The Research Division in the School of Journalism at the University of Minnesota (Ralph O. Nafziger)
- 1946—Bureau of Audience Research at the University of Iowa (Wilber Schramm)
- 1947—Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois (Wilber Schramm)
- 1949—The Mass Communications Research Center at the University of Wisconsin (Ralph O. Nafziger)
- 1955—Institute for Communication Research at Stanford University (directed by Wilbur Schramm)
- 1956—The Communication Research Center at Michigan State University (Paul J. Deutschmann who has been a doctoral student of Schramm's at Stanford). (A History of Communication Study, 26-27.)
In the 1940s and 50s communication was a subject of research in the behavioral and social sciences as well as psychology. During this period Carl Hovland researched group dynamics and Paul Lazarsfeld researched mass communication. Ruben and Steward note that:
studies in rhetoric and speech in the late 1940s and 1950s broadened to include oral interpretation, voice and diction, debate, theater, psychology of speech, and speech pathology. In journalism an mass media studies, growth and development were even more dramatic, spurred on in so small way by the popularity of television and efforts to understand its impact. (Ruben & Stewart, 25)
Ruben and Stewart see the 1960s as a period of "integration" when the study of communication was taking the shape of a discipline. This was evident in the number of theoretical "models of communication" that were advanced, an indication of an emerging effort to define the field coherently.
As a result of the shift toward research and communication theory in the 1940s and 50s and its integration in the 1960s, the 1970s and 80s, in Ruben and Stewart's view, became a period of specialization, a pattern that has continued into the 90s. The convergence of media, owing to the impact of computer technologies, seems to have resulted in the subordination of speech as well as journalism to the rise of scholarly interest in media.
In the 21st century, the study of communication has tilted toward the study of new media. While this is an obvious and sensible shift of emphasis in the composite "field" of communication, the pattern of development Ruben and Stewart trace reveals a tendency to favor the techniques and technologies of communication rather than the personal aspects of communicative situations.
As a result, the general model of the field we have inherited portrays communication "without attention to cognition."
jjs
Lawrence Veysey gives an historical overview of this change in his The Emergence of the American University. 
Burton Bledstein has a detailed account of the history of 19th century professionalization in his The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America.
Ruben and Stewart cite H. Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914-1945 (Annandale, VA: National Communication Association) as their source.
.David Downing conception of a "knowledge contract" leads one to suspect that this tendency to research technique and technology (and the various methods through which they were studied) was not motivated by concerns for the integrity of the "discipline" of communication but motivated by concerns for the economic utility of such studies—that is, by what was deemed publishable and fundable. While this claim should surprise no one, it could explain why communication studies did not ally itself with cognitive science in the 1980s and 1990s even though its theoretical modeling was borrowed from the same sources in the 1960s. See the Evolution of Communication Theory.
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September 4, 2007
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