Communication in the Conversation of Disciplines

Communication has acquired many of the institutional-professional trappings of an academic discipline, but as an intellectual tradition it remains radically heterogeneous and largely derivative. What mainly explains the field’s disciplinary emergence is its significant relationship to communication as a category of social practice, and it is, I argue, by reconstructing its intellectual traditions around that category that the field can best hope not only to become more intellectually coherent and productive but more useful to society as well. A theory of disciplinarity is presented in which every discipline derives its identity and coherence from its participation in the conversation of disciplines, for which it draws on a specific mixture of intellectual, institutional, and sociocultural discursive resources. Communication’s specific character as a discipline thus can be understood in terms of its contributions to knowledge in certain intellectual traditions, its evolving institutional forms, and its relevance to “communication” understood as a socioculturally constituted category of problems and practices. The third of these factors — the sociocultural context of disciplinarity — has, I maintain, a primary role. Communication as a practical discipline has been constructed upon (even as it reflexively reconstructs) the foundation of communication as an increasingly central category in modern societies and global culture.