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Running Head: THEORIES AND MODELS OF COMMUNICATION 1

Theories and Models of Communication: Foundations and Heritage

William F. Eadie

Robin Goret

San Diego State University

THEORIES AND MODELS OF COMMUNICATION 2

Abstract

This chapter charts the historical influences on the theories and models that shaped the

communication discipline. This chapter illustrates the importance of U.S. and European

scholars from not only the beginnings of the communication discipline, but those who were

pre-eminent in other academic disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science and

journalism, as well as examining emerging scholarship from Asia that focuses on understanding

cultural differences through communication theories. The chapter traces the foundations and

heritage of the communication from five perspectives: (1) communication as shaper of public

opinion; (2) communication as language use; (3) communication as information transmission;

(4) communication as developer of relationships; and (5) communication as definer,

interpreter, and critic of culture.

Key words: public opinion, media messages, Agenda Setting Theory, Cultivation Theory,

language, cultural studies, rhetoric, General Semantics, symbolic interactionism, relational

communication, information, uncertainty


Theories and Models of Communication: Foundations and Heritage

Communication study seems inherently multi-disciplinary, drawing theory and sharing

concepts from psychology, sociology, political science and other social sciences. Indeed, many

of the scholars that are considered pre-eminent in communication were not from the discipline

of communication itself and that their work shaped communication theory was a by-product

and not the original intent of their work (Delia, 1987; Rogers, 1994).

Communication has deep roots as an area of inquiry, but its history as an academic

discipline is relatively brief. The most comprehensive ancient texts on communication to which

we have access are those of the Greek and Roman societies. In both societies, communication

is defined as synonymous with rhetoric, though that term was contested between Plato and

Aristotle. Plato, according to Peters’ (1999) analysis, defined rhetoric as fostering the ability for

humans to connect as eros, or at a soulful level through stylish and poetic language, while

Aristotle’s ideas about rhetoric are generally seen as explaining how humans influence each

other ethically in public fora. Aristotle’s ideas were oftentimes seen as cornerstones of

democratic deliberation, while Plato’s ideas provided a foundation for the study of literature.

The differences between them were sometimes simplified to style (“mere rhetoric”) vs.

substance (rhetoric as an ancient and noble art). Nevertheless, major philosophers tended to

write about rhetoric at least in passing. Rhetoric evolved distinctly from communication for at

least half of the 20th Century, but eventually the two areas of study came to rival each other.

Communication’s history is also somewhat contentious, as a communication disciplinary

story starts with sociology and social psychology and then co-mingles with the study of


journalism and speech before emerging as the dominant force in the stories of both of the

latter (Eadie, in press). The study of communication developed primarily in the United States,

though with considerable influence from European thinkers. In this chapter, we will trace some

of the historical influences on contemporary thought in the communication discipline. In doing

so, we will draw on the influence of U. S. and European scholars on the development of our

ideas about communication phenomena, and we will touch on some emerging scholarship from

Asia that shows potential for understanding cultural differences through communication ideas.

In structuring this chapter, we need to take into account differing ideas about the

nature of communication. So, we will organize our survey around five broad categories of

communication phenomena: (1) communication as shaper of public opinion; (2) communication

as language use; (3) communication as information transmission; (4) communication as

developer of relationships; and (5) communication as definer, interpreter, and critic of culture.

Communication as Shaper of Public Opinion

Communication’s roots in the formation of public opinion stem from the development

of sociology as a discipline, primarily at the University of Chicago. Deliberately located in the

midst of a working class urban neighborhood, the university took as its mission the study of its

surroundings as a laboratory for societal improvement. Robert Park, the head of the nascent

program that would come to define the university’s mission, recognized early the role that

communication technology could play in society. Park’s theories of mass communication (1922,

1952) became the basis for his colleagues to begin to think, from a variety of perspectives,


about how a variety of communication phenomena interacted with the formation and

maintenance of society.

It was a journalist who brought the idea of public opinion into focus, however.

Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann chose to write for public, rather than scholarly

consumption, but the thorough and eloquent manner in which he expressed his ideas led

scholars to value his work. Lippmann’s (1922) book, Public Opinion, became a touchstone for

scholarly work for many years to come.

Following World War I, concern arose in particular about the role of propaganda in

shaping public opinion. Political scientist Harold Lasswell (1927) became an early advocate for

studying how media could be used, particularly by governments, to influence public opinion

through biased or incomplete messages. Media were looked on as powerful forces that could

potentially affect large numbers of people in similar ways. The wide-spread panic that set in

following the Halloween radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ story, “The War of the Worlds,” was

seen as an example of the power of media to act as a “hypodermic needle” (Lowery & DeFleur,

1995; Pooley, 2006; Rogers, 1994), injecting a powerful drug into the public consciousness.

Concern about the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe led to the first concerted

research efforts in both mediated and face-to-face communication, in the 1930s. Interestingly,

many of the scholars who participated in these efforts were European émigrés who sought to

escape those political movements. As outsiders (and Jews, who suffered under anti-Semitic

attitudes then prevalent at major U. S. universities) these scholars found ways of supporting

themselves by doing practical research on problems deemed to be of great interest either to U.


S. corporations or to the government. From this research, which eventually was identified with

social psychology, came a tradition of quantitative study of communication behavior.

During World War II, the U. S. government gathered scholars together in Washington, D.

C., to provide collective brainpower for managing the war effort and the sacrifices that were

necessary at home. Research on propaganda and public opinion had already been underway in

the 1920s and 1930s, and Paul Lazarsfeld and his associates’ (1944) study of the 1940 election

(see below for details) had debunked the idea that mass media messages had direct effects on

voting behavior. Rather, these effects were often modulated by pre-existing attitudes, such as

political party allegiances, and by interactions with influential people (who were labeled

“opinion leaders”). Research conducted on group interaction as a tool of persuasion (e.g.,

Lewin, 1943) demonstrated that commonly-held attitudes could be modified if “good of the

whole” pressures were applied. All in all, research efforts during World War II set the stage for

an explosion of communication study in the years following the end of the war.

Lazarsfeld and the Office of Radio Research studied how political advertisements during

the presidential campaign of 1940 affected voters in Erie County, Ohio. This study according to

Lazarsfeld (1969) was not originally intended to study voting habits, but instead to test "a

program of the Department of Agriculture, since its innovations made major changes in

American behavior and … this Department … developed the most extensive use of the radio in

support of its policies" (p. 330).

The Erie County study examined the changes in voters' opinions over a period of several

months, expecting to find that the media messages they were exposed to had a direct effect on


their voting behavior. Instead of showing a direct effect, however, the analysis of the results

showed that voting decisions were completely unrelated to the messages they had heard

(Barton, 2001; Jeřábek 2001; Rogers, 1994). These findings completely contradicted the

prevailing thought of the day. The study further showed that opinion leaders developed their

ideas through a variety of sources that included the media, and then influenced the members

of their community through their social interactions. The voters who Lazarsfeld interviewed

inevitably pointed to these influential individuals as the source of their information and the

main influence on their voting decisions. This finding led Lazarsfeld to propose that there was

another level of communication other than the media (Lowery and DeFleur, 1995), a process he

called the two-step flow of communication.

After Lazarfeld’s large-scale case study demonstrated that media messages played only

a small role in directly influencing election results, research in this area for a number of years

focused on conditions where media messages would play more or less of a role than face-to-

face influence in the formation of public opinion. It would not be until McCombs and Shaw

(1972) produced data causing the re-thinking of the small-effects paradigm that research would

shift to what these authors dubbed “the agenda-setting function of media.” This function links

press coverage with public ratings of importance with issues, and a study of the 1968 U. S.

presidential election found a high correlation between these two items, given a three-week lag

time. While these findings did not negate Lazarsfeld’s idea of two-step flow, they identified for

the first time a powerful direct effect for media messages on public opinion. Rather than


persuade people or tell them what to think, argued the researchers, media tell them what is

important to think about.

A companion theory, Cultivation (Gerbner, 1973), argued that large effects from media

could be generated based on the amount of time spent consuming media. Heavy users of

media tended to distort perceptions of society to fit with media content to a far greater extent

than did light users. For example, individuals who heavily consume news and news analysis

from a particular point of view (e.g., in the U. S., Fox News or MSNBC) will be likely to distort

news events to a greater extent than those who spent little to no time consuming content from

these stations. While Cultivation Theory had uses outside of public opinion research, it, too,

was a crack in the formulation that media had but small effects on public opinion.

In later developments, agenda-setting theorists demonstrated that media messages also

had the capability to influence how individuals think about topics. In particular, these theorists

developed the concepts of “framing” and “priming” to describe this process. Framing refers to

the means by which media messages are presented. Frames provide salience for particular

aspects of the message that have been selected by its creator to shape it from a perspective

(Entman, 1993). So, a news story about a crime can be framed from the perspectives of the

victim, the perpetrator, or the investigating police officer and the same details can yield

different impressions of the event. Priming, on the other hand, relates to how media messages

are constructed to indicate to audiences what elements are important to use in judging the

value of an object. To provide an example, a news analysis is priming its readers when its

author states that performance on maintaining a healthy national economy is the most


important element for forming judgments about the performance of U. S. presidents when they

run for re-election. Such an analysis may cause its readers to overlook other measures of

presidential performance and focus only on economic viability. President Ronald Reagan, who

was a master of priming rhetoric, famously asked American voters whether they were better

off than four years previously as a cornerstone of his campaign for a second term. Americans

agreed overwhelmingly that they were and returned Mr. Reagan to office in a landslide vote.

The study of communication as a shaper of public opinion has focused primarily on

means by which media messages influence the public’s perceptions of issues and events.

Research on how mediated and face-to-face communication combine to change behavior has

combined public opinion research with other communication phenomena to produce promising

means for promoting individual and social good. These models have been used primarily to

create campaigns for the betterment of individual and public health (e.g., Cappella, 2006;

Donohew, Lorch & Palmgreen, 1998).

Communication as Language Use

The turn of the 20th Century brought with it not only the discovery of stimulus and

response as a direct cause of behavior but also an interest in philosophical quarters in how

language is constructed and used. Early 20th century interest in language use developed in both

Europe and in the U.S. The study of language represented the variety of interests of the day,

including interest in the nature of reality and the relationship of language to culture.

For example, Ferdinand de Saussure, working in Europe and Charles Sanders Peirce,

working in the U. S., formulated the theory of semiotics. Saussure was a professor of linguistics


at the University of Geneva in the early part of the 20th century. He posited that linguistics was

part of a then unheard of science called semiology or semiotics, both derived "from the Greek

word semeion, which means sign, and they both refer to the study of how signs communicate

meanings" (Bignell, 2000, p. 5). In semiotics theory, Saussure argued that language is made up

of linguistic signs that join a concept and a sound image. He called the concept the signified

and the sound image the signifier and the combination of the two, a sign. The sign, Saussure

(1916/2000) wrote, is seen as a psychological construct. The nature of the linguistic sign has a

number of distinct properties which include immutability, mutability and arbitrariness.

Another approach to semiotics was undertaken by Saussure's intellectual protégé

Roland Barthes. In many ways Barthes followed Saussure in noting the dual function of

communication, especially language. In Barthes’ volume, Mythologies (1957), the overarching

theme is that the majority of experiences a person has at a social or personal level begin with

language--identity, features of experience, narrative, communication with others, and so on.

But linguistic behavior as a structure of experience derives far less from personal exchange than

with how language is conveyed to the personal level from the public level, where lies the locus

of social control, including control over language itself (Barthes, 2000).

In fact, according to Barthes, language that makes the most social meaning (allegedly) is

not necessarily clear but is rather deliberately ambiguous or deceptive in some way. Thus

language, as an attribute of culture, "lends itself to myth," only rarely "impos[ing] at the outset

a full meaning which it is impossible to distort" (Barthes, 2000, p. 132). Language may be

unclear in a variety of ways, either because it is poetic or because it works by analogy. The real


idea is that language "lends itself to multiple contingencies" (p. 132). Semiologists function to

engage in this interpretive act, and it is up to the reader of myths to reveal their necessary

function. That is because "in a language, the sign is arbitrary: nothing compels the acoustic

image tree 'naturally' to mean the concept tree" (p. 126). Nothing, Barthes posited, except the

motives of those who conveyed the notion of tree.

Where language use is intent on signifying a cultural meaning there is undoubtedly

intent to affect the psychological experience of that meaning (Barthes, 2000). Motivation,

Barthes argued, is essential "to the very duplicity of myth: myth plays on the analogy between

meaning and form, there is no myth without motivated form" (p. 126). Barthes cited the

innumerable images that the media use to convey a social message, to imply, without directly

pronouncing the superiority of a Eurocentric worldview. The communicated image conforms to

what Barthes termed the "very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature . . . [and] is

not read as a motive, but as a reason" (p. 129). In due course, values get conveyed with the

authority of facts, all in the service of social control. Only when the receivers that would be

recognized decoders of language themselves produce language is social control likely to shift.

Thus, the "bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth;

revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth" (p. 146).

Interest in language use by Vygotsky (1971: originally published in 1934) and Ayer

(1936) drew upon logical positivism and empiricism as a means of explaining the relationship of

language to reality. Vygotsky saw language development as a function of experience with one’s

environment, using language to associate objects with thoughts and feelings. Ayer proposed


the use of language as a means of verifying the logic of one’s environment. Language in itself is

not verifiable, but it can be used to understand what may be verified empirically.

A desire for empirical verification also pervaded the development of General Semantics,

which started out as a theory of language use and became more a philosophy of

communication than anything else. Begun by a Polish engineer named Alfred Korzybski (1933)

and popularized in the U. S. by S. I. Hayakawa (1941), General Semantics began with the

observation that language was not a logical system and ended by advocating for a series of

devices designed to make communication based on language that was concrete, as opposed to

abstract. General Semanticists envisioned a communication system with as little ambiguity as

possible so as to promote understanding and thereby reduce conflict, particularly conflict

between nations. The proposed system was based on a set of tools that would continually

remind language users to aim for the lowest possible level of abstraction in both speech and

writing.

Pierce’s work on the philosophical movement known as pragmatism (c. f., 1878)

influenced a number of U. S. scholars interested in language use. Among those were John

Dewey, whose book, How We Think (1910), became the basis for teaching generations of

students the basics of collective decision-making, and George Herbert Mead, whose book,

Mind, Self, and Society (1934, a posthumous rendering of his theory, based on lecture notes

and working papers) became a basis for understanding how individuals interact with society

through the use of signs and symbols. Mead and Dewey were colleagues at the University of

Chicago for a time, and their interactions with each other and with colleagues were


instrumental in developing the perspective that became known as the Chicago School of

Sociology.

Communication scholars eventually pursued with gusto Mead’s ideas about what was

eventually called symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969). Symbolic interactionism held that

individual behavior was a function of the repertoire of roles available to an individual, as well as

how that person diagnosed what role might be appropriate for a particular situation. Hart and

Burks’ (1972) concept of rhetorical sensitivity provided an early example of the influence of

symbolic interactionism in communication study, as these authors combined rhetorical

message-generation principles with symbolic interaction’s emphasis on role-taking and

adaptation. Eventually, symbolic interactionism gave way to social construction, as

communication scholars adapted the work of psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1992, 1999) for use

in communication research.

Kenneth Burke was another sociologist with big ideas, ones that would prove to be

highly influential in understanding of the rhetorical aspects of language use. Burke described

language as a tool used by people to communicate and rationalize at a far deeper level than

could be done by mere language itself. Burke focused on the symbols people created to name

things in his understanding of language. According to Holland (1955) when rhetoricians

analyzed speeches, they tended to look at three aspects -- what was said, why it was said and

how it was said. Burke however, would argue that Holland’s formulation did not go far enough

and that a primary goal of criticism was to use "all [language instruments] that there is to use"


(Burke, 1941, p. 23). For Burke, speeches were only one aspect of language instruments and he

argued that a rhetorician should not limit themselves to spoken text.

Burke proposed the Dramatist Pentad Theory, which analyzes events through five

essential elements: "what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it

(agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)" (Burke 1945, p. xv). He adapted his terms

of analysis from the theatre in order to account for motivation, which he took to be a decisive

category for the explanation of rhetorical events. Burke held that language is created

hierarchically, that it reinforces hierarchies, and that humans cling to hierarchies to bring order

to their lives through symbolic actions. Language for Burke is always layered with emotion.

Every word is layered with judgment, attitude and feelings, and Burke further argued that

because of this complexity, language functions either to bring people together or to separate

them. When people identify with the language and symbols that a speaker is using, this

bringing-together process creates what Burke called, "consubstantiality.” Like many scholars of

language use, Burke’s influence crossed disciplines. Communication scholars poring over

Burke’s work continue to find insights that reveal how language use not only communicates but

can also influence communicators.

Of course, the study of language use overlaps with linguistics, including both its sub-

fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Communication scholarship tends to focus more

on the pragmatics of language use, as well as the effects of such use, while linguistics often

focuses more on structure and function of language. Clearly, however, the two fields overlap,

and sometimes their scholarship is difficult to separate. Linguist Deborah Tannen, for example,


has produced some work that is clearly within the realm of linguistics (e.g., 1989), but much of

her more popular work (e.g., 1990, 2006) at a minimum straddles the border with

communication scholarship.

Communication as Information Transmission

Major strands of theory and research appeared in the U. S. following World War II.

Most of them focused on information and transmission, or in other words, how to get a

message from Point A to Point B in the most intact fashion possible. The key works associated

with this perspective came from engineering, and the technological problems that drove the

theorizing concerned the modernizing of the telephone system and the development of high

speed computers that could process a great deal of information in a short span of time. Two

books stood out in particular: Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory

of Communication (1949) and Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948). Shannon and Weaver

developed a theory that defined information as the reduction of uncertainty, and his primary

concern revolved around how much “noise” (pure uncertainty) in any transmission could be

tolerated before the message would be transmitted inaccurately. Wiener’s work described the

reduction of uncertainty in systems through feedback that would indicate a change of course

was needed. Wiener’s scholarship on the control of systems was instrumental in developing

computers, which were popularly known as “thinking machines.” Scholars who built on

Shannon and Wiener’s work attempted to model communication based on transmission of

information, moderated by feedback. Some scholars believed that these theories could be

used to model thought, about which little was then known.


Indeed, a great deal of theory and research in media communication based itself on the

transmission model and continued to do so after the appearance of information theory and

cybernetics. Two post-World War II research programs illustrated this approach. The first was

the Yale Communication and Attitude Change Program, directed by Carl Hovland. Hovland had

been one of the scholars who worked on propaganda research for the Federal government

during World War II, and after the war he focused his efforts on understanding how people

were influenced by other people and their messages to change their attitudes. According to

McGuire’s (1996) review of that period, Hovland succeeded because he was able to attract top-

notch faculty and graduate students to work on the project and because his management style

allowed for creativity of theory development while still keeping research focused on the

overriding goal. Hovland’s efforts made attitude change the major topic for social psychological

research during the 1950s and 1960s.

The second came via the leadership of Wilbur Schramm, another veteran of the Federal

government’s propaganda research program. Schramm moved to Washington, DC, from the

University of Iowa, where he was head of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When the war

ended, Schramm wanted to return to Iowa, but his position with the Writers’ Workshop had

been filled. Instead, Iowa asked Schramm to head its journalism school, and Schramm accepted

the position with the condition that he be allowed to start an institute for communication

research. Schramm’s institute spurred the beginning of the field of journalism’s association

with mass communication scholarship, as opposed to scholarship about journalism itself.

Under Schramm’s tutelage, Iowa scholars and others attempted to take the theoretical work


from information theory and social psychology and apply it more directly to understanding

communication phenomena. Journalism scholars were joined in this effort by scholars from the

field of speech who were energized both by Kurt Lewin’s work on group dynamics and the Yale

Group’s scholarship on individual credibility in promoting attitude change. Schramm became a

proselytizer for communication scholarship, and he began institutes at the University of Illinois

and Stanford before affiliating with an institute in Hawaii after retirement (Rogers, 1994).

The transmission approach to communication began to break down in the 1960s. David

Berlo’s (1960) book, The Process of Communication, for example, presented what was then a

traditionally linear transmission model of information flow but added the idea that

communication was dynamic and cyclical and that research efforts to measure simple effects

would ultimately fall short. Berlo urged scholars to account for process in their research, but he

did not provide a clear means for so doing. It would take some years before scholars began to

devise ways to measure communication as interaction and thus to abandon effects research.

In media research, the transmission model found continued life as part of research using

Social Learning Theory and later, Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986). Research conducted

under the theme of learning the audience’s uses and gratifications of media (Blumler & Katz,

1974) would find the transmission model amenable for some time before succumbing to

criticism that audiences were more active than the approach gave them credit (e.g., Reinhard &

Dervin, 2009).

But, the information transmission approach was not only about movement of data from

one point to another. Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) theory also focused on how information


functioned either to increase or decrease entropy, or the level of uncertainty within a system.

As Wiener (1948) noted, uncertainty is present in every system and is a healthy element,

causing the system to self-correct via the use of negative feedback.

Two different theorists applied this principle to specific situations, marking, in part, a

turn away from the development of grand theories of communication and moving toward more

contained theories that provided more focused opportunities for testing. The first was Berger’s

Uncertainty Reduction Theory (Berger & Calabrese, 1975), which was focused on

communication between individuals who were just beginning a relationship. Drawing on

information theory’s central tenet that individuals process information for the purpose of

reducing uncertainty, Berger & Calabrese laid out a set of variables such as amount of verbal

communication, nonverbal affiliative expressiveness, information-seeking behavior, intimacy

content of messages, reciprocity of information sharing, perceived similarity and liking between

communicators, and degree of perceived shared communication networks. From these

variables, the authors drew eight axioms and twenty-one theorems that served as the basis for

a program of research that has continued through the present day.

The second use of the uncertainty principle emerged from the work of Karl Weick. An

organizational psychologist, Weick (1969) proposed that organizing is a process that involves

reducing uncertainty through the negotiation of organizational goals and routines. While

previous theorists had assumed that organizations were formed to achieve goals, Weick

contended that organizational goals evolved out of interaction among the organization’s

members. Weick called the process of individual negotiation with the organization and its


members “sensemaking,” and he proposed that organizations were loosely-coupled systems

where collective meanings of messages and actions evolved over time. Weick’s notions were

radical in that they ignored organizational hierarchies in favor of the power of informal

networks to define and influence collective thought and actions. Communication scholars

eagerly embraced Weick’s ideas about organizations and have used his sensemaking principle

as a means of studying organizational culture, oftentimes using qualitative data such as stories

(e.g., Smircich & Calás, 1987).

The information transmission model remains a dominant one in communication

scholarship, though its nature has become more process-like and less linear over time.

Communication as Developer of Relationships

Relational communication scholarship emerged from a variety of sources, including

anthropology, social and clinical psychology, social work and family studies, and systems

analysis. It is likely that scholars from a number of disciplines influenced each other as common

problems overlapped. For example, Schramm (1997), who was working on propaganda

research during World War II in Washington, DC, shared a carpool with anthropologist

Margaret Mead, who was working on conserving food for the war effort and whose program

funded Kurt Lewin’s (1948) work on using groups to solidify cooperation from homemakers to

use what they might consider to be “inferior” cuts of meat in preparing meals for their families.

Mead, in turn, was married to Gregory Bateson, whose work on family systems in the post-

World War II era would develop the idea that double binds (communications where meaning

was made deliberately unclear) were a basis for relational pathology (Bateson, et al., 1956).


Behavioral researchers approached relationships as a matter of perception (e.g., Heider,

1946; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), while clinical psychologists defined relational intimacy in terms

of degrees of authenticity (e.g., Buber, 1947; Rogers, 1961) and degree to which being in

relationship with others allowed individuals to self-actualize (Maslow, 1943). In fact, Peters

(1999), in his intellectual history of the idea of communication, argued that all curiosity about

communication arises from a desire for connection at a number of levels: another’s soul and/or

intellect, which we cannot directly experience; those entities (such as plants and animals) that

do not use symbols; and connection that is distinguished by authenticity that the participants

do experience. The two groups often found themselves at cross-purposes, and they disagreed

substantially about the nature of the phenomena they were studying.

Building on Bateson’s work, Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) devised the basis of

a formal theory of relational communication. In particular, the group’s five axioms became the

cornerstone of a number of research programs: (1) “one cannot not communicate”; (2) “every

communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former

and is therefore a meta-communication”; (3) “the nature of a relationship is dependent on the

punctuation of the partners' communication procedures”; (4) “human communication involves

both digital and analogic modalities”; and (5) “inter-human communication procedures are

either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is

based on differences or parity”. Dubbed “the interactional view,” Watzlawick, Beavin, and

Jackson’s work led the study of communication in relationships away from both competing

emphases: variable analysis and psychic connection.


The end of variable analysis did not spell the end of quantitative approaches to

relational communication, however. Instead, quantitative research sought to blend verbal and

nonverbal elements of communication behavior so as to demonstrate how those elements

combine to produce interactive meaning. An exemplar of such an approach, Burgoon’s (1978)

Expectancy Violations Theory, proved to be a model of the genre. Burgoon revised her theory

often and sometimes substantially based on the data she collected (c.f., Burgoon & Hale, 1988),

and the result of persistence and a willingness to reinterpret her findings has made the theory

one of the most respected and robust of its type.

Relational communication has also been studied qualitatively, through interviews,

personal narratives, and ethnographic approaches. An exemplar of a theory emerging from

such study is Relational Dialectics Theory, which was developed by Leslie Baxter and her

associates (e.g., Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). Derived from the work of philosopher Mikhail

Bakhtin (1986), the theory proposed that relationships are developed out of the push and pull

of interaction. Some of the contradictory dynamics that the theory has studied are: (1)

autonomy vs. connectedness (i.e., how much “I” and how much “we” are needed by relational

partners); (2) favoritism vs. impartiality (i.e., how much is each partner treated “fairly,” as

opposed to how much each partner is valued as “special”); (3) openness vs. closedness (i.e.,

how much information is disclosed between partners, as opposed to how much information is

kept private); (4) novelty vs. predictability (i.e., how much the relationship feels exciting and

new, as opposed to how much it feels comfortable and old); and (5) instrumentality vs.


affection (i.e., how much continuing the relationship is based on tangible rewards, as opposed

to how much continuing the relationship is based on emotional rewards).

Relational communication replaced the former “interpersonal communication” as the

designator for communication in face-to-face settings. The term implies that it is the

relationship that is being studied, not the face-to-face context, and this subtle change in focus

has made a great deal of difference in how theorizing in this approach to communication study

has proceeded.

Communication as Definer, Interpreter, and Critic of Culture

The early works of the Frankfurt School, specifically critical theory, laid the foundation

that led toward one of several paradigm shifts in communication theory during the post-World

War II era. According to Jay (1973; 1980), Rogers (1994), Tar (1977) and others, critical theory

is the term that refers to a specific tradition of thought that originated with Herbert Marcuse,

Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s at the Frankfurt School and the Institute of

Social Research in Germany. This theory synthesizes ideas advanced by Karl Marx and Sigmund

Freud and positions media as having the potential to advance the agenda of the bourgeois

while controlling the proletariat (Jay, 1973; Tar, 1977). Celikates (2006) posited that critical

theory makes it possible for one to understand what is really happening in social reality and to

explain these actions in terms of such constructs as socioeconomic structures and who in

society has the power. Critical theory, Celikates (2006) further argued, questions and analyzes

media, the production of media, and its agents.


In the 1950s at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, a group of scholars

founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (what later became known as British

Cultural Studies) because they had a desire to understand the changes in post-war British

society within the structure of "a long retrospective historical glance" (Hall, 1992, p. 16). Hall

(1980) argued that Cultural Studies "defines 'culture' as both the meanings and values which

arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes on the basis of their given historical

conditions and relationships, through which they 'handle' and respond to the conditions of

existence" (p. 63). Having suffered great losses in the two world wars in the first half the 20th

century, Britain was no longer the locus of Western power and the wholesale societal shift from

Britain to the United States was a major motivating power for the beginning of Cultural Studies

(Hall, 1992). The goal was to locate British intellectual dynamics as they were as well as identify

how the inevitable breaking-away of British communication traditions occurred and what

meanings were implied by the whole process.

An essential element of the new paradigm was to redefine and refocus the meaning of

communication itself. Hall (1992) cited the practice of analyzing communication as similar to a

circle of activity. The emerging idea was to think of communication as "structure produced and

sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments-production, circulation,

distribution/consumption, reproduction" (p. 128). This idea came to be known as structuralism

and had its roots not just in Marxist theory; but in early semiotics theory (Hall, 1980). For Hall

though, there were inherent problems in the idea of structuralism such that the content of

ideas gives way to patterns of ideas that may be contained in a communication, as well as the


means or conventions, whether literary, linguistic, or social, by which the ideas are encoded

and function toward making meaning.

The encoding of a communication event is only part of the process of communication

itself, carrying no essential meaning without an audience (or receiver) to decode what the

meaning is, and by decoding the message, the audience constructs the meaning. Hall (1992)

provided the example of a TV news broadcast, which has an outcome on the society in which

the encoded message is transmitted only when the meanings are decoded. Hall posited that

there were three types of readings of meanings of a message when it was decoded. The

dominant or preferred reading is produced by those whose status favors the preferred readings

and therefore do not question the dominant ideology; the negotiated readings are produced by

those who interpret the preferred reading as it is aligned with their societal status; and the

oppositional readings are produced by those whose social status puts them in direct conflict

with the dominant ideology.

Adding further to the foundation laid by the Frankfurt School and the British Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies, was theorist Jurgen Habermas, who was a student of Theodore

Adorno. During his tenure at the Frankfurt School, Habermas focused his research on how a

new public sphere materialized during both the age of Enlightenment and the French

Revolution in Europe and the American Revolution in the United States and how this new public

sphere encouraged political discourse (Jay, 1973; Kellner, 2000; Wiggerhaus 1994). Habermas'

theory of the public sphere was a metaphorical "space of institutions and practices between

the private interests of everyday life in civil society and the realm of state power ... [that


bridges] where private interests prevail and the state which often exerts arbitrary forms of

power and domination" (Kellner, 2000, p. 260-261). Using the U.S. wars in both Vietnam and

the Gulf Wars as examples, Habermas developed the view that public opinion and

understanding of the wars were primarily shaped by "the demonstrative rationality of the

military planning, and the unparalleled presence of the media" (Habermas, 1994, p. 6). The

"encoding" objectives of those in power was, in Habermas' view, involved in managing how

much information and precisely what information to dispense to the general public in a way

that was meant to influence public opinion and to install a "staged reality" that not just for the

general public, but for the "mediators" of public information as well. The act of installing a

staged reality, Habermas argued, transformed media from a place that aided rational discourse

to one that limited such discourse to what media corporations wished to discuss.

Besides the cultural studies approach, which often took societal critique as a given,

theorizing and scholarship has also been devoted to understanding communication across

cultures or across groups within cultures. Much of the theorizing in this area of study built on

either the information transmission or the relational approach (c.f., Gudykunst, 2005), but one

attempt to develop a unique cultural perspective on communication has come from the work of

Guo Ming Chen. Chen, who splits his time between the University of Rhode Island and the

South China University of Technology, has outlined in a series of articles (2001, 2002a, 2002b,

2002c, 2004, 2005, 2006) a vision of communication based in several Asian concepts: harmony,

the polarity of the yin and the yang, the Tao, the I Ching, and Confucian spirituality. Assuming


Chen’s formulation is developed further through research, it could provide a new direction for

theorizing about how communication is culture-specific.

Concluding Remarks

In 1999, Robert T. Craig summarized different theoretical strands in communication

scholarship into seven “traditions:” rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic,

sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical. Craig (1999) defined the rhetorical tradition as

considering communication to be a practical art; the semiotic tradition as considering

communication to be intersubjective mediation via signs; the phenomenological tradition as

considering communication to be the capacity of experience otherness through authentic

dialogue; the cybernetic tradition as considering communication to be synonymous with

information processing; the sociopsychological tradition as considering communication to be

expression, interaction and influence; the sociocultural traditional as considering

communication to be the means by which the social order may be (re)produced; and the critical

tradition as considering communication to be discursive reflection, particularly on hegemonic

ideological forces and how these might be critiqued. Each of these traditions combines

ontology and epistemology differently (Anderson & Baym, 2004), making communication

theory truly a “big tent” encompassing social sciences, humanities, and arts.

Craig (1999) worried that scholars adhering to each of his traditions were sufficiently

different from each other that they potentially could not engage in dialogue about what issues

were important to communication as a discipline. Disciplinary dialogue, Craig argued, is

essential to growth, development, and ultimately to disciplinary health. While we have defined


the major intellectual strands of communication in a slightly different manner than did Craig,

we do not have the same worries. There may be no such thing as COMMUNICATION THEORY,

but there may be many communication theories, each proceeding from a different

understanding of communication phenomena and each contributing to scholarship proceeding

from that understanding. There may be quarrels about which of these understandings is

“correct” (or, more likely, which might be considered “incorrect” or “inadequate”), but

ultimately we find commonality through appreciating the variety of different approaches and

the scholarship they have produced. “Communication” may turn out to be the wrong term to

define what we are studying, but for the moment it’s good enough.


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