The social scientific study of human communication began during the late 1930s in the USA (Delia 1987). Schramm (1983) attributes the birth of this movement to four scholars: the political scientist, Harold Lasswell, the sociologist, Paul Lazarsfeld, and the social psychologists, Kurt Lewin and Carl Hovland. Though the parentage of any scholarly movement is bound to be ambiguous, many communication researchers would doubtless concur with Schramm’s attribution, for these four pioneers not only authored much of the early influential communication research, but were also responsible for training a second generation of scholars who carried on their work.
The work of two of these founders, Lasswell and Lazarsfeld, centred almost exclusively on the impact of mass media on public information and attitudes, with some of Hovland’s work at Yale University focusing on the same problem (see Hovland et al. 1949). Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) note that the early traditions of communication research focused either on the media of public communication as instruments of clandestine manipulation or hope for them as agencies of social integration. Scholars in both traditions forwarded the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media effects, positing that the media could ‘inject’ new information and attitudes into individual citizens in much the same way as a doctor could inject serum into a patient. As a result of the classic election studies conducted in the 1940s by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1948), a different, less communicatively hegemonous view of the mass media emerged, one positing that the media transmitted information to opinion leaders who, in turn, employed it to influence others in face-to-face settings—a process labelled ‘the two-step flow hypothesis’. Although later research revealed that both the hypodermic needle model and the two-step flow hypothesis were oversimplified explanations of the impact of mass media on individual attitudes and behaviours, these two notions exerted a strong influence on the thinking of mass communication researchers for several decades.
During roughly the same period, Lewin was conducting his famous studies at the University of Iowa concerning the effects of group decision making (Lewin 1958) and group leadership (Lewin 1939; Lippitt and White 1943) on the productivity and morale of group members, studies motivated at least partially by his repugnance for the fascist regimes emerging in Germany and Italy. With the advent of the Second World War, concern for ways of mounting effective public information campaigns against these Axis powers spawned the remarkably fruitful programme of research on communication and persuasion carried out by Hovland and his associates at Yale, a programme that produced an influential set of volumes which began appearing around the mid-1900s (Rosenberg et al. 1960; Sherif and Hovland 1961). Their work influenced communication researchers interested in the areas of small group communication and persuasion.
As the preceding chronicle suggests, most ground-breaking early work was problem-oriented and was conducted by scholars of varying disciplinary commitments. Communication did not emerge as an academic discipline until the late 1940s, one of the earliest signs of its emergence being the establishment, in 1947, of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois under the directorship of Wilbur Schramm. Influenced by the success at Illinois, research units were formed at other major midwestern universities including, most notably, at Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin. The growth of communication as a discipline accelerated rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. Two Annenberg Schools of Communication were founded, the first at the University of Pennsylvania and the second at the University of Southern California. The newly christened departments were staffed by faculty whose degrees were from departments of journalism, speech, sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. But they all shared a common commitment to studying human communication processes.
As with most fledgling academic enterprises, consensus regarding conceptual delineation for the field has emerged slowly and equivocally. One approach to defining the field has focused on the various situational contexts in which communication may occur. This category system has produced researchers interested in mass communication, cross-cultural communication, health communication, technologically mediated communication, organizational communication, educational communication, small-group communication, family communication, marital communication, communication among children, interpersonal communication, non-verbal communication, and intrapersonal communication. A second approach has focused on various functions of communication, including socialization, conflict resolution, negotiation and bargaining, with persuasion and social influence receiving the lion’s share of attention. Indeed, until the late 1960s, most of the theoretical, methodological, and empirical literature was devoted to the persuasion process. McGuire’s (1969) ambitious summary of attitude and attitude-change work through the late 1960s has forty-two pages of references dealing with the topic.
Though persuasion research is certainly not a dead issue (Miller and Burgoon 1978), students of communication have diversified their interests considerably. Spurred by several important educational and scholarly occurrences, including the growth of interpersonal classes in the universities and the publication of Watzlawick et al.’s (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication, a number of researchers have turned to the study of symbolic transactions in more intimate, face-to-face settings. A lively interest has developed in examining the design of messages (O’Keefe and Lambert 1995) and message exchanges from a transactional, relational perspective (Folger and Poole 1982). Rather than using individual communicators as the unit of analysis, this approach uses the relationship: ‘the focus of analysis is on the systemic properties that the participants have collectively, not individually’ (Rogers and Farance 1975). Furthermore, greater emphasis has been placed on investigating communication relationships developmentally; that is, in looking at the evolution of relationships over time (Cappella 1984).
Three major paradigmatic alternatives have emerged to the earlier approaches. The systems perspective (Monge 1977; Watzlawick et al. 1967) stresses the structure and organization of all components of a system, rather than focusing on one or more underlying elements as would a reductionist approach. Contemporary treatments (Contractor 1994; Watt and Van Lear 1995) focus on studying how communication systems move from order into chaos (i.e. chaotic systems) or from chaos into order (i.e. self-organizing systems). The second major paradigm, the interpretive perspective (Putnam 1983) underscores the centrality of meaning in social interactions. It aims to unravel the subjective and consensual meanings that constitute social reality, by conducting naturalistic studies to document how symbols are invested with interpretations during interaction. A third paradigm, the critical perspective, is also concerned with the study of subjective social realities. However, unlike scholars from the interpretive paradigm, critical scholars assume a political stance in treating society as circumscribed by power relations (including materialistic forces such as capital) and conflict. Their efforts, which have been focused primarily in the arena of popular culture (Grossberg 1992), gender issues (Treichler and Kramarae 1988), and sexuality (Vance 1987), often incorporate interventionist strategies for changing both discursive and material conditions.
As the study of communication moves into the twenty-first century, these paradigmatic debates, buttressed, one hopes, by more durable research foundations, will doubtless continue. In addition, the burgeoning communication technology is likely to generate more intensive efforts to identify the interfaces between mediated and face-to-face communication systems (McGrath and Hollingshead 1994). The precise nature of these influences constitutes an important priority for future communication research.
Noshir S.Contractor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(revision of text by the late Gerald Miller)
References
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