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Review of "Communication Theory as Liberal Education" by Austin S. Babrow (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2025)

 

Image source: https://titles.cognella.com/communication-theory-as-liberal-education-9798823343947

A new college textbook by Austin S. Babrow uses the traditions of communication theory in a unique way to introduce the subject of communication theory as a vital part of liberal education. In contrast to narrow technical or professional training, liberal education fosters personal growth by liberating our minds from dogmatic, unreflective, habitual ideas, cultivating both a broadminded openness to different perspectives and a capacity for critical thinking. This potential for mind expansion has long been at the heart of arguments for the value of a traditional liberal arts education, and this book offers communication theory as a key component of that education for our present era. 

Communication theory is especially valuable now, says Babrow, because communication has become so central to our lives and prospects in a world that is ever more hyperconnected, diverse, contentious, and uncertain. As liberal education, the study of communication theory can free our minds from unreflective, habitual assumptions about communication and cultivate our ability to think critically from various points of view about the communication we experience and practice in our everyday lives.

The opening and closing chapters of Communication Theory as Liberal Education develop the idea of communication theory as liberal education. To introduce multiple perspectives on communication, Babrow structures the remaining chapters according to seven traditions of communication theory as defined in the Constitutive Metamodel: rhetorical, social psychological, phenomenological, cybernetic, semiotic, sociocultural, and critical, with an additional chapter that broadens the subject to include non-Western traditions. The theoretical traditions are useful for Babrow's purposes because they are based on different core conceptions of communication that "offer distinctive ideas about the self, relationships with other people, social institutions of every sort, and our relationship with nature" (p. 14). Learning to approach the world from these different perspectives on communication can expand our possibilities for living and, thus, our freedom. Because theories in each tradition are systematically elaborated and defend points of view that differ from other theories, the study of multiple traditions also fosters critical thinking.

Unlike other theory textbooks that can overwhelm students with numerous concepts and theories, this relatively short text of about 200 pages illustrates each theoretical tradition by presenting one or two representative theories in detail. Interspersed through the text are brief "reflections" that pose questions for application, critical thinking, and discussion, and each chapter concludes with a set of questions for further thought and discussion, making this an ideal text for use in small, discussion-based classes and seminars. The text is engagingly written with many relevant examples, personal anecdotes, and references to recent events and issues.  

This book provides an accessible introduction to the traditions of communication theory while largely avoiding the technical complexities of the Constitutive Metamodel, the metatheoretical scheme in which the traditions were originally defined. Readers learn about the seven traditions and about the general idea of traditions based on different core concepts of communication, but without grappling with notions of communication as a practical discipline, theoretical and practical metadiscourse, matrices of topoi for argumentation across traditions, and so on. This non-technical approach to the traditions is a limitation but also a strength, in that it keeps the focus on the idea of communication in its multiple conceptions and what it all means for how we understand the world and live our lives. 

And, whereas I have often complained that textbook presentations of the metamodel are a little misleading, I find that Babrow gets it right in essence and gives a vivid sense of each tradition's distinct point of view on the world. I am pleased to recommend this book for classes on communication theory as a liberal art. 

Traditions of Communication Theory: An Introduction to the Constitutive Metamodel

 

Above is a slide prepared for a lecture about the traditions of communication theory. It tries to encapsulate seven complex traditions of thought in just a few words. I've been using versions of this slide for many years, but it never looks quite right to me, so I tweak it for every new presentation. This is the latest version as of this writing, but I doubt it will be the last. 

The traditions of communication theory represent some basic options for framing communication problems. They first appeared in my 1999 article, "Communication Theory as a Field," as elements of the Constitutive Metamodel of communication theory. As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of my subsequent writing, including this blog, has grown out of ideas in that article. (For my current thinking on and "beyond" the seven traditions, check out this interview.)

Readers wanting to learn in depth about the Constitutive Metamodel and the traditions can use the sources listed below under Further Reading, some of which are available on my website. Descriptions of the metamodel that you'll find in popular communication theory textbooks are helpful but often a little misleading in my opinion, and free materials that people have posted online, almost always based on those second-hand textbook accounts, are usually worse. Except for a decent Wikipedia article that currently needs editing and updating, I haven't found an introduction to the metamodel free on the Web that I can strongly recommend. 

So, this post provides a free-online, accurate, and I hope fairly readable introduction to the Constitutive Metamodel and the traditions of communication theory. Borrowing some material from previous encyclopedia articles (Craig, 2009a, 2016), I'll start off by explaining the metamodel in general, then say more about the seven traditions, and I'll conclude by discussing criticisms of the metamodel and recent work that expands the traditions and suggests different applications. 

The Constitutive Metamodel

A model is a representation of something from some point of view. A metamodel is a model of models. It's a framework for describing and comparing different models of something. Every theory of communication is also a model of communication insofar as it represents the communication process from some point of view. The Constitutive Metamodel is a framework for describing and comparing different models of communication from the point of view of how they are relevant to practical problems. 

The metamodel is useful theoretically because it shows how diverse ideas about communication relate to each other, and it is useful practically because it gives us a wide range of perspectives on communication problems. It's called the "constitutive" metamodel because it is based on a constitutive model of communication--the idea that communication is a social process that constitutes, or produces, shared meaning. The Constitutive Metamodel is a model of communication in the field of communication theory. As such, it represents models of communication as ways of communicating about communication that constitute, or produce, alternative meanings of communication as a concept and a practice. 

We need a metamodel because communication theory is a wonderfully rich field of thought but also a very fragmented one. There has never been a single, generally accepted overall theory or core set of theories of communication. In fact, there are hundreds of  theories, and not only are they about different aspects of communication (such as media technologies or personal relationships), they often come from such different intellectual backgrounds that they can seem entirely unrelated to each other. How does a psychological theory of media effects relate to a critical theory of decolonizing communication, and what difference does it make for communication in practice? The metamodel gives us a way of thinking about questions like that. 

From the early decades of the 20th century, theories of communication sprang up in philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech, and many other fields of thought. Philosophers analyzed problems of language and meaning, sociologists looked at problems of urban community, psychologists studied problems of persuasion and group dynamics, and so on. I suspect that the topic of communication attracted such widespread intellectual attention because communication was increasingly felt to be an important problem in society. Each discipline developed theories by extending its own traditional ways of thinking to address some communication problems, but until the late 1940s there was still no awareness of "communication theory" as an overarching topic that included all of those theories. 

The term "communication theory" first appeared in the field of electrical engineering, where by the 1930s and '40s it referred to theories of signal coding and transmission--the origins of what I call the cybernetic tradition. As the academic discipline of communication began to be organized in the 1950s and '60s (a long story that can't be told here), the term "communication theory" was borrowed from the electrical engineers and became an umbrella term covering all theories of communication in all fields of thought. Although much has changed through the following decades, communication theorists continue to work in a variety of different intellectual traditions, so the field continues to be rich with ideas but also very fragmented. Yet, all of those disconnected theories have relevant things to say about communication problems in society, so there is common ground among them and a potential for productive dialogue about their practical differences.  

The Constitutive Metamodel tries to bring the field of communication theory together in a unified conversation without diminishing its rich diversity. The trick is to see how all communication theories are relevant to practical problems. In that pragmatic capacity, not only do most theories contribute something useful, they all have something in common to discuss and debate when we treat them as alternative models for framing practical problems.

The main ideas of the Constitutive Metamodel can be summarized in a few bullet points:

• Communication is a culturally shaped concept and social practice, constituted in the ordinary metadiscourse (practical discourse about communication) that circulates in a society. In other words, how we understand and practice communication is shaped by common ways of talking about communication in our culture.
• Communication theory is a technical practice of metadiscourse that interprets, critiques, and reconstructs ordinary metadiscourse to develop useful new ways of talking about (and thereby constituting) the practice of communication. Communication theory contributes to society by creating and disseminating practically relevant forms of metadiscourse that can be used to frame problems and discuss practices of communication in everyday situations.
• Theories that are practically relevant are both plausible (consistent with some commonly held beliefs about communication) and interesting (challenge other common beliefs). For example, cybernetic theories are plausible because they build on certain commonplace ideas (e.g., that communication depends on information transfer) while also challenging other commonplace ideas (e.g., that humans are essentially different from machines). As such, cybernetic theories give us a unique perspective for framing and discussing a range of communication problems. 
• A basis for debate between different theories is that they often disagree about the validity of some commonplace metadiscourse. For example, theories of genuine dialogue (in what I call the phenomenological tradition), contrary to cybernetic theories, generally challenge the idea that communication depends on information transfer while affirming that humans are essentially different from machines. This difference gives us two alternative perspectives on communication problems, one focused on information processing and the other on authentic human relationships. In this way, the diversity of communication theory can be a strength when it enables us to reflect on problems from different viewpoints. 
• Theories of communication are both numerous and intellectually diverse, partly because they have developed independently in several different thought traditions, each with its own vocabulary, core assumptions, and relevance to ordinary metadiscourse. The Constitutive Metamodel argues that many ideas in communication theory are based on a smaller number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication, first presented in my 1999 article as the seven traditions of communication theory. It's important to emphasize that these traditions are not uniform or unchanging. Each tradition includes many contending theories and they all continue to evolve over time through ongoing innovation and debate. It's also important to emphasize that the metamodel is open-ended in principle and not limited to the original seven traditions. In fact several more traditions have already been recognized in the literature since 1999. Finally, theories often blend ideas from different traditions, so we can't expect every theory to fit neatly in one tradition. 

Traditions of Communication Theory

In the original article on the Constitutive Metamodel (Craig, 1999) the seven traditions were represented in the form of two tables, reproduced below. Feel free to skip over the tables. They may be hard to read on your device, and they refer to a lot of complex ideas that I can't explain in this short introduction to the metamodel. Instead, I'll say a few words about the overall structure of the tables and then return to the simplified version at the top of this post to say more about each tradition.

Table 1. Seven Traditions of Communication Theory (from Craig, 1999, p. 133)

The purpose of Table 1 is to display the seven traditions of  communication theory as forms of metadiscourse based on different fundamental conceptions of communication. Each tradition is summarized with regard to:

• Its typical definition of communication,
• Its general way of framing communication problems,
• Some of its core vocabulary, 
• Some commonplace ideas about communication that it affirms, and 
• Some commonplace ideas about communication that it challenges.

Table 2. Topoi for Argumentation Across Traditions (from Craig, 1999, p. 134)

Table 2 illustrates points of disagreement among the traditions as a basis for theoretical debate across the field. In the column under each tradition, the table lists "topoi" or lines of argument from that tradition against each tradition. Because theoretical debate goes on within as well as between traditions, the diagonal cells of the table present lines of argument against each tradition from within the same tradition: rhetoric against rhetoric, semiotics against semiotics, and so on. As I've mentioned, this table alludes to a lot of complex ideas and it may be hard to make much sense of it until you have studied the traditions more deeply. 

With that in mind, let's return to the simplified picture at the top of this post and consider a brief sketch of each tradition (adapted from Craig, 2016).  

Rhetorical Tradition

• Communication is the practical art of discourse.
• Problems of communication involve choices about what to say and how in particular situations, depending on such factors as audience, purpose, and the available means of persuasion (reasons, emotions, stylistic devices).

Rhetorical theory originated in ancient Greek city-states where citizens participated in public juries and deliberative assemblies, and public speaking skills were highly valued. Popular teachers known as sophists wrote handbooks on techniques of effective speaking. Aristotle, in the first systematic philosophical treatise on rhetoric, defined it as the art of discovering the available means of persuasion and codified fundamental rhetorical concepts that continue to be used today. Through the Roman and medieval periods in the West, rhetoric was a standard school subject (part of the trivium), and a complex tradition of theoretical writings on rhetoric can be traced from ancient times down to the present. As the idea of communication gained currency in the 20th century, rhetorical theory also flourished and the scope of rhetoric was broadened from its roots in public speaking and written composition so that any communication could now be thought of as a form of rhetoric. In the rhetorical tradition, communication is a practical art of discourse, concerned with mastering techniques of communication, developing a critical awareness of techniques, and making wise choices about what and how to communicate in practical situations. 

Semiotic Tradition

• Communication is the sharing of meaning through signs and symbols.
• Problems of communication involve the use of signs and symbols (words, gestures, images, etc.) to express meaning, achieve understanding, and bridge gaps between different subjective viewpoints. Problems can arise from unfamiliarity, language differences, too much abstraction, or  unintended meanings that might be confusing or offensive. 

Semiotics, the theory of signs, sprang in its modern form from the 17th-century empiricist philosopher John Locke, who theorized that words stand for ideas in each person’s mind and that communication fails when people use words with different or unclear meanings. Under the influence of seminal thinkers such as Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, sophisticated theories were developed in the 20th century to explain types and systems of signs and how signs function in the mind and in society. For example, natural signs (e.g., smoke is a sign of fire) can be distinguished from symbolic signs (e.g., the word “fire” used in a speech about fire prevention) in that symbolic signs have shared meaning only as a matter of social convention. In the semiotic tradition, communication depends entirely on the production and interpretation of signs to share meaning or convey information. The practical concerns of rhetoric and semiotics overlap, but rhetoric has traditionally focused on persuasion while semiotics has focused on intersubjective understanding as the fundamental problem of communication. 

Phenomenological Tradition

• Communication is the experience of self and other in dialogue. 
• Problems of communication involve inauthentic ways of being and relating to others, such as one-way monologue, rejection of different views, or focus on an instrumental goal like persuading the other or projecting a certain image of oneself.

Phenomenological theory is concerned with communication as a subjective experience. In contrast to cybernetics, human consciousness and intentionality are essential to communication as theorized in this tradition. Phenomenological theory describes the forms of conscious experience through which we interpret and make sense of the world around us, including other people. Several contending schools of phenomenology developed in the 20th century from the work of major Continental philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An important concept first theorized by the philosopher Martin Buber is that of genuine dialogue—an event of communion between people who experience each other as full persons with their own subjectivity (I–you) rather than as instrumental objects (I–it). The phenomenological tradition thus offers an ethical view of communication that values openness and authenticity and is critical of strategic (rhetorical) as well as mechanistic (cybernetic or sociopsychological) views. Phenomenology’s focus on our direct experience of others can be contrasted to the semiotic assumption that meaning can only be shared through signs, but current philosophers of communication often blend the two traditions, weaving signs and discourse into the fabric of conscious experience. 

Cybernetic Tradition

• Communication is information processing in systems at all levels of complexity (machines, organisms, groups, organizations, societies). 
• Problems of communication involve malfunctions in the flow of information such as too little or too much information, lack of feedback, runaway processes such as escalating conflict, or system breakdown. 

In the late 1940s, formal theories of communication developed by mathematicians and electrical engineers, especially Claude Shannon’s theory of information and Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetic feedback-control systems, attracted widespread attention in disciplines ranging from biology to psychology and the social sciences. At the dawn of the Information Age, these theories seemed to point the way to a rigorous science of communication that would explain how information functions in all complex systems including machines, biological organisms, and human society. Although the formal mathematics of these theories were not easily applied to human interaction, Shannon’s diagram of the linear model of communication (showing the flow of information from a source through a channel to a destination) became a staple of communication theory courses, and key terms such as information, redundancy, noise, and feedback were absorbed into ordinary language as a somewhat technical-sounding vocabulary for discussing communication. In the cybernetic tradition, communication is information processing in systems at all levels from machines to human societies, and problems of communication have to do with system malfunctions (such as information blockage in organizations or escalating conflict in interpersonal relations) rather than persuasion (contrary to the rhetorical tradition) or shared meaning (contrary to the semiotic tradition). In a cybernetic view, contrary to the phenomenological tradition, communication is a functional process that does not rely on conscious intentionality. Human consciousness itself is a form of information processing that is not different in its essential functioning from that of computing machines or other nonconscious systems.

Sociopsychological Tradition

• Communication is a process of social behavior, interaction and influence, the causes and effects of which are determined by psychological variables such as personality, cognition, and emotion.
• Problems of communication involve the use of psychological variables to affect behavior and interaction and to achieve desired outcomes, such as sales from advertising, public health, team motivation, or interpersonal closeness.

Scientific social psychology developed in the 20th century, roughly in parallel with phenomenology and in response to some related practical concerns about human relations, but it theorized communication, quite differently, as a process of behavioral interaction with psychological causes and effects. Leading social psychologists such as Kurt Lewin, Carl Hovland, and Gordon Allport developed theories of group dynamics, persuasion and social influence, rumor transmission, cognitive information processing, interpersonal attraction, and other communication-related phenomena that have been extensively applied and further developed in communication research to explain media effects and interpersonal interaction. This is the dominant theoretical tradition in current conceptions of communication research as a science. As a tradition focused on explaining the causes and effects of communication, sociopsychologcal theory appeals to a practical interest in diagnosing the causes of communication problems and finding effective solutions to control outcomes. Although both rhetoric and social psychology are concerned with communication techniques, rhetoric theorizes communication as an art adapted to each situation while social psychology pursues scientific generalizations. Although cybernetics and social psychology share a scientific orientation, sociopsychological theory does not equate machine and human communication but rather emphasizes the importance of distinctly human factors such as personality, emotion, and motivated cognition. 

Sociocultural Tradition

• Communication is participation in society and culture. 
• Problems of communication involve barriers to community and social cooperation, and can arise from factors such as cultural differences, social and cultural change, and community conflict. 

The sociocultural tradition of communication theory emerged under the influence of 19th and early 20th-century social theorists such as Emile Durkheim, Charles H. Cooley, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. In this tradition, communication is viewed as an essential process of human society. On the macro level of society as a whole, communication functions to integrate and coordinate the various institutions of a society. On the micro level of social interaction, our successful communication with one another depends on a shared context of social institutions and cultural patterns, which we both reproduce and flexibly adapt as we interact, thus contributing both to the maintenance of society and to the possibility of social change on the macro level. A problem for sociocultural theories is to explain how local interactions, in the aggregate, produce social and cultural patterns even while they depend on and reproduce existing patterns. The sociocultural tradition is concerned with practical communication problems such as collaboration and organization, social conflict and change, communication across cultural differences, and the quest for community in diverse, multicultural societies. Sociocultural theory criticizes the overemphasis on individual agency and the lack of attention to the macro level of society and culture in traditions such as rhetoric, phenomenology, and social psychology. It criticizes the tendency in traditions such as semiotics and cybernetics to abstract communication codes or functions from the rich context of social life in which they necessarily occur. 

Critical Tradition

• Communication is discursive reflection, meaning that genuine communication requires free and open questioning of the social forces that condition and often distort communication.
• Problems of communication involve hegemonic ideologies and unjust power relations that go unquestioned (with respect to social class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age, etc.) and that systematically distort the communication process to privilege certain views while excluding or marginalizing other views. 

The modern critical tradition of communication theory began in the mid-19th century with the Marxist critique of capitalist ideology and has evolved through the Frankfurt School critical theorists of the mid-20th century, and later Frankfurt School theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, to contemporary poststructuralism and identity-based critical movements that challenge oppressive ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other dimensions of difference marked by unjust privilege and domination. For theorists in the critical tradition, most communication is distorted by ingrained ideological assumptions and power structures that perpetuate social injustice, and a practical purpose of communication theory is to cultivate forms of discursive reflection or communication that exposes oppressive ideology, freely questions the status quo, and promotes progressive social change. Turning this critique on the field of communication theory itself, critical-cultural theorists have centered the theoretical contributions of women and LGBTQ+ theorists, theorists of color, and non-Western indigenous thought traditions. If some other communication theorists criticize the critical tradition for politicizing science and scholarship, critical theorists criticize other traditions for upholding a sham political neutrality that implicitly serves dominant interests. 

Criticisms, Applications, and Extensions

The Constitutive Metamodel has been mentioned thousands of times in the academic literature, most often simply as a way of nodding toward communication theory in general or toward the traditions or some other idea in the metamodel. Substantial criticisms, applications, and extensions of the metamodel have also been published, and several traditions of communication theory have been introduced in addition to the original seven. Listed below under Further Reading are good sources for learning more about these developments: Craig (2009b), Craig (2015), Craig & Xiong (2022), and Rich & Robles (2021). I'll just quickly mention some criticisms and applications of the metamodel, and will conclude with brief summaries of four newly-proposed traditions.  

First, here in gist are some of the main criticisms of the metamodel and responses to those criticisms:  

• Epistemological bias: The metamodel represents the field of communication theory from a social constructionist stance as opposed to a naturalistic, scientific stance. In other words, the metamodel sees communication as a social practice that we can constitute in different forms depending on how we talk about it (metadiscourse) as opposed to a natural phenomenon that can be described and explained scientifically. One response to this criticism is to point out that the metamodel does include scientific theories (in the social psychological, cybernetic, and other traditions), but even though some aspects of communication may be naturally determined by biological or other factors that can be discovered scientifically, the practice of communication is still culturally shaped in many ways. Scientific theories can become part of the culture that shapes our understanding and practice of communication. 
• Western bias:  The metamodel is entirely based on Western (chiefly European and North American) thought traditions, and therefore it may have limited relevance for communication theory and practice in Asian, African, and other non-Western cultures. In an article co-authored with Bingjuan Xiong (Craig & Xiong, 2022), we proposed to correct this bias by expanding the metamodel to include non-Western traditions of communication theory, starting with Confucian and Buddhist traditions. 
• Misalignment with current research areas:  Communication scholars often complain that they can't really place themselves or their theories in any of the seven traditions as defined in the metamodel, even if they nominally work in one of them. For researchers at the forefront of fields like rhetoric, semiotics, or phenomenology, the definitions of those traditions may seem too simplistic and/or old-fashioned to capture current thinking. Other scholars often feel that the metamodel excludes, or at least underemphasizes, theories in their own field of expertise, whether it be media ecology, public relations, or communication biology. One way of responding to these criticisms has been to add new traditions to the metamodel to fill gaps, so far including a Pragmatist tradition and a Spiritual tradition, in addition to the Confucian and Buddhist traditions already mentioned. (See below for more on these four traditions.)  Another way of responding to the criticisms is to point out that the traditions are intended to identify different fundamental conceptions of communication, which don't necessarily correspond to current sub-fields of communication. For example, there is no public relations tradition in the metamodel because that field does not have a fundamentally distinct conception of communication, but public relations theories use ideas from several of the traditions including rhetoric, semiotics, social psychology, and others. 

Second, although the metamodel has been criticized for certain biases and limitations, it has nevertheless proven to be a useful way of representing the field of communication theory. Here in gist are two main ways of applying the metamodel: 

• Teaching communication theory:  The metamodel is a useful tool for helping students to make sense of communication theory as a field and to apply communication theories to problems in everyday life, by showing how theories in the field are based on a smaller number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication (the traditions) that all have different practical implications. Most communication theory textbooks include the metamodel in some fashion, and many teachers have developed creative ways of presenting and using it in their courses. You'll find great examples of this in Practicing communication theory: Exploring, applying, and teaching the constitutive metamodel, a book edited by Marc H. Rich and Jessica S. Robles (see below under Further Reading).
• Critically reflecting on theories and subfields: Scholars have used the metamodel to finds points of comparison for analyzing particular theories or entire subfields of communication in terms of how they relate to other theories or to practical problems. Some of these analyses have looked at which traditions are being applied to a problem or topic area and have pointed out gaps that could be filled by applying different traditions. For examples of this type of application in social thought, phenomenology, interpersonal communication, and even robot communication, see Craig (2015, pp. 359-360).

Third, the metamodel has been extended to include traditions beyond the original seven. (Adding traditions to the metamodel faces some challenges as discussed by Craig, 2015, and Craig & Xiong, 2022.) Here in gist are four traditions that have been proposed so far: 

Pragmatist Tradition (Craig, 2007)

• Communication is pluralistic community, the coordination of practical activities among diverse people and groups through discourse and reflective inquiry.
• Problems of communication involve a "paradox of pluralism" because to fully embrace diversity in a community means taking a standpoint that takes no particular standpoint. 

Building on previous work by Chris Russill, Craig (2007) explicated a pragmatist tradition of communication theory that began in the late 19th century in the work of American Pragmatist philosophers such as William James, C.S Pierce, and John Dewey. For theorists in this tradition, communication problems arise from the difficulty of achieving consensus on matters of common concern among the diverse interests and incommensurable worldviews in complex modern societies. Pragmatist communication theory is concerned with forms of discourse that enable the creation and maintenance of cooperative, pluralistic communities in response to such problems. This tradition not only exists in the field and offers a distinct conception of communication, it makes clear that the Constitutive Metamodel itself is a pragmatist theory of communication: a model in the field as well as of the field. 

Spiritual Tradition (Rich, 2014) 

• Communication is mimetic of the atemporal (non-material) plane of reality. 
• Problems of communication involve the ineffable nature of spiritual truth. "These problems include denial of the atemporal, discerning the mimetic of the atemporal, and failing to overcome the material nature of communication to grasp the inner atemporal purity of the message better" (Rich, 2014, p. 140).

"Rich ... has proposed a spiritual tradition of communication theory in which communication is conceived as mimetic of the atemporal. This tradition is based on a dualistic distinction between the temporal, material world in which we practice human communication and an atemporal, spiritual plane of truth that can influence our temporal beliefs and practices when we manage to connect with it, but that is not in any way influenced, much less socially constructed, through human interaction. Normative human communication can represent atemporal truth, but only imperfectly. Among many writings on communication in the spiritual tradition Rich cites classical works of Plato and Augustine, certain strains of American pragmatism, and contemporary works including those of several communication scholars. Having defined the spiritual tradition, Rich puts it in conversation with the eight previously defined traditions in the field, noting, for example, that genuine dialogue in the phenomenological tradition is an experience of meeting between individuals while in the spiritual tradition it emerges from a shared atemporal moment" (Craig, 2015, p. 361). 

Buddhist Tradition (Craig & Xiong, 2022)

• Communication is the individual's attunement to enlightenment. 
• Problems of communication involve barriers to enlightenment such as self-centeredness and ego-attachment. 

Buddhism, a long-standing religious and philosophical tradition that significantly influences Asian communication concepts and practices, developed from teachings of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in ancient India during the 6th or 5th century BCE. While diverse Buddhist traditions exist (Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana), they share core beliefs like the Four Noble Truths, enlightenment, and the interconnectedness of all living things. The Buddhist tradition conceptualizes communication as an individual's attunement to enlightenment, which encompasses both the communication process of becoming enlightened and an ultimate ideal state of communication.  Individuals in this tradition are "conditioned" rather than self-contained agents, yet retain the capacity for "becoming" through Buddhist practices. Causality is a process of "interdependent co-arising" rather than linear cause and effect. "Attunement" highlights mindfulness, harmony, and interconnectedness, emphasizing both inner mind development and the outer world. Consciousness is central, with mind development crucial for enlightenment, achieved through practices like meditation. Enlightenment, similar to nirvana, is a practice-based experience, attainable gradually or suddenly, through the Eightfold Path. This path involves ethical thinking, living, and relating, beginning with understanding the Four Noble Truths. Buddhism challenges social hierarchies, emphasizing moral equality, and stresses individual experience over reliance on language or authority. Buddhism shares (Western) phenomenology's focus on individual consciousness but in a metaphysical context that shapes communication differently. And although it has much in common with the spiritual tradition, Buddhism embraces not a dualistic (temporal-atemporal) but rather a "tri-world" (human-natural-supernatural) conception of reality and regards the material world as an illusion to be overcome in enlightenment. 

Confucian Tradition (Craig & Xiong, 2022)

• Communication is harmonious social interaction.
• Problems of communication involve conditions that threaten social harmony, such as lack of personal cultivation or failure to perform traditional rituals and rites.

Confucianism, a prominent philosophical tradition derived from teachings of the Chinese scholar Confucius (551-549 BCE), has significantly influenced East Asian societies, shaping everything from governance to interpersonal relationships, particularly for Chinese and Koreans. Confucianism offers a coherent system of thinking about communication, emphasizing moral speech that reflects self-cultivation and fosters harmonious relationships. Key concepts like guanxi (social relations), mientzu (face), he (harmony), and uye-ri (reciprocity) are used to understand Asian communication. Chen's harmony theory highlights ren (humanism), yi (righteousness), and li (propriety) as guiding principles. Confucian communication is viewed as harmonious social interaction, prioritizing social harmony over individual enlightenment. This harmony stems from individual virtue and ethical communication, requiring constant attunement to ethical principles and the interplay of yin and yang. The five ethical principles (ren, yi, li, zhi, xin) are interdependent and crucial for moral self-cultivation. Confucianism emphasizes the individual's role in creating harmonious relationships, extending from family to the cosmos. While valuing harmony, it acknowledges conflict, advocating for its resolution towards greater harmony. It promotes individual moral cultivation as the basis of social order, but also acknowledges hierarchical social positions based on virtue. This creates a tension between dynamic adaptation and static rites, leading to both criticism and creative adaptations of the tradition.   

*****

Questions? Comments? Please post a comment on this blog or email me (Robert.Craig@Colorado.edu).

Further Reading

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x 

Craig, R. T. (2007). Pragmatism in the field of communication theory. Communication Theory, 17(2), 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00292.x 

Craig, R. T. (2009a). Traditions of communication theory. In S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Communication Theory (Vol. 2, pp. 958-963). Sage. 

Craig, R. T. (2009b). Reflection on "Communication Theory as a Field". Revue internationale de communication sociale et publique, 2009(2), 7-11. https://doi.org/10.4000/communiquer.346 

Craig, R. T. (2015). The constitutive metamodel: A 16-year review. Communication Theory, 25(4), 356-374. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12076 

Craig, R. T. (2016). Traditions of communication theory. In K. B. Jensen & R. T. Craig (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (Vol. 4, pp. 2068-2077). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect11 

Craig, R. T., & Muller, H. L. (Eds.). (2007). Theorizing communication: Readings across traditions. Sage. 

Craig, R. T., & Xiong, B. (2022). Traditions of communication theory and the potential for multicultural dialogue. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2021.2009487 

Rich, M. H. (2015). Spiritual debate in communication theory: Craig's metamodel applied. Journal of Communication and Religion, 38(2), 134-153. https://doi.org/10.5840/jcr201538213 

Rich, M. H., & Robles, J. S. (Eds.). (2021). Practicing communication theory: Exploring, applying, and teaching the constitutive metamodel. Cognella. 

Remarks to the Pennsylvania Communication Association

 

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122109968042533321&set=pb.61565999637307.-2207520000

(Following are my revised notes for a speech presented to the 84th Annual Convention of the Pennsylvania Communication Association, held at Penn State University-Schuylkill Campus, Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, September 27, 2024.)

Thank you, it's great to be here, and it's great to see all of you here and that the PCA is thriving as a professional home for communication scholars in this region. It's especially great to see so many students in attendance. Since you represent the future of communication studies, while I mostly represent the past, we're a good group to engage the conference theme of "Pondering Our Past, Forging Our Future."

I was invited here this year to accept the Julia T. Wood Teacher-Scholar Award, and of course I'm very honored and grateful for that recognition.

REMARKS

When Prof. Schrader wrote to me about the Julia T. Wood award, she asked if I would be willing to share some remarks at the conference. I said yes, of course.

But then, of course, I immediately started worrying about what I was going to say and soon realized that I wasn't really sure what constitutes sharing remarks.

In an email exchange, Valerie and I agreed that it would be something like a short after-dinner speech. But I got interested in the question anyway. What kind of communication is sharing remarks? To begin with, what are remarks?

I vaguely remembered a famous quote, something about "remarks are not ___" but I couldn't remember who said it or what the "not" was.  So I googled "remarks are not" and at the top of the results was a helpful AI snippet reminded me that the quote came from Gertrude Stein, an early 20th century modernist writer, who once remarked that "remarks are not literature" -- which I take to be a bit of a putdown of remarks. 

Also in the top Google results was a snarky tweet pointing out that Gertrude Stein is well known for her quirky remarks but nobody reads her literary writings anymore, which I think is basically true.

Then it occurred to me that Twitter or X is a medium that consists almost entirely of remarks. It's a platform for remarks, and a lot of them are negative.

However, another helpful AI snippet informed me that remarks are not always negative. They express opinions that can be positive or negative, so that was a relief. 

Then I thought, when you make a remark about something, whether positive or negative, you are saying that the thing is somehow remarkable. And that thought became the inspiration for my talk tonight on what to me are some especially remarkable things about our discipline of communication studies.  

THREE REMARKS

A lot of my scholarly work has been about the communication discipline, its fundamental purpose and how our work as scholars and teachers can contribute to that purpose.

So the theme of this conference, "Pondering Our Past, Forging Our Future," is something I have thought about quite a bit over the years, and I'd like to share three remarks about that -- that is, I'd like to point out three remarkable things about the communication discipline that I've learned over time.

1. We're both very practical and very theoretical. I got this insight from my communication theory students in an exercise where I asked them how their communication courses differed from courses in other subjects, and they often said that communication courses tend to be both more practical but also more theoretical as compared to courses like biology or psychology where you learn a lot of "facts". In communication courses you tend to practice communication and learn theories. Theories can help us think critically about practical problems, so maybe sometimes theories are more practical than facts. But how does that actually work, being both very practical and very theoretical? That brings me to my second remark.

2. We're very meta. Not Facebook or Instagram! Not that kind of Meta! I'm referring to metacommunication or meta-discourse - in short, much of our work as communication scholars is talking or writing about communication, often developing new and carefully thought out ways of talking about communication, which is what I think of as communication theory. Communication theory consists of metadiscourse, that is, well-thought-out ways of talking about how we talk.

My little detour into the concept of "remarks" illustrates this way of going meta, taking a practical concept and reflecting on it, asking what it means. This is how our minds work as communication scholars: We go meta. 

In a way, talking about communication is not remarkable in itself, because in modern societies everybody talks about communication. As the sociolinguist Deborah Cameron has pointed out, we live in a communication culture that produces a lot of metadiscourse, people talking about communication problems like loneliness, bullying, polarization, misinformation.

As I see it, our discipline's main role in society is to participate in that metadiscourse and to cultivate it.  

We often contribute to the metadiscourse by saying, in effect, "here's another way of talking about that problem" and referring to some communication theory.

For example, at this afternoon's panel on communication challenges, we heard that students often say that talking about controversial issues is useless, that it's painful, hearing my deep beliefs contradicted hurts me, and so on, and our job as communication teachers is to suggest other, theory-based, potentially more productive ways of talking about dialogue and deliberation on controversial issues. And, in doing so, we can draw from a rich body of relevant theories, which leads to my third remark. 

3. Our theory is amazingly diverse. There's no one theory of communication. There are hundreds of theories. Communication theory provides us with a great diversity of perspectives for thinking about communication problems. Many of those theories originated in other disciplines ranging from philosophy to linguistics, psychology, and so on, but we've made them our own by systematically developing these different intellectual traditions as ways of talking about communication.

I became aware of this theoretical diversity decades ago as an undergraduate student, as I was struck by how communication was a topic in so many courses that I took in other disciplines around the university. Many of those same ideas were brought together in my first communication theory course, where I studied them as different perspectives on communication (psychological, sociological, and so on). It made for a fascinating but not a very coherent subject. 

Many years later I came back to this problem. The field continues to be rich with ideas but the ideas are scattered and come from such different intellectual traditions -- literature, humanities, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc. -- that it's hard to see them as part of the same field.

Probably my most widely cited and influential work stems from an article I wrote in 1999, "Communication Theory as a Field," where I presented a metamodel of communication theory that included seven theoretical traditions--rhetorical, semiotic, cybernetic, phenomenological, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical.

Most communication theory textbooks include a chapter or section about the metamodel. For those of you who are undergrads and have studied one of those textbooks in a communication theory course, that's where you may have seen my name before. (Craig, Craig, heard that name somewhere...) So, yeah, I'm the "Seven Traditions" guy, and I'd like to apologize for giving you yet another list of seven things to memorize!

But honestly, I didn't write the article as an instrument for torturing students, I wrote it to develop a way of understanding how communication theory can be coherent and useful by contributing to the metadiscourse in society. Most of those hundreds of communication theories are based on a small number of fundamentally different conceptions of communication, each of which is practically relevant because it intersects with concepts and issues in everyday talk about communication.

Without going into details, the gist of the metamodel is that we can think of communication theory as a kind of  conversation about models of communication and how they address practical problems. Rather than one unified theory of communication, we have several traditions of theory that give us different perspectives for thinking about problems. The idea wasn't to have a list of traditions but more like a dialogue or debate among the traditions that all of us can join in on.

*****

So, as we ponder our past and forge our future, let's keep in mind these three remarkable things about our discipline:  we're both very practical and very theoretical, we're very meta, and our theory is amazingly diverse. Those are my remarks, and thank you for listening!

Framing Mass Incarceration as a Social-Systems Communication Problem: Brief Review

Working toward a larger project on how we frame communication problems in theory and practice, I'd like to reflect briefly on a recent academic article about the problem of mass incarceration to illustrate how a certain practical way of talking about problems implies a certain concept of communication and vice versa.

"Mass incarceration" refers to the fact that the United States, since the 1970s, has imprisoned more people relative to population than any other country, and that people of color, especially Black men, are vastly overrepresented among those prisoners. (As the graph above shows, the numbers have gone down a bit in recent years.)  Lane and Ramirez (2024) have studied this problem from a communication perspective. They introduce the term, "carceral communication, to explain the interconnection between communication, digital traces, and surveillance to link individuals, neighborhoods, and prison for poor, Black Americans overrepresented in the criminal justice system" (p. 675).

To document this phenomenon of carceral communication, Lane and Ramirez analyzed the sources of evidence for specific acts that were cited by prosecutors in a sample of publicly available criminal indictments against youth gang members in New York City between 2010 and 2014. They found that a large majority of specific acts cited in the criminal indictments consisted of social media messages or posts, and recorded phone calls with prisoners. Here are the main findings of the study as summarized in the article's abstract:

First, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become the most sought-after type of criminal evidence because of its visibility and permanence. Second, law enforcement uses the interpersonal communication and neighborhood networks of incarcerated Black men for crime control and surveillance purposes. Third, carceral communication operates as a communication feedback process, in which marginalized, young, Black men under surveillance know they are being watched and respond to that surveillance with resistance that is also subject to criminalization. (p. 674)

The authors describe their study as an exercise in reframing: "By reframing the racial–spatial problem of mass incarceration ... through the concept of carceral communication, we present it as a communication and technology issue" (p. 687). That's a good description as far as it goes, because the study reveals how social media platforms and the routine practice of recording prison phone calls  provide law enforcement with technological means of accessing interpersonal communication networks for purposes of surveillance and investigation. 

What I want to emphasize in addition is how this way of describing the process of mass incarceration implies a social-systems model of communication. In this model, there is a complex set of elements––gang activity, related flows of interpersonal communication, police surveillance of those interpersonal flows targeting poor black communities through technological means such as accessing social media platforms, and feedback processes in which police monitoring leads to resistance (e.g. deleting social media messages) which itself can be criminalized (e.g. as destroying evidence), all leading to criminal prosecution and incarceration––and these elements all operate together to form a self-perpetuating system. This is a communication problem that has little to do with "miscommunication" or other common ways of talking about failures and difficulties in communicating. Rather, the problem is a system of communication that contributes to bad outcomes (criminal activity, racialized mass incarceration), and this way of framing the problem invites reflection on forms of action not for "improving" communication but for intervening to disrupt and change a dysfunctional system. 

References

Lane, J., & Ramirez, F. A. (2024). Carceral communication: Mass incarceration as communicative phenomenon. New Media & Society, 26(2), 674-691. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211060841 

Beyond the seven traditions of communication theory: Otávio Daros Interviews Robert T. Craig

Following is the English source text of an interview recently published in Portuguese in the journal, Questões Transversais (Craig & Daros, 2022). The interview was done by email in January, 2021, by the Brazilian scholar Otávio Daros.  Daros questioned me concerning my intellectual background and development, my concept of communication as a practical discipline and how it relates to current thinking about the field of communication as a "post-discipline." We also discussed my "constitutive metamodel" of communication theory (the seven traditions), how the field has changed since the original publication of that concept in 1999, and current issues about "de-westernizing" or "decolonizing" communication theory.  The interview concludes with my thoughts about the future of communication studies, which I think will depend on the future of communication itself as a cultural practice that is somewhat under threat at the present moment. 

Otávio Daros: Could you comment on your intellectual trajectory since your BA in Speech at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and your PhD in communication at the Michigan State University? I would like to know about your sources of inspiration at that time, and how your main study interests have moved up to the present day.

Robert Craig: I had always thought I would grow up to become a lawyer, but during my undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I became a scholar instead, because I fell in love with communication theory. At that time, in the late 1960s, communication was a “hot” topic across the disciplines. In my liberal arts curriculum, I took courses in science, literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, etc., each a different subject, but communication had a big role in most of them. Philosophy was about language and meaning; political science was about cybernetic systems and political symbols; social psychology was about persuasion and social interaction, and so on. My first communication theory course, which touched on all of those disciplines and more, was where it all seemed to come together. Communication was at the center of everything! In the Speech department, I took courses in rhetorical theory, which, of course, were also about communication, but communication theory was a separate course. The Speech department was split between humanistic scholars who studied rhetoric and social scientists who called their subject “communication,” and I wavered between the two. Rhetorical studies had philosophical depth and engaged with important normative problems of public discourse, while communication studies seemed more up-to-date and scientific and covered the full range of communication from interpersonal to mass. That was when I first began to think about problems like the nature of theory, the relationship between normative and empirical knowledge, and the purpose of a communication discipline. 

I decided, however, to pursue graduate studies in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, where I was totally immersed in the behavioral sciences and took courses in statistics, mathematical modeling, network analysis, theory construction, social psychology, and interpersonal communication, among others. I emerged with my PhD as a quantitative communication scientist in 1976 and took my first job at the Pennsylvania State University in a Speech Communication department which, like the Speech department at Wisconsin had been, was sharply split between a dominant group of humanistic rhetoricians and a smaller cohort of communication scientists. As I encountered that academic “culture clash” once again, I was driven back to the same philosophical, theoretical, and methodological questions about the communication discipline that had begun to engage me as an undergraduate. This is not the place for a detailed account of my intellectual development through the following decades. I have told parts of that story in previous publications (Craig, 2006, 2021). For now, let me just say that my ongoing struggle with those questions has inspired much of my subsequent work on practical theory, communication as a practical discipline, the constitutive metamodel of communication theory, and metadiscourse. 

OD: One of your first and most significant contributions refers to the article "Communication as a Practical Discipline" (1989). You recently returned to this reflection in "For a Practical Discipline" (2018a). How have you described communication as a practical discipline, considering its object of study and methodology? And how does it distinguish itself from other intellectual disciplines?

RC: The concept of a practical discipline has been at the center of my work for more than 30 years. The idea has developed through time as I have revised and elaborated various aspects of it, but my core argument has always been that we can use the concept of practical discipline to make sense of our very diverse, currently very fragmented field of study and to focus our collective activities on an essential function: to cultivate the practice of communication in society. I have argued that all elements of the communication field, including scientific, humanistic and critical research, professional and technical education, applied studies, etc., can contribute in different ways to our essential purpose, identity, and legitimacy as a discipline. The concept of a practical discipline goes back historically to Aristotle’s practical philosophy and his way of distinguishing practical subjects, such as ethics and politics, from productive subjects, such as shipbuilding and poetry, and from scientific subjects, such as physics and psychology. Communication can be studied in all three forms—as a set of practices that require thoughtful deliberation and good judgment, as a set of technologies and skills for producing things such as messages, and as a set of natural phenomena that can be investigated empirically, but I argue that these different forms of inquiry can be pursued most fruitfully when the practical dimension of communication is foregrounded as our primary object of study, which can integrate and give direction to our technical and scientific studies.  

OD: Does conceiving communication as a practical discipline mean that it is not a scientific discipline? In this case, don't you think it is appropriate to speak in terms of a communication science or an applied science?

RC: A modern practical discipline must also be a scientific discipline because empirical knowledge and explanatory theories can be of enormous practical importance. Those who wish to study communication and media phenomena as a “pure” communication science should be free to do so, but it is also important for them or other scholars in a practical discipline to reflect critically on the normative implications of that work. For example, “pure” scientific research showing how online social networks are influencing democratic politics can inform thinking about regulatory policies as well as political campaign practices, etc. Moreover, communication scientists can select research problems with the larger purpose of a practical discipline in mind. Prominent communication scholars such as Wolfgang Donsbach (2006), Russell Neuman (2016) and Klaus Bruhn Jensen (2021), have argued that communication scientists should focus their research on empirical questions that are relevant to normative problems in the practice of communication, including problems of democracy, pluralism, and social justice. This is a way to pursue scientific studies of communication while also contributing to a practical discipline.

OD: And how would your original proposal approach or distance itself from recent discussions about communication constituting a type of post-disciplinary field, configured by the lack of theoretical nucleus and thematic diversity?

RC: Debates about whether communication is an interdisciplinary field or an “emerging” discipline have gone on for decades without clear resolution. As the institutional consolidation of communication and media studies has progressed, I think the disciplinary view has gained ground, yet our field obviously continues to be very diverse and fragmented, with no generally acknowledged intellectual core. The “post-disciplinary” position advanced recently by Silvio Waisbord (2019) proposes to leverage the growing institutional strength of the communication discipline together with the field’s intellectual diversity to produce a new kind of academic formation that is more dynamic and innovative than traditional disciplines. In this view, our messy academic pluralism and habitual free roaming across disciplines are among the virtues of a post-discipline, not a source of weakness. Waisbord calls for the communication field to engage with contemporary social problems and to develop integrative frameworks across different areas in order to resist the tendency toward hyper-specialization. He implies, however, that a tightly unified disciplinary structure is not only unnecessary for our field to thrive but would be counterproductive, even if it were possible to achieve. 

My work on communication as a practical discipline proposes to unify the field under the broad disciplinary purpose of cultivating the practice of communication in society by developing practical knowledge, deliberating on communication problems, and intervening in the metadiscourse about communication that circulates in society (Craig, 2018a), but this not a very restrictive prescription. It does not require a tight disciplinary structure but rather emphasizes that the field’s diverse research and educational activities, theoretical traditions, and methodological approaches, all have something useful to contribute to its essential disciplinary purpose, if understood in that light. Even so, I am under no illusion that this vision of a practical discipline will ever become hegemonic. In Waisbord’s post-disciplinary view, the idea of a practical discipline can serve as an integrative framework to focus some of our activities on contemporary social problems, even if it is never universally adopted to define the communication discipline. In that regard, I think “post-discipline” describes our actual situation reasonably well, but I think the same can be said of many other academic fields at this time, including such traditional disciplines as sociology and anthropology.  

OD: For some scholars, the strength of communication studies is precisely in their dialogue - and dependence - with fields such as sociology and anthropology. On the other hand, others claim the autonomy of the communicational field. What is your position in this debate about an autonomous or dependent field? Has your vision changed since the 1970s?

RC: What is autonomy? Every discipline may be unique in some ways, but no discipline is independent of others. They all overlap with others, borrow from others, and endlessly fragment into subfields and divergent approaches, partly under the influence of others. Parts of psychology are now indistinguishable from neuroscience. Parts of economics have become branches of psychology. Economic theory dominates areas of sociology. Anthropology uses gene sequencing, carbon dating, economic modeling, and conversation analysis. By the same token, no discipline exclusively “owns” its nominal object of study. Not everyone who studies society is officially doing sociology, not everyone who studies behavior is a psychologist, and not everyone who studies communication is or ever will be officially a communication scholar. In this fluid reality, we need not worry that becoming an “autonomous” discipline will cut us off from dialogue and interdependence with other fields. I don’t clearly remember how I thought about this issue in the 1970s, but later on I developed the idea of a “conversation of disciplines” in which each discipline draws on a certain combination of rhetorical resources to assert its distinct “voice” (Craig, 2008). In this view, no discipline has a clear identity apart from the ongoing dialogue among disciplines.  

OD: In "Why Are There So Many Communication Theories?" (1993), you argue that the production of new theories does not necessarily contribute to making the field more enlightened, and that scholars still lack even a cohesive vocabulary to discuss the contributions that today announce themselves as a theory of communication. So I must ask this very basic question, but so important: what is your definition of communication theories?

RC: I don’t think I wrote in that article that producing new theories fails to enlighten the field. My point was that the epistemological diversity of communication theories that were being produced should make us question our traditional assumptions about theory. I was trying to open a space in the field for the discussion of new concepts of theory, such as practical theory, which I had proposed in the 1980s (Craig, 1989). I was responding, in part, to communication scientists like Charles R. Berger (1991), who complained that communication scientists were not producing original theories but were continuing to rely on theories borrowed from social psychology and other fields. To this I replied that communication scholars were doing plenty of original theoretical work outside of the narrow boundary of Berger’s definition of “theory,” but in order to appreciate what they were doing we must expand our concept of theory. (My exchange with Berger has been republished in Portuguese translation: see Martino, Craig & Berger, 2007.)  The expanded concept of theory is something I have been working on for several decades. As of now, I define communication theory as expert metadiscourse (discourse about communication) that is relatively abstract and general, and that interacts with (influences and is influenced by) the ordinary metadiscourse that constitutes and regulates the practice of communication in everyday life. This definition emphasizes the vital flow of discourse between theory and practice to cultivate the practice of communication, and is broad enough to include the empirical scientific theories that Berger favored, along with interpretive, critical and explicitly practical forms of theory that that would not count as theory in his view.   

OD:  At that time, the International Communication Association created the Communication Theory journal, of which you are founding editor. Could you share a little behind the scenes of the foundation of the journal in 1991, and what did this mean for the development of research in communication?

RC: Although the first issues of Communication Theory appeared in 1991, the story of the journal’s founding goes back to debates that were already occurring in ICA in the 1980s about the communication discipline’s lack of a distinct theoretical core. The lack of core communication theories was attributed, in part, as I mentioned a moment ago, to our tendency to borrow theories from other disciplines without developing theories of our own. The lack of a core was also attributed to a “gap” between the subdisciplines of mass communication and interpersonal communication, such that each of those sub-fields was developing in isolation from the other, without general theories of communication to connect them. There was also an awareness of competing theoretical paradigms in the discipline, as critical and interpretive approaches to inquiry arose to challenge the dominant quantitative social science paradigm. These problems were debated in several special issues of communication journals and at the 1985 ICA conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i, the theme of which was “Paradigm Dialogues.” 

It was in the context of those debates that the ICA Board of Directors, at its 1987-1988 meetings, decided to create a new journal called Communication Theory. At that time, ICA members received subscriptions to two journals.  One was the Journal of Communication, which was published by the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and focused almost exclusively on media and mass communication studies, and the other was Human Communication Research, which was published by Sage for ICA and focused primarily on quantitative research in interpersonal communication. The purpose of ICA’s new journal, Communication Theory, was to publish original theoretical work on communication in all paradigms and all areas of the field, including general theory that would begin to fill the discipline’s empty theoretical core.

The proposal for Communication Theory was finally approved in May 1988, and a call for editor nominations was announced. I submitted an application later that summer and was fortunate to be selected by the Publications Committee and approved by the ICA Board of Directors in November 1988 to be the founding editor, responsible for the first three volumes. In the following two years before the first issue appeared in print, I was occupied with setting up and running the journal’s editorial process, overseeing the creation of its graphic design, and establishing arrangements for its publication.  I have described these phases of the journal’s development in more detail in a previous interview (Boromisza-Habashi, 2013).

But just to answer your question as to what the foundation of this journal meant for the development of research in communication, I think Communication Theory has successfully advanced the growth of original theoretical work across the field of communication, although it never quite became the flagship disciplinary journal that its founders envisioned. The discipline of communication still lacks a theoretical core, but there is more awareness of communication theory as a field, and of the range of work that it includes, and we are creating more and better theories than before. 

OD: In "Communication Theory as a Field" (1999) published in this journal, you agreed with James Anderson's statement that the field of communication is not a coherent field of study yet. At the same time, you said you believed that a field would emerge as scholars became theorists committed to socially important goals and issues that permeate the various traditions of thought, and which historically divide them. Today, do you think we have become more or less coherent, taking into account increasingly fragmentation and hyperspecialization in the field, for example?

RC: I don’t know if the field of communication theory has become much more coherent since 1999. Anderson’s (1996) content analysis of communication theory textbooks found that they all presented different groups of theories, with little or no overlap between books. If we were to repeat Anderson’s study today, would we find more agreement among current textbooks regarding the standard contents of the field? If so, that might indicate some degree of coherence. As I mentioned a moment ago, I think scholars across the field have become generally more aware of different theoretical traditions and approaches than they were in the 1990s, but I think dialogue across those differences is still lacking. Another way to measure coherence would be to ask, “What are the important issues that communication theorists across the field are currently debating?” Debate goes on within subfields and approaches, but are there any issues that engage the whole field? Off hand, I cannot think of any such issues. There are differences that cut across many areas, for example scientific empiricism versus critical theory, but there is little dialogue about those differences. The recent calls for dewesternization or decolonization of communication raise theoretical issues that potentially concern the whole field, but how many of us are discussing them? On the whole, it still seems now, as it did in 1999, that communication theorists neither agree nor disagree about much of anything but generally ignore each other. 

OD: In this classic essay, you summarized different theoretical strands in communication scholarship into seven traditions: rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical. Two decades later, do you think that this table remains valid to accommodate the expansion and diversification of communication studies?

RC: The seven traditions were never intended to compose a final and comprehensive model of the field. They were constructed to illustrate the possibility of dialogue in the field, based on the principles of the constitutive metamodel of communication theory. From the beginning, it was explicitly assumed that the metamodel was open to debate about its structure and that it would change over time. Furthermore, the seven traditions were never intended to represent subdisciplinary areas of communication study. The traditions represent fundamental conceptions of communication, which do not necessarily correspond to currently existing subdisciplinary areas of study. That is why it would make no sense to add an “intercultural communication tradition” or a “digital media” tradition to the metamodel. Those are current areas of study but not fundamentally distinct conceptions of communication. 

With those qualifications, I do think that the 1999 table remains valid because the fundamental conceptions of communication that it presents still constitute viable alternative viewpoints from which to frame communication problems and theorize the practice of communication. However, there are many other possibilities to explore. Since 1999, at least two additional traditions and other modification to the metamodel have been proposed. Some of these revisions are discussed in a volume recently edited by Marc H. Rich and Jessica S. Robles (2021). My own contribution to that book concludes with the suggestion that it is not necessary for the field to agree on a single “official” set of traditions, but that theorists should apply the principles of the constitutive metamodel in more flexible ways, for example, by selecting and defining different sets of traditions for specific analytical purposes. That is what I did in a recent article about pluralism as a communication problem (Craig, 2018b), where I defined four traditions of pluralistic communication, none of which corresponds exactly to any tradition in the 1999 table. The 1999 table remains valid, but it should not prevent us from exploring other views of communication. 

OD: As you detailed in Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions (2007), each tradition elaborates and operates with its own understanding of communication. But these traditions certainly did not shape communication research with the same intensity, varying according to the time and context. What are the strongest downward and rising movements of these traditions specifically in research in the United States?

RC: Every tradition defined in my 1999 article is still practiced today, which is evidenced by the continued existence of rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, cybernetics, and so on, as theoretical topics and academic fields. Of course, the seven traditions are not all equally influential in current communication research, and a lot of current research is not easily placed in any one of those traditions. For example, poststructuralist critical theory is influenced by semiotic, phenomenological, sociocultural, and rhetorical, as well as critical conceptions of communication. Poststructualism perhaps should be defined as a tradition in its own right, if we conclude that it constitutes a fundamentally distinct conception of communication. However, of the seven traditions defined in 1999, I think the dominant ones now, specifically in US research, are the sociopsychological and the critical traditions. The great division in our field is between empirical communication science and humanistic-critical studies. The field of rhetoric still flourishes but the rhetorical tradition as I defined it in 1999 has lost influence. Most rhetoricians now seem to think of themselves as critical scholars. The Critical and Cultural Studies Division is now the largest interest group in the (US) National Communication Association, and several other NCA interest groups also align with critical studies. However, empirical communication science is also growing rapidly, and social psychological conceptions of communication continue to play a central role, along with cybernetic concepts related to cognition and information processing.  Communication science has also taken a strong turn toward biological approaches, and some are now arguing that biology should be recognized as a distinct tradition of communication theory.

OD:  In your opinion, the dominant understanding among American researchers remains that communication is a process in which some information is transmitted from a sender through a medium? And how does your own understanding of the phenomenon diverge or converge with this dominant idea?

RC: I’m not actually sure what the dominant understanding of communication is among US researchers, but I think most would agree that the traditional transmission model of communication is oversimplified. The official definition of communication on the National Communication Association website presents a “transactional model of communication” in which “people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts” (https://www.natcom.org/about-nca/what-communication). The emphasis in defining communication has shifted from the transmission of information to the interactive production of meaning in context, with media as an important part of the context. This shift is related to the rise and decline of different theoretical traditions we were just discussing, and it is generally consistent with the constitutive metamodel of communication theory that I have proposed. 

OD:  Regarding the Rhetorical tradition, communication is understood as the practical art of discourse. How does your point of view on the phenomenon relate to this understanding, and how do you situate your contributions to communication theory within (or outside) this tradition?

RC: Rhetorical theory was an important part of my undergraduate education, as I mentioned earlier, and it has deeply influenced my thinking about communication theory and communication studies in general. The modern discipline of communication can trace its origins to the ancient Greek art of rhetoric. For Aristotle, rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was an offshoot of the practical discipline of politics. I conceive a similar relationship between the modern practical discipline of communication and the various arts and technical branches of communication studies, including the art of rhetoric, that are its offshoots. In the modern world, communication has become a complex field of social practice that extends beyond politics into every aspect of social and personal life, and the arts and technologies of communication have proliferated accordingly. We need a practical discipline of communication to deliberation on normative problems in the practice of communication, just as the Aristotelian practical discipline of politics ideally governed the normative use of its technical offshoot, the art of rhetoric. 

The constitutive metamodel of communication theory also draws from the rhetorical tradition. In the metamodel, communication theory itself is an art of discourse that that appeals to commonplace beliefs about communication and develops lines of argument for deliberation and debate on communication problems.  In that regard, rhetoric, although just one of seven traditions of communication theory in the metamodel, is also an element in the design of the metamodel as a whole. However, the same can be said of other traditions. All seven traditions contributed to the design of the metamodel, as did a later addition, the eighth tradition of pragmatism (Craig, 2007). As a tradition of communication theory, rhetoric provides us with a fundamental conception of communication that exists in dialogue and debate with other fundamental conceptions from the traditions of semiotics, cybernetics, and so on. 

OD: In common, the traditions of communication theory identified by you originated in European thought, and the new theories are developed predominantly by American and European scholars who frequently work with the traditions of their respective countries. Considering this inequality in the theoretical field, Latin American scholars began to speak in terms of the decolonization of communicational thinking. How do you relate to this movement of claiming knowledge outside the Anglo-Saxon orbit? On the other hand, do you see the risk of erasing the matrixes that originated the tradition of communication theories? 

RC: Cultures are always evolving, so whatever “decolonization” means in this context, it cannot be to return to some pure, pre-colonial indigenous epistemology. The project of dewesternizing or decolonizing communication theory faces a paradox if the very ideas of “communication” and “theory” are regarded as Western impositions, which, in a sense, they are. But you cannot have “indigenous communication theory” without some conceptions of “communication” and “theory.” In this light, we need not worry about “erasing the matrices that originated the tradition of communication theory.” Those matrices will continue to be available for whatever uses modern communication scholars, including scholars committed to decolonizing the field, choose to make of them.  The development of traditions of communication theory rooted in nonwestern cultures is an entirely positive movement in my view. It will not diminish communication theory at all but can only enrich and invigorate the field while improving its cultural relevance. We must acknowledge, however, that decolonizing the field means accepting some adjustments to the academic power equation on editorial boards and the like, more than just welcoming new ideas in principle. 

OD: In "Constructing theories in communication research" (2013b), you question whether communication theories can express universal principles that apply to all cultures, or whether the phenomenon of communication is culturally variable, and therefore it is necessary to have specific theories for each culture. What answer have you been writing to this question? 

RC: Communication is both universal and culturally variable. The global growth of academic communication studies both follows and potentially accelerates the globalization of communication itself, as a cultural concept and as a field of social practice, but the globalized concept of communication may clash with local cultures, in relation to which it must then be adjusted or “glocalized” to be made relevant to local practices. The decolonizing movement in communication studies that we were just discussing is perhaps one manifestation of that process, one in which local conceptions of communication feed back to influence the global. I believe any concept of communication, regardless of its cultural origin, is potentially universal insofar as it can be interpretated and made relevant to communication in any cultural context. But this implies that a universal concept can be interpreted differently and have different meanings in each local culture. In this assumption I follow philosophical hermeneutics, which asserts that universal principles take on different meanings as they are applied to each new practical situation.  So, culturally based theories of communication should be welcomed by everyone because they become potentially universal resources for understanding communication problems and practices, albeit with somewhat different practical meaning in different times and places. This is the basis for multicultural dialogue in the field of communication theory. Cultural variability in communication theory is not, therefore, a problem, but cultural domination can be a problem and must be resisted when it distorts multicultural dialogue in the global field. 

OD: As a historical leader in the field, what challenges do you see for the maturation of the communication field? And what trends for communication studies in the future?

RC: My realistic expectation is that the field of communication in the near future will continue to consolidate institutionally as an international academic discipline while also continuing to proliferate sub- and inter-disciplinary specialty areas and approaches without regard to a coherent theoretical core. At best, this process of simultaneous institutional consolidation and intellectual fragmentation will produce something resembling the dynamically innovative “post-discipline” that Waisbord (2019) has envisioned. However, the discussion of our disciplinary identity and purpose must go on, in order to make some sense of our institutional consolidation, even if we cannot realistically expect that discussion to produce a fully coherent discipline. I would like to think that the concept of a practical discipline contributes something useful to the discussion of disciplinary identity and purpose because it reveals a common thread running through our diverse activities in communication research and education, which potentially ties the field together and explains the social importance of our work. We are already a practical discipline in many respects and could continue to develop well in that direction. 

In a longer view, the fate of the academic field of communication depends on the fate of communication itself—I mean communication as a cultural concept and practice, not as a sheer physical-biological phenomenon.  Communication in the latter sense will go on, of course, in some form as long as the world goes on, but the cultural future of communication is less certain.  The global rise of communication can be partly explained as a result of technological and economic forces, but cultural trends associated with modernity and globalization have also been involved, and the rise of communication has brought with it a certain expectation that information, democratic dialogue, and better communication in general can be instruments of human progress.  More and more, personal and social problems are framed as communication problems, and our discipline is expected to offer practical solutions. It seems to me that the legitimacy of our discipline depends on such cultural beliefs about the importance of communication and the relevance of our work for improving communication. 

However, there is no guarantee that those supportive cultural trends will continue.  With the rise of communication comes social change that may conflict with traditional ideas and institutions (Craig, 2013a).  Religious and cultural conservatives may associate the idea of communication, for example the idea that we should resolve our differences through dialogue, with undesirable trends toward relativism and secularism.  Others may associate the idea of communication with weakness in situations that would be more effectively resolved through the exercise of power, perhaps including violence or threats. Trends toward political authoritarianism and the cynical development and use of the technical means of communication for purposes of warfare, manipulation, and misinformation undermine the normative legitimacy of communication as a social practice.  Our discipline cannot thrive in such a toxic culture, and as a practical discipline we are called upon to resist it. 

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