Introduction to Special Issue: Educating Global Communicators: How Communication Scholars Create Value in Challenging Environments

Abstract

This paper introduces the concerns of the papers in the Special Issue and examines communication as a chameleon discipline that responds and adapts to sometimes very challenging contexts. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the diversity of approaches that exist in communication studies and shows how this diversity offers both opportunities to be resourceful and hurdles to be managed. The paper reflects on the definitional ambiguity of communication and the ways that communication is perceived and approached in different institutions globally. Its aim is to forge a way through debates about the nature of the field by paying attention to the responsiveness and adaptability of those who teach communication in the face of educational and political change.

Overview

Communication scholars have often reflected on the nature and status of their discipline. In 1983, George Gerbner edited a Special Issue of the Journal of Communication, on behalf of the International Communication Association, called “Ferment in the Field,” which focused attention on the divergent traditions within communication and explored the commonalities and differences, including the contention that the pursuit of disciplinarity should be given up entirely. Then 35 years later, Christian Fuchs and Jack Linchuan Qin revisited the debate in another Special Issue of the Journal of Communication that explored many of the same themes. Many of the topics raised in both issues continue to vex scholars. Despite some substantial changes, particularly in the impact of technology and globalization, communication remains in an ambiguous state, lacking a unifying narrative or identity. This Special Issue revisits debates on the role and positioning of communication studies internationally but does so from a different perspective. We focus both on the disciplinary claims made in the field and on the ways those who teach communication are responding to the pressures placed on them by institutional structures and business interests, in the context of continuing disciplinary uncertainty.

The ways we communicate are central to the experience of being human, to the extent that core social practices, from politics to business to culture, are unimaginable, and some would say even practically impossible, without symbolic interaction. Yet communication as a field of study and research lacks the cultural or institutional power that the profound significance of its object might suggest. Instead, we suggest here, it has a somewhat paradoxical and unstable status, for a number of interrelated reasons. For example, it is defined contextually and dynamically, which means its definition changes according to particular circumstances and intentions. Also, it involves skills that are unambiguously valued by all professions, while, as a discipline (when defined as such) it constantly requires validation and legitimacy. Furthermore, a large number of its instructors, and in fact a large number of its founders, have been educated in other disciplines. However, rather than gather a series of laments about our disciplinary woes, this Special Issue gathers together reflections and cases on how communication research and teaching negotiate these pressures. We find that, in addition to posing significant challenges, our disciplinary status also encourages communication-related academics and scholars to be resourceful, resilient, authentically interdisciplinary, and collaborative. The contributions take a range of perspectives, both globally and locally, that give insight on what those teaching communication are doing to educate future professionals.

The Scope of Communication Studies

The value of communication education is connected to the identity of the discipline and so our discussion needs to begin by acknowledging definitional concerns. A key issue is that communication scholars struggle to define the scope or central concerns of the discipline. Craig (2012) observes that, despite its rapid rise as a subject studied at university and field of research, “there is no universally accepted overall structure” (p. 3) to the body of knowledge. A quick look at university departments and degrees shows that, in fact, communication sits under different academic umbrellas at different universities, in some places categorized as part of the humanities, in others a social science, in others a business subject. As Donsbach (2006) pointed out, “when you see a communication department on the map of any university worldwide you have to take a closer look and see what they are really dealing with” (p. 445).

Attempts to map the field have tended to focus their attention on the development of research domains and key intellectual figures, and yet institutional factors and the contexts in which communication is taught are important determinants. Simonson and Park (2015, p. 6) critique what they see as an overemphasis on histories of the field or intellectual history. This ‘Whiggish’ history, in the sense of accounts that describe progress toward the present in celebratory terms, is criticized as being blind to the powerful interests that enabled those trajectories. In particular, student learning, pedagogy, and the role of the curriculum as the connector between industry and the university are much less prominent than they should be in accounts of the development of communication as a discipline. This has implications for future work, as well as understanding the past. If, as Craig (2012) puts it, research and teaching in communication “derives much of its identity and coherence from its profound engagement with communication as a category of social practice while also contributing to the ongoing evolution of that very cultural category” (p. 13), then we need better conceptual tools to discuss that engagement.

In particular, we need tools that make sense of the very different ways that communication becomes institutionalized in universities. A perusal of the websites of the top five universities, according to the QS university rankings in 2022 (MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, and Harvard), revealed that only Stanford has a Communication Department, which defines communication as the study of journalism. The others exhibited two other common phenomena: one phenomenon is positioning of communication study as the development of skills that are supplementary to the main degrees and majors; the other phenomenon is the development of niche graduate degrees in currently popular fields linked with technological developments, most notably internet, and digital studies. So, at MIT and Harvard, communication is diffused in various locations where students can improve their communication skills to complement their course of study: MIT has a Writing and Communication Center and an Engineering Communication Lab, whereas Harvard offers professional development in communication skills in the Business School. Oxford has a DPhil degree in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences, which is dedicated to the study of digital media.

A look across other universities worldwide at the end of 2022 shows communication-related courses scattered across the university. The most common combination is Communication with Media, followed by Communication with Public Relations, while Technical and Professional Communication programs and departments are mainly found in the United States. Communication paired with Culture or Cultural Studies seems to be more prominent in Australian, Aotearoa New Zealand, and United Kingdom contexts. In several instances, communication courses and even degrees are unaffiliated and offered in different Faculties/Schools. For example, at Aarhus University, Denmark, Communication is split into the School of Communication and Culture, which includes communication-related departments such as Digital Design and Information Studies and Media and Journalism, and the School of Business, which includes Organizational and Strategic Communication. Similarly, the University of Southern California has the Annenberg School of Communication, which not only focuses on journalism and mass communication and boasts a long history of communication research but also a teaching-focused Department of Business Communication, housed in the Marshall School of Business, which offers skills-based courses.

In Asian countries with English as Medium of Instruction, Communication reflects the model used in most English-speaking countries by being paired with media, cultural studies and criticism, and digital production, and often with some connection to business. Thus, both major universities in Singapore, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in communication, which they combine with an array of related subjects, such as film, journalism, and business. In the major universities in Hong Kong, Communication reflects the diverse approaches to the discipline that are found elsewhere, while at the same time being closely associated with language. For example, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Communication is housed in the Department of English and Communication and describes itself as “a leading provider of undergraduate and postgraduate-level programs in applied English language studies for the professions” (HKPU brochure, 2022), emphasizing the link between communication and language. City University of Hong Kong has a Department of Communication and Media, with a focus on broadcasting, film, and digital production, while professional communication courses, such as public relations, are offered in the Department of English, once again connecting communication with language and confirming English as the global, professional lingua franca. Besides their communication courses in the Department of English, The University of Hong Kong offers a degree in Human Communication, which is part of the Faculty of Education and focuses on language development and speech disorders. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Communication is positioned solely as a research area in engineering with a clear focus on technology, such as speech recognition and robotics.

A Chameleon Discipline

Understanding this diversity requires an appreciation of the different contexts of communication alongside the disciplinary debates. Communication scholars have consistently been aware of the need to maintain credibility and legitimacy through academic rigor and industry relevance. Communication studies departments in universities worldwide seem aware of the expectation to demonstrate pragmatic relevance to global workplace concerns and recognize this is a source of strength. As Henning and Bener (2016) note, “(h)aving the capability to fill roles in the workplace is a way to have power” (p. 319). In a similar vein, Craig (2018) describes communication as a discipline that “may be somewhat lacking in intellectual distinctiveness as well as institutional mass” but which has “sociocultural relevance as a source of legitimacy that warrants institutional support” (p. 292). Other scholars have argued for the preeminence of communication as the foundational human activity that underlies all others. According to the Communicative Constitution of Organizations Theory, for example, all activities related to human organizing are constructed and presupposed by communication, making it the main ingredient rather than just a component of organizations (Cooren, 2012).

The fact that communication lacks an undisputed definition has been observed, and often lamented, by many writers while, at the same time, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of communication practices in society suggests a need for a more clearly defined field. Communication is often a “chameleon” discipline that takes the form and shape of its environment, often in an attempt to maintain independence and integrity. Henning and Bener (2016, p. 313) note that despite numerous attempts, a universally accepted definition of a technical communicator still eludes us—and a similar claim can be made about the definition of a “communicator” or even a “communication specialist.”

This situation does not seem to be as prominent in other fields. Tracing an analogy between communication and medicine, for instance, Cobley and Schultz (2013) point out that, although medicine too consists of numerous branches, it is based on a more coherent definition and delimitation of its object so that even if there is some dispute on what medicine is about, there is no dispute on what it is not about (p. 4). In a similar vein, Donsbach (2006), in his presidential address at the 2005 International Communication Association conference, suggested that the reason the study of communication is often not taken seriously is that its object is practiced by everyone. This can cause it to be seen as lacking “an ontological center” (Waisbord, 2019, p. 8) since communication is performed or enacted through a variety of behaviors and intentions.

The multiplicity of communication branches leads to minimizing interaction and discussion within the wider field. This schism is also evidenced in the publishing industry. As anyone who is involved in reviewing or editing manuscripts submitted to communication journals would testify, approaches, research questions, and methodologies are so diverse that articles in one subject or journal can be, at best, unacceptable or, at worst, incomprehensible to another. A similar phenomenon is that instructors of communication are not generally required to have degrees in their branch of communication, or even in communication at all. For example, a study by Melonçon et al. (2016), which surveyed nontenure track faculty in technical and professional communication in the United States, found that only 38% of those surveyed had degrees in technical and professional communication. The others had a diverse educational background. This reflects, in some respects, the fact that many foundational theories of communication originate in other disciplines, such as sociology (Everett Rogers, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Elihu Katz), political science (Harold Lasswell), linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure), psychology (Karl Weick), and engineering (Clause Shannon, Warren Weaver, Norbert Wiener).

The Strength and Weakness of a Plurality of Approaches

A complication with the field of communication is its diversity of methods, approaches, theoretical frameworks, and applications, which often make each communication branch define itself and function as independent of an overarching communication discipline and even in conflict with other communication branches. For example, at the end of 2022, the International Communication Association had 26 Divisions classified under the umbrella term “communication,” ranging from Mass Communication to Language and Social Interaction and Game Studies; The National Communication Association had 43. Another major professional association, the Society for Technical Communication, focuses on one branch of communication but still contains 12 different Special Interest Groups. Although communication is the common denominator in all, what exactly this means remains unclear. As Vorderer (2016) points out, the discipline of communication has diversified and broadened so much in the last few decades that it has “become stretched too thin” (p. 8), making it hard to define as a unified field. As he also points out, however, this need not necessarily be a disadvantage if we can capitalize on the diversity to multiply the angles and perspectives from which we view the world and become more resourceful and creative with the ways we interact with it.

In many ways, a discipline's worth is measured by the rigor of its research practices (leading to evidence that can inform policy and practice), or its relevance to graduate employment and professional competence. In their survey of approaches to communication, Cobley and Schulz (2013) distinguish two methodological traditions: a semio-linguistic, humanistic approach prominent in European schools of thought, and an empirical, quantitative approach prominent in Anglo-Saxon circles. They continue their overview by classifying the communication phenomena studied by these two approaches into five categories: “(1) communication as shaper of public opinion; (2) communication as language use; (3) communication as information transmission; (4) communication as developer of relationships; and (5) communication as definer, interpreter, and critic of culture” (p. 18). This classification is reflected in advertisements for university jobs in communication, in which particular positions require either quantitative or qualitative research backgrounds. For example, a perusal of job advertisements for communication positions in universities internationally found at the website of the International Communication Association at the end of 2022 reveals, among others, the following skills as required expertise for applicants: big data analytics; machine learning; text analysis; agent-based modeling; advanced social network analysis; algorithmic bias; automation; datafication; fintech; infrastructure; networks; platform capitalism; knowledge of contemporary critical, theoretical and professional issues in communication; ability to teach across the subject in a way that is industry-focused and socially relevant; and humanistic and rhetorical approaches.

The rapid escalation of digital media this century and the concomitant academic interest has encouraged attempts to bridge the gap between “humanistic” and “quantitative” approaches, with mixed-method studies becoming increasingly popular, especially in digital media research. The Association of Internet Researchers, founded in 1999 with the aim to bring together researchers from across disciplines, is an example of this contemporary interest in digital communication in multicultural and diverse contexts. Their mission, as stated on their website, “to provide an outlet and a community for those of us who interrogate and examine the practices and relationships around individuals, organizations, institutions, cultures, and the Internet” (https://aoir.org/community/), illustrates a key feature of this turn toward the digital world: the field is being pulled further away from any disciplinary center either in topic or in methods. In addition, the introduction of big data research using interdisciplinary methods adds yet more diversity.

A Precarious Discipline?

Pooley (2020) goes as far as to suggest that communication, at least in the United States context, has lost its disciplinarity and become a “poly-disciplinary free-for-all” (p. 3) He cites Waisbord's (2019) observation that half the submissions to the discipline's flagship journal, the Journal of Communication, come now from lead authors working or studying in departments outside communication. In hindsight, the struggles stretching back to the 1980s to reconcile competing traditions in the growing discipline (e.g., Gerbner, 1983) prefigured the later fragmentation of approaches and the ballooning in the study of communication by scholars from other areas interested in digital transformation. He finds that the “shared canopy of memory” (Pooley, 2020, p. 2) produced by postwar leaders of the field in the United States, such as Wilbur Schramm and Paul Lazarsfeld, has less resonance, replaced by memories produced within subdisciplinary corners or replaced by less interest in or need for these kinds of collective identity claims at all. Overall, he finds a lack of ambition for communication as a discipline.

It is not difficult to find other scholars who resist investing in the grand project of a coherent disciplinary identity and who argue instead that the best communication research draws on other fields and practices. Implicitly or explicitly, communication is widely seen as weaker when it seeks to make such strong claims. Beniger's (1993) argument that the search for disciplinarity is a “debilitating affliction” (p. 21) which should be replaced by interdisciplinary pursuits that together will provide a coherent account of communication, is echoed by others who see disciplinarity as a “straitjacket” (Trudel & De Maeyer, 2022, p. 440). It is important to add that here communication scholars are echoing debates in other fields, where interdisciplinarity is sometimes regarded as occupying an intellectually privileged position, one held by leading scholars with greater research impact (Okamura, 2019) who are able to perceive the interconnections and relationships through which knowledge is constructed and freed from dogma (Dickinson, 2019). However, it is important to add that interdisciplinarity for a “weak” discipline such as communication can look like a loss of a specific identity.

This ambiguity about the boundaries and status of communication, when combined with the increase in managerialism and business models in universities, arguably leads to precarity. In English-speaking countries, communication has a large number of what are called “casual,” “non-tenured,” or “contingent” faculty, which consist of faculty with temporary contracts, who most often need to reapply for their positions on a regular basis. In addition, communication departments include a large number of faculty members who are not expected to conduct research (and, indeed, are discouraged from doing so)—known by different terms, such as “clinical,” “education-focused,” or “teaching specialist”—and who, therefore, have high teaching loads and no access to research funding and, by extension, to career development and the academic distinction that often comes with being involved in research projects. Examination of this phenomenon in the United States context has shown that more than 50% (and sometimes up to 86%) of teaching in written communication (composition) and business and technical communication is carried out by this category of instructors (Bousquet et al., 2004; Melonçon & England, 2011; Melonçon & St.Amant, 2018; Melonçon et al., 2016; Schell, 1998; Scott et al., 2006). This precarity drives communication instructors to be resourceful in creating collaborations across institutional divisions, as happens, for example, with Writing in the Disciplines or Language for Specific Purposes programs.

In a neoliberal context, eschewing disciplinary coherence is not a position of power—however, strong its intellectual justification. It risks leaving scholars, particularly those with weaker job security, less able to defend their curriculum in the face of criticism and less able to call upon the institutional power that comes with clear disciplinary boundaries. While departmental status may not be a bulwark against management restructuring, the status that comes from being able to claim reputation, a position in rankings, and publication in top journals offers such a bulwark. Disciplinarity remains closely connected to such claims. More importantly for society, disciplinarity is central to claims of academic freedom, because, as Post (2009) argues, “Academic freedom presupposes that faculty are experts in the production of knowledge” (p. 763) who set their own standards through disciplinary mechanisms and structures. Conversely, the inability to claim such a space risks a loss of critical independence in the face of other powerful claims to know what communication is. In the United States and Australia, one element of the so-called “culture wars” has been the attempt to weaken publicly funded universities on moral and anti-intellectualist grounds (e.g., Newfield, 2011). Subjects less able to make disciplinary claims, from media studies to gender studies, race studies, or cultural studies, have been frequent targets. More immediately, industry leaders, who arguably have an interest in resisting calls for professionalization, with its accompanying claims to autonomy, critical reflection, and higher pay for staff, are empowered to seek to shape curricula around their immediate training needs or transfer government funding into other forms of training. The oft-relitigated scepticism of news industry managers to university education, to give one example, is consistent with this picture. In our view, a richer understanding of student learning and curricula builds the autonomy needed to create healthy partnerships with industry.

One particular area of tension is the frequent claim that communication is an applied area producing readily employable graduates. Yet empirical research on employment options for communication graduates reveals a different picture, which challenges claims about employability. Research on the employment outcomes of degrees with a vocational focus, such as journalism or public relations, is hampered by the difficulty of pinning down the difference that a particular degree made. It is difficult to separate the intake effect: strong, enthusiastic students tend to be attracted to prestige programs; it is, therefore, difficult to separate out how much impact the program had on the excellence of the graduate. In addition to identifying this value-added effect, it is important to study skills rather than just job titles. A study at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia of 10 years of graduates found 80% were in employment, with 62% in jobs directly related to their study (Bridgstock & Cunningham, 2014). But it also found there was little difference between students of vocational and nonvocational degrees, other than the time it took to get their first study-related role (one to two years longer). Vocational students were more likely to be employed in explicit communication roles, while nonvocational students were more likely to be in roles where communication skillsets were embedded in jobs with other titles. The study provides evidence of the value of communication to employers beyond specific vocational contexts, but less evidence that vocational courses are the key way to develop communication competencies. Further, it leads to questions about what aspects of communication study might lead to the development of these skills and how those skills map onto workplace capabilities. Thus, there is a particular challenge in identifying what an education in communication degrees provides by way of communication skills and competencies that an education in, say, history or commerce does not.

Such observations provide evidence that, despite its pervasiveness and high value as a professional set of skills and despite the fact that it can lay claim to the privileged category of interdisciplinarity, communication is still in some contexts disempowered as an academic discipline and requires substantial support to build its legitimacy and independence. Contributing factors to this precarious status include the pluralism within the communication discipline as well as the current state of university management with its “increasing focus on entrepreneurship, the commercialization of research, rising tuition fees, managerialism, and the quantification and evaluation of scholarly activities” (Fuchs & Qiu, 2018, p. 224).

Also, the volatility of current work markets, due to digitization and convergence, corporatization of the media industry, and the intercultural skills required by globalized business, both accentuate the importance of communication and highlight its challenges.

Connecting Debates Back to Institutions and Contexts in This Special Issue

There is value in stepping back from debates about what Bird (2001) anthropologically calls “tribes” and “territories” in the field. This Special Issue works less programmatically and instead more holistically and analytically, discussing the universities and contexts in which communication is taught, at a range of sites around the world. The critical intent is to understand better how communication takes form in response to the tensions discussed above in different national traditions and under different particular pressures. The main goal is to explore the resourcefulness of individual instructors in anchoring communication principles into the curriculum.

On the one hand, communication is widely understood outside communication departments as one achievement of a solid general education rather than specialized training. Indeed, many business schools must be able to claim that students learn communication skills in order to gain accreditation by one of a number of peak bodies, but they are not required to teach courses in communication to do so. On the other hand, the presence of graduate programs in communication as well as the plethora of research journals in different branches of communication indicates the recognition of a research-led body of knowledge in the field.

In this context, communication curricula must be responsive. Indeed, throughout their history, departments that offer communication-related courses have been quick to adapt to developments and design curricula that meet social and business needs. Digital media courses started to emerge in the 1900s, followed by courses in social media in the 2000s. Recent years have seen a boom and reformulation of intercultural communication courses and course components in response to the interest in culture, equity, and diversity in professional and academic contexts (Holliday, 2013; Rieger, 2022; Weiss, 1993).

To address the challenges discussed above, communication scholars and teachers have needed to compare notes across their institutional departments and national boundaries and view the state of communication studies in a global and historical context. The papers in this Special Issue explore in a range of ways the links between practice and learning, both theoretically in explaining the interface of higher education and the global context of communication work and empirically in terms of evidence of good practice at universities.

Terry Flew considers the evolution of communication as a discipline, with a focus on Australia. He explores the issues and concerns that propelled the transitions between different “turns” in the conceptualization of the field. Initially, the “cultural turn” connected communication with cultural studies, emphasizing the cultural elements that embed communication practices. Later, global and international interests in higher education signaled the “global turn.” This was followed by the rise of digital professions, which motivated the development of a “creative turn,” followed more recently by the proliferation of social media and internet technologies, which brought about the “digital turn.”

Natalia Chaban explores the value of communication education for the relations between governments and their publics, with a specific focus on Aotearoa New Zealand and the European Union. Her paper draws on work that argues for the centrality of dialogue and, even further, collaborative knowledge production, in public diplomacy, and in doing so places the “knowledge diplomacy” that takes place in education at the very center of this work. She makes a case for the potential of learning where students must themselves engage in dialogue, whether working with students of communication from different countries or working with diplomats. Conscious and deliberate co-creation of knowledge of this kind forms a valuable preparation, she argues, for the next generation of international communicators and diplomats.

Misa Fujio's paper connects the teaching of communication to the drive in Japan toward educating students to be globally minded leaders. Twenty years of higher education policy aimed at globalizing the Japanese university curriculum has led to a strong emphasis in communication studies on developing students’ English-language competency. Fujio shows how this has diverted attention from other key areas of communication competency, including intercultural and, in particular, professional skills. Through a discussion of a teaching collaboration between a Japanese and Malaysian class, she also offers an example of what internationalization of the Japanese communication curriculum and discipline can achieve when it looks to other Asian contexts, thereby foregrounding multiculturalism and a critical approach to deference toward “mainstream” English as spoken in the United States or United Kingdom.

Overstreet, Carbonel, and Akhmedjanova also draw out lessons from a multilingual context in which communication is valued for broader competencies. They describe and analyze a general studies curriculum designed for science and technology students, in an English Medium Instruction university in the United Arab Emirates, in which multimodal communication and the integration of communication, literature, and education topics are taught via a spiral approach, where the material is revisited in growing complexity. The curriculum, a response to institutional and societal demands and weighted toward English competence, is a case study of cooperation and student-centered learning, rather than disciplinary-driven coursework. As a result, it promises learning adapted to the communicative needs of professionals in a transnational and multilingual context.

Kirk St.Amant explores the cognitive dimension of communication showing how communication both informs and is affected by the ways we think. Many desired attributes of graduates, such as leadership potential, problem-solving, higher-level thinking, and the ability to work in teams and manage conflict, are also essentially communication skills and are influenced by the “mental models” that humans create through interaction, habit, and learning and that subsequently govern their behavior and their responses to external stimuli. St.Amant examines the role of mental models in thinking by explaining the ARCO process (Actualization, Recognition, Categorization, Operationalization) as it applies to designing usability in products.

Together these five papers provide conceptual resources and case studies that respond to the challenges facing communication studies in a range of contexts. Flew's and St.Armant's papers frame the case studies of Chaban, Fujio, and Overstreet et al., providing historical–cultural and cognitive frameworks to conceptually ground the practical teaching initiatives of communication scholars.