Why has the field of communication failed to define itself, its intellectual focus, and its mission in a coherent way? This essay explores reasons for this failure, focusing especially on the institutional use of the field's central terms and concepts. Incoherence has been the price of institutional success. What defines communication's unique identity as a field is also what maintains its conceptual confusions. The field is compared to a nation-state. The essay places the field's emergence in the context of the history of the social sciences in order to help illuminate its current crises and to explore how we might find new ways of conceiving the field's intellectual task.
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