The following is the English source text of my preface to the Finnish translation, by Saila Poutiainen and Mats Bergman, of my 1999 article, "Communication Theory as a Field." The translated article, including the preface, appears in the Finnish open-access journal, Media & Viestintä. Full citation: Poutiainen, S., & Bergman, M. (2025). Viestinnän teorian kenttä [Communication Theory as a Field]. Media & viestintä, 48(4), 167-216. https://doi.org/10.23983/mv.177427
With the welcome appearance of a Finnish translation of “Communication Theory as a Field” (CTF), I would like to take this opportunity to offer brief comments on the article’s current relevance and how my own thinking about it has changed through more than 25 years since it first appeared in English (Craig, 1999).
Although its seven traditions are often said to map the field of communication theory, the central claim of CTF was not to propose a definitive map but rather a “constitutive metamodel,” a framework for representing and building theory for a practical discipline of communication, illustrated by a tentative scheme of seven traditions. The essential purpose of a practical discipline would be to cultivate communication as a social practice, and a field of theory for a practical discipline would serve that purpose by cultivating inquiry, dialogue, and debate regarding alternative conceptual models of and for the practice of communication (Craig, 2018).
The constitutive metamodel renders the multidisciplinary diversity of communication theory as an open set of intellectual traditions, each characterized by a distinct fundamental conception of communication, vocabulary for framing problems, and points of intersection (agreement or disagreement) with ordinary practical beliefs about communication. CTF announced this scheme not as a static map of the field but as a dynamic intervention to “jump start” a conversation through which the field itself would evolve in unforeseeable ways to produce new and redefined theoretical traditions and new ways of representing and applying them. This “theoretical metadiscourse” would contribute to society by enriching the “practical metadiscourse,” that shapes the understanding and practice of communication in everyday life.
In the event, CTF may have failed to “jump start” quite the energetic, field-constituting dialogue and debate across traditions that it idealistically envisioned, but it has been influential, and I believe it continues to be relevant. While textbook summaries indeed often reduce the constitutive metamodel to a map, grid, or list of communication theory’s seven traditions, scholars have also commented critically on the matrix of traditions, defined traditions beyond the original seven, and creatively adapted and applied the scheme in various ways (see: Craig, 2015; Rich & Robles, 2021). CTF is still widely cited, and scholars in other disciplines often cite the article to document any mention of communication theory.
Thus, CTF not only mapped the field of communication theory but has, in a sense, put the field of communication theory “on the map” with a citable location among the disciplines. Even so, the pragmatist philosophy of practical discipline that underlies the constitutive metamodel has received relatively little attention. What has had more uptake is the idea that communication theory is, for better or worse, a diverse, fragmented field of thought that has developed in multiple traditions. Without consideration of its underlying philosophy, however, the purpose of a pluralistic metamodel (“dialogical-dialectical coherence”) and its relevance to contemporary communication and media studies may not be apparent.
Here we should emphasize an important distinction. If CTF maps the field, what it maps is not subfields of communication and media studies but rather fundamental conceptions of the practice of communication that apply across subfields: communication as a practical art (rhetoric), communication as mediation by signs (semiotics), communication as information processing (cybernetics), and so on. The metamodel includes no media studies tradition, no communication technology tradition, no organizational communication tradition, nor others of the like, because such categories refer to fields of study, but not to distinct fundamental conceptions of communication. Communication can be, and historically has been, theorized rhetorically, semiotically, cybernetically, and otherwise in each of those fields of study. Hence, it is not a defect of the constitutive metamodel that the traditions fail to represent the disciplinary substructure of communication and media studies. The metamodel is intended to be relevant to all areas of communication research and practice but in a different way: as a device for focusing attention on alternative fundamental conceptions of communication and their practical implications.
For example, if we examine media studies through the constitutive metamodel, we can see that media-related theories have ranged across the traditions of communication theory, most prominently sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical, but also cybernetic, semiotic, and rhetorical. Categorizing theories in this manner may not be of much interest, but reflecting on the problems of media communication as conceived in different traditions can generate interesting questions. From the standpoint of phenomenological conceptions of communication as dialogue, the very mediated-ness of media communication may appear as a problem in contrast to the greater dialogical potential of direct personal interaction, but this view is also highly debatable as shown by Peters’s (1994) provocative argument that the gap between transmission and reception is so fundamental to all communication that mass communication may be considered the most basic form. Every tradition in the metamodel provides a vocabulary for theorizing the gaps of which communication is made (speaker-audience in rhetoric, signifier-signified in semiotics; transmission-reception in cybernetics, and so on), but we could consider also the possible usefulness of parsing out a distinct “mediational” tradition in which communication would be defined as mediation and communication problems would be framed in a vocabulary of gaps, media, and mediated relations. Conceptualizing such a tradition, situating it historically and culturally, putting it in conversation with other traditions in the metamodel, and applying it to problems in the field of media studies would be creative work in communication theory.
How has my thinking about communication theory changed since 1999? If I were to revise CTF now, I would, of course, tweak it here and there, partly in response to critics, but my case for the constitutive metamodel of communication theory as a field would remain essentially the same, as would my presentation of the seven traditions. The matrix of traditions was always intended to serve as an illustration of how to analyze the field through the constitutive metamodel, not as a definitive representation of the field, and it still serves well as an exemplar. My revision of CTF would emphasize even more strongly the openness and instrumental adaptability of the scheme of traditions, and that we should think of the metamodel, not as a sturdy edifice to be built for the ages, but as a way of thinking to be practiced. Three themes that have grown in my work since 1999 would reinforce that emphasis: (1) the dynamic interaction of theory and practice in the medium of metadiscourse; (2) the cultural basis of theoretical and practical metadiscourse; and (3) the necessity and usefulness of selecting and adapting elements of the metamodel for specific analytical purposes.
First, CTF regards communication theory as a field of “metadiscursive practice” that “intersects with and potentially informs the ongoing practical metadiscourse of society” (Craig, 1999, p. 119). The social usefulness of communication theory in this view is that it contributes well-considered ways of talking about communication problems and practices that are relevant and informative for ordinary ways of communicating. In the years since CTF, empirical studies of practical metadiscourse have given me a fuller and livelier sense of this potential for dialogue between theory and practice, finding both that ordinary talk about communication is surprisingly rich in concepts that can inform theory, and that the traditions of communication theory can be made relevant and applicable to practical discourse on communication problems (Craig, 2020). This dynamic metadiscursive practice would not be well served by a static metamodel of theoretical traditions.
Second, CTF holds that theories are relevant to practice insofar as they both appeal rhetorically to certain commonplace beliefs about communication and challenge other beliefs. What I would emphasize more strongly now is that these commonplace beliefs or ordinary ways of talking about communication are culturally based. They are elements of a communication culture that varies with the general culture. This unavoidable fact would obviously pose a problem for a static metamodel that defined theoretical traditions, in part, by their relevance to commonplace beliefs. Theories will be variably relevant in different cultural contexts, and distinct traditions of communication theory can be reconstructed from the practical and intellectual traditions of specific cultures. This issue arises most acutely in the discourse on “de-westernizing” communication theory (Craig & Xiong, 2022), but it is worth considering in any cultural context. Are there distinctly Finnish thought traditions and ways of talking about communication that should inform the constitutive metamodel?
Third, CTF mentions in an endnote that the number of traditions in the metamodel (seven) may be optimal for representing communication theory because cognitive scientists have found that we can hold about that many “chunks” of information in mind at one time (Craig, 1999, p. 156). However, CTF also points out that the metamodel is not limited in principle to seven or any number of traditions, and, in fact, scholars have already proposed several additional ones since 1999. This poses a problem if you imagine that every newly defined tradition should be incorporated with its own rows and columns in the “official” tabular representation of the metamodel. As traditions are added, the tables threaten to become quite unwieldy, and the task of engaging all the traditions with each other in the discussion of any problem threatens to exceed one’s mental capacity or at least the capacity of an article-length essay. My encounters with this problem have led me to emphasize more strongly that the constitutive metamodel is a way of thinking about communication theory, not a static tabular structure, and that the traditions are best approached as resources to be flexibly adapted and used for specific analytical purposes, as we did, for example, in a recent essay on the Buddhist and Confucian traditions of communication theory (Craig & Xiong, 2022).
References
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. (2015). The constitutive metamodel: A 16-year review. Communication Theory, 25(4), 356-374. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12076
Craig, R. T. (2018). For a practical discipline. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 289-297. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx013
Craig, R. T. (2020). Models of communication in and as metadiscourse. In M. Bergman, K. Kirtiklis, & J. Siebers (Eds.), Models of communication: Theoretical and philosophical approaches (pp. 11-33). Routledge.
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
Peters, J. D. (1994). The gaps of which communication is made. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 11, 117-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039409366891
Rich, M. H., & Robles, J. S. (Eds.). (2021). Practicing communication theory: Exploring, applying, and teaching the constitutive metamodel. Cognella.
No comments:
Post a Comment