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Fragmentation and Hyper-Specialization

This chapter aims to offer a stage-setting analysis and conceptual ground-clearing to assess the state of communication studies. It lays out definitions and positions. Interpretations and analytical foci are anchored in classic philosophical understandings as well as in contemporary approaches. No single definition captures the richness of perspectives about communication. Long-standing attempts to bring differences under a common conceptual roof have not been able to contain dispersion or reorganize lines of research.

Communication studies has long been fragmented into multiple lines of inquiry, disciplinary and theoretical traditions, levels of analysis, and institutional trajectories. It has been a big academic tent for various research areas, as well as disciplinary and methodological traditions (Corner 2013; Levy and Gurevitch 1993; Simonson, Peck, Craig, and Jackson 2013). The symptoms of fragmentation are many. One telling sign is continuous disagreement and confusion about what to call communication scholarship. The usage of various terms such as "communication," "communications," "communication science," and "communication studies" to name schools, departments, journals, books, and conferences reflects confusion and dispersion. Disagreements about whether to call communication a field, science, discipline, or art signal fragmentation too. Underlying multiple institutional names is remarkable intellectual diversity. Also, the constantly growing number of communication journals, with different analytical foci, is symptomatic of such division. One could reasonably argue that these dynamics are not unique to communication, but they reflect broad trends in academic publishing, namely publishers' persistent interest in expanding the numbers of journals. Likewise, the creation of new sections and divisions in professional organizations expresses schisms in thematic areas of specialization.

Over recent decades, communication has developed into an intellectually rich but jumbled field. Undoubtedly, hospitality to multiple traditions and research interests has been the source of its enormous intellectual richness and ontological diversity. Because there has been no single, unified understanding of communication scholarship "across knowledge claims, practices, and values", communication scholarship comes in various types and shapes (Anderson and Baym 2004).

Communication has been a field manqué - too diverse, separated, and pulled in different directions to become a common intellectual enterprise. It has remained a balkanized, anarchic area without intellectual coherence. Kaarle Nordenstreng's (2007: 12) summary of the state of communication studies in Finland applies to the field as a whole: "The nature of the discipline often remains unclear, while its identity is typically determined by administrative convenience and market demand rather than analysis of its historical development and scholarly position within the system of arts and sciences."

The lack of a common epistemological core raises the question of whether communication is indeed a distinctive field of inquiry. Communication studies evolved into what "communication" scholars do, rather than something that is immediately understandable and clear. Given that communication scholars have wide-ranging interests and understand communication in different ways, the field has evolved into a disorganized collection of theories, methodologies and research lines without obvious, straightforward connections.

Producing a Borgesian map that covers the integrity of the territory of communication research is impossible. No cartography or abbreviated summary could do justice to the multiple ways in which research is constantly defined, (re)configured, and organized. Communication studies is an ever-expanding landscape with many sides without fixed boundaries. It is a "contradictory and mobile whole," to repurpose the words Walter Benjamin used to define himself. It does not demand strict credentials for entry in terms of theoretical interests, analytical motivations, conceptual frameworks, and so on. Any taxonomy focused on identifying neat boxes misses the enormous diversity within research clusters as well as the connecting threads across lines of specialization.

Intellectual divisions are grounded in analytical frameworks, foci, and levels of analysis. Studies are embedded in a vast array of epistemologies, disciplinary traditions, and theoretical frameworks that cover the whole spectrum of the social sciences and the humanities (plus influences from information sciences and the "hard" sciences). Whereas some lines of scholarship are grounded in the empirical social sciences, others draw from the intellectual framework of interpretive theories and methodologies identified with the humanities. Just like in other social sciences (Steinmetz 2005), the great methodological divide between quantitative and qualitative approaches is also present in communication studies. Research focuses on different interpersonal and mediated dimensions, as well as different levels of analysis of communication processes - individual, interpersonal, community, society, and systems and structures. Also, whereas some scholars are interested in the institutional dimensions of communication, including media settings, organizations (workplace, corporations, governments, international agencies), and policies and regulations, others are primarily concerned with the psychological aspects of communicative processes.

Communication studies is also scattered over many areas of thematic specialization. This reflects the analytical focus on various "settings" or contexts where communication acts take place, be they politics, health, organizational, intergroup, intercultural, children and youth, environment, science, and risk. These thematic specializations generally exist in relatively compartmentalized quarters with few bridges connecting them. Each area has several specialized journals and is represented by sections and divisions in professional organizations.

Communication studies also pervades the "platform/technology/channel" studies that have expanded over the years with the continuous arrival of information and communication technologies. These include studies of newspaper, film, radio, television, internet, video games, and social media.

Other research clusters are organized around particular institutions and industries of "public communication," such as journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, and entertainment. Even these traditional clusters have continued to break down into smaller areas of thematic specialization. Continuous technological innovations break up traditional "platform/technology" studies as they generate new channels, behaviors, and phenomena with their own particularities. Second screening and binge watching have emerged as a thematic focus in television studies; social media has become disaggregated into "platform" specializations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tinder, given the particularities of each channel.

It is not an exaggeration to say that all areas of specialization are multidisciplinary in nature and straddle communication studies and other fields and disciplines. A considerable body of work in political communication sits at the intersection of communication, cognitive psychology, and political science. Health communication connects communication studies to public health, social psychology, health education and promotion, community health, social marketing, and behavioral studies (Parrott and Kreuter 2011). Risk communication brings together communication scholarship with the psychology of risk and perception. Communication policy connects public policy, media and information policy, political economy, sociology, and technology studies.

Like the field as a whole, areas of thematic specialization are broken into parallel lines of research. Not only do they lack a shared theoretical and analytical corpus, many also lack a common subject of study. For example, health communication contains research clusters concerned with parallel analytical foci such as the effectiveness of message design in modifying knowledge, attitudes, and practices, the uses of digital platforms to strengthen social capital and health, and the impact of community mobilization on health indicators. Health communication is also split into clusters around specific health areas and diseases (chronic and infectious diseases, and diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and polio), as well as aspects of communication processes and dynamics such as levels of interaction (provider/patient, government/citizens, corporations/consumers), messaging (type of appeals) and platforms (e.g. mobile health, web health, gaming). Likewise, science communication is broken up into clusters that examine questions at the intersection of science and communication around specific themes such as nuclear energy, climate change, genetically modified foods, biomedicine, and pharmaceuticals.

Research in political communication, too, is split into various fields, such as propaganda studies, election communication, participation and collective mobilization, government communication, public opinion, and parallel lines of research concerned with information processing, the linkages between media and political institutions, and so on (Reinemann 2014). Likewise, mass communication studies is fragmented into questions about...