This volume examines the past, present, and potential relationships between pragmatism and communication research. For scholars and students in communication study.
In Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Robert Danisch examines the search by America's first generation of pragmatists for a unique set of rhetorics that would serve the needs of a developing democracy. Digging deep into pragmatism's historical development, Danisch sheds light on its association with an alternative but significant and often overlooked tradition. He draws parallels between the rhetorics of such American pragmatists as John Dewey and Jane Addams and those of the ancient Greek tradition. Danisch contends that, while building upon a classical foundation, pragmatism sought to determine rhetorical responses to contemporary irresolutions. rhetoric, including pragmatism's rejection of philosophy with its traditional assumptions and practices. Grounding his argument on an
Emerging during the late nineteenth century in the diverse scholarship of US commentators such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, American pragmatism shaped many intellectual currents within a range of disciplines including politics, education, administrative science and religion. Despite attracting attention and interest due to its conceptualization of theory, in terms of its practical consequences for improving the human condition, American pragmatism struggled to maintain its influence and suffered a hiatus until it experienced a renaissance within scholarly circles during the 1970s. While renewed interest in American pragmatism continues to grow, with some scholars distinguishing between classical, neo and new forms of pragmatism, it is only relatively recently that organization studies scholars have drawn upon American pragmatist philosophies for shedding new light on aspects of contemporary organizational life. This edited collection builds on this emergent literature in an engaging and scholarly manner. American Pragmatism and Organization is a ground-breaking collection and distinctive in its book-length treatment of American pragmatism as a relevant resource for analysing organisations. It draws together an international body of research focused on the interconnections and interplay between American pragmatism and organizational phenomena, explores the theoretical possibilities afforded by pragmatist thinking for understanding organization, and illuminates the practical advantages of doing so.
This collection of essays engages with the current resurgence of interest in the relationship between American pragmatism and communication studies. The topics engaged in this collection of essays is necessarily diverse, with some of the figures discussed within often viewed as “minor” or ancillary to the main tradition of pragmatism. However, each essay attempts to show the value of reading these minor figures for philosophy and rhetorical studies. The diversity of the pragmatist tradition is evident in the ways in which unlikely figures like Hu Shi, Ambedkar, and Alice Dewey leverage some of the original commitments of pragmatism to do important intellectual, social, and political work within the circumstances that they find themselves. This collection of essays also serves as a reminder for how we might reimagine and reuse pragmatism for our own social and political projects and challenges.
The development of communication studies has been a lively process of adoption and integration of theoretical constructs from Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. Critical Communication Studies describes the intellectual and professional forces that have shaped research interests and formed alliances in the pursuit of particular goals. Hanno Hardt reflects on the need to come to terms with the role of history in academic work and locates the intellectual history within the context of competing social theories. The book provides a substantive foundation for understanding the field and will be a major text in all courses dealing with communication history and theory.
For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.
Communicology is widely accepted on the international scene as a new name for the study of human communication. It replaces several equivocal disciplinary conceptions such as "communication," which may fail to distinguish the science of communication from its object of investigation or the message-centered "communication studies," which often obfuscates information exchange with the experience of shared meaning in human encounters. Communicology differs from the American mainstream social science of communication not only because it is grounded in communication theory rather than information theory, but also because it advances a philosophically informed ecological perspective on human discourse. This book is intended as a contribution to the philosophy of communication and the human science of communicology. Semiotic phenomenology is thoroughly described as the synthetic logic that combines a philosophy of consciousness with a science of culture and conduct to explicate the lifeworld habitus. Consciousness is viewed as cultural-semiotic and experience as personal-phenomenological. This is a reciprocal, reflexive relationship in which culture is conceived as consciousness of communication and communication the manifest experience of culture. The book describes embodiment so conceived, including the history of the matrix idea in American pragmatism and European philosophy as they commingled in the United States to produce a unique discipline of communication, the science of embodied discourse. Important roots of this new discipline are described for the first time here in a unique synthesis of C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, and Pierre Bourdieu. In addition, the semiotic relativity hypothesis is argued to be an important implication of this new discipline. Transcending the stale debate on language and thought, the limited conception of linguistic relativity is considerably broadened and deepened. The distinctive lifeworld of humans is argued to occur at the threshold of sign consciousness in the semiotic matrix of culture-society-person. Semiotic phenomenology is not only a synthesis of two great European philosophical movements, structuralism and phenomenology; it is also the essence of American pragmatism. This view culminates in the contemporary human science of communicology.
Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the Metaphysical Club of the 1870s to the present day. This ambitious new account identifies the connections between traditional American pragmatism and contemporary philosophy and argues that the most defensible version of pragmatism — roughly, that of Peirce, Lewis, and Sellars — must be seen and recovered as an important part of the analytic tradition.
Communication as Organizing unites multiple reflections on the role of language under a single rubric: the organizing role of communication. Stemming from Jim Taylor's earlier work, The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface (LEA, 2000), the volume editors present a communicational answer to the question, "what is an organization?" through contributions from an international set of scholars and researchers. The chapter authors synthesize various lines of research on constituting organizations through communication, describing their explorations of the relation between language, human practice, and the constitution of organizational forms. Each chapter develops a dimension of the central theme, showing how such concepts as agency, identity, sensemaking, narrative and account may be put to work in discursive analysis to develop effective research into organizing processes. The contributions employ concrete examples to show how the theoretical concepts can be employed to develop effective research. This distinctive volume encourages readers to discover and develop a truly communicational means of addressing the question of organization, addressing how organization itself emerges in the course of communicational transactions. In presenting a single and entirely communicational perspective for exploring organizational phenomena, grounded in the discourse of communicational transactions and the establishment of relationships through language, it is required reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in organizational communication, management, social psychology, pragmatics of language, and organizational studies.
A systematic examination of Chinese communication scholarship and comprehensive critique of its theories and methodologies are long overdue, and in this new collection of essays by a multicultural group of scholars, both aims are achieved. Focusing on such relatively new fields as Chinese health communication and Chinese communication on the internet, the volume addresses key questions about the state and the future of its field. Both challenging and complementing the Western views of communication, it advances theories of cultural and intercultural communication while at the same time broadening our understanding of the relevance of Chinese communication studies to communication studies overall, and the ways in which this subdiscipline points the way toward a new and more complicated future. The essayists, whose origins include the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, bring their many perspectives to bear on what is the most comprehensive and inclusive review of Chinese communication research literature published in English. Of great benefit to Western and Eastern communication theorists, philosophers of social science, and Asian studies scholars, Chinese Communication Theory and Research is an invaluable guide to an increasingly complex and significant field of study.