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Gary Mariano
Department of Communication
De La Salle University
garymariano@gmail.com
April 2010
Abstract If social science is soft science (the other), and communication is the
soft social science (the other other), then Philippine communication must be
the other other other. I reviewed 56 recent articles in four Asian
communication journals, and conclude that the debate on whether
communication is a full-fledged academic discipline (like physics) remains
unresolved, especially in Asia, where the research straddled between soft
science and empiricism.
The social sciences have a reputation as the soft sciences (Geertz, 1973; Cherns, 1979;
Buddenbaum and Novak, 2001). In turn, communication is regarded as the soft social science
Outside of its sphere, communication does not enjoy the prestige of the other
university disciplines (Beniger, 1987). The same paradox can be observed outside of the
West. There are a number of emerging communication journals in Asia which are
communication. Yet the Asian communication scholar is hardly heard of in the Western
dominated arena.
Following Beauvoir’s (Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1996) take on the hard masculine and
the soft feminine, the social sciences are the other science, and communication the other
* With apologies to Isagani R. Cruz (2010. The other other, D. J. Y. Bayot [Ed.]. Manila: Far Eastern
University Publications) and Elvin Valerio (2010. Ang pelikulang bukod na bukod: Ang pelikulang
alternatibo bilang mapagpalayang sining. Dalumat: Multikultural at Multidisiplinaryong E-Journal sa
Araling Filipino, 1(1), http://ejournals.ph/index.php/DALUMAT/article/view/287/408.)
Mariano p. 2 of 17
other. Is Asian, or even Philippine, communication scholarship then, the other other other?
Is communication a discipline?
a discipline or a field. The two terms are often used loosely to refer to each other. But there is
a fine thread separating them, especially in academe. A discipline usually has a long and
established tradition like law, philosophy and chemistry, while field is used for the more
recent areas like tourism, health sciences, even communication (Malcolm, 2003).
social system of knowledge, with its own specific procedural norms and orientation models-
methods, paradigms, theoretical underpinning of its subject matter, and career criteria. Kuhn
(in Pfau, 2008). It must have exclusive powers to recruit and train new members, to judge
who is qualified, and to regulate the quality of professional work (Smart et al., 2000).
market in which different university departments that award higher degrees regularly hire
Within communication itself, there are those who believe that it is a discipline
(Powers, 1995; Hornsey et al., 2008), albeit a fragmented discipline (Mirchandani, 2005;
Pfau, 2008) with a broad epistemology and ontology (Anderson and Baym, 2004). The more
conservative view it as a field (Phillips, 1986; Malcolm, 2003; Nordenstreng, 2004, 2007;
Jones, 2005; Benoit and Holbert, 2008; Kreps and Maibach, 2008; Wildman, 2008; Zarefsky,
2008). Donsbach (2006) calls it an interdisciplinary field, defined by a common object, i.e.
object.
Mariano p. 3 of 17
science. In his review of communication journal articles, Donsbach (2006) reported that
while most authors considered their work to be of a social-science nature, they also admitted
to other approaches (see chart, Epistemologies in ICA, from Donsbach, 2006). McQuail
(2005) writes that inasmuch as communication has a social-science tradition, there is as much
humanities in its approach, such as in the cultural studies which he differentiated from the
While careful not to call communication a discipline, Benoit and Holbert (2008) write
that it is both healthy and mature. Its journals have relatively high standards (The figure
below, from Neumann et al., [2008] show the predictors of article acceptance).
Yet communication does not get as much respect as the other social sciences like
psychology, sociology, and political science. Nordestreng (2004) warns of the so-called
“Mickey Mouse studies” that some scholars publish. Social psychologists Hornsey et al.
(2008) point out to the differences between their approach to communication problems from
methods, as against “meta-methods” like archival research, textual analysis, category sorting,
conversation analysis, interview data, focus groups, and diary studies. And while social
psychology aims for consistency, communication studies often go for variability. One article
(Zarefsky, 2008) lays the logical basis for rhetorical criticism as a way of knowing.
Pooley and Katz (2008) note that sociologists have stopped studying communication
for a very academic reason: the new communication agenda were no longer within their
crosshairs. The rise after World War II of public opinion research proved “unsociological,”
being more akin to psychology and market research. Sociologists became uncomfortable that
Anderson and Baym (2004) organized the communication philosophies into four
directions: the empirical, the foundational, the reflexive, and the analytical. The domains
Foundational/empirical studies are axiomatic and causal, their methods objective and
metric. Their goal is to make claims about prediction and control of a stable, determined, and
material reality. Reflecting values common to material science, this quadrant is the “hardest.”
The other extreme is the reflexive/analytical. Its theories are politically active, its
method critical and ideologically positioned. Its goal is to make emancipatory claims that
intend value-based social change in a culturally produced rather than “objective” reality; to
advance its own well-being, and to call for change in what is right.
constructed reality. The latter is the “home” of philosophic authority, its theories formal,
Scientists study the relationships between variables. The scholars who wrote the first
media and communication research had their roots in the social sciences. Some of them
eventually migrated permanently to communication. The biggest debate was how much of an
The first belief was that the media produced automatic, immediate, direct, uniform,
and undiscriminating public. This was known as the Powerful Media Effects paradigm or the
2005:458).
The Powerful Effects school was influenced by the behaviorists, particularly Skinner
(1971) who believed that organistic action was determined and not free. It was in the matter
of picking the right reinforcers that gave us the illusion of freedom, he said.
Almost all living things act to free themselves from harmful contacts. A kind
of freedom is achieved by the relatively simple forms of behavior called
reflexes... We do not attribute them to any love of freedom; they are simply
forms of behavior which have proved useful in reducing various threats to the
individual and hence to the species in the course of evolution.
Another behaviorist, Watson (1913), also saw psychology (one of the prisms through
This thinking emboldened early scholars to assume that man was capable of only one
type of response to a stimulus, and that was the the same kind of response an animal would
Marx and Engels (1848), and later their Frankfurt and New School followers, also
believed in powerful media. Writing about classes, they said that “Modern bourgeois society
with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able
to control the spells of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
The New School dynamic duo of Horkheimer and Adorno noted how media were
were making everyone alike, again dispelling the possibility of individuality. In their
Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002, originally published in 1944), they wrote that “culture
today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each
branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together.”
McLuhan, the Canadian literature professor turned media philosopher, advanced the
notion of the medium as the message. By message, he did not mean the content of the
communication, but the effects of media, which he described as the extensions of the human
body, and consequently technology. The message of any new medium, or technology, could
be found in “the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension
of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension
Limited Effects theory of Blumer and Katz argued that people were not all that passive, that
they were used media purposively, and that they had many ways of resisting media influence.
Mass media messages are not im-printed on the minds of media audiences in the precise
Mariano p. 8 of 17
manner in which they are offered. Rather, audience members condense the offerings in their
own ways, select aspects of interest, and integrate them into their own thinking.”
These polar beliefs have since been replaced by a Moderate Effects paradigm, which
holds that media indeed are capable of inducing important effects but only under certain
conditions.
within the past 70 years reflect these philosophical mindsets (Beniger, 1987).
communication as a firm discipline. Yet it is also Western, in scope, orientation, and method.
Should Asian communication scholars, many of them living in Asia and observing Asians
control?
Westernized, communication scholarships are Miike, Chen, Kim, and Dissayanake, who have
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Sri Lankan roots, respectively. They are all professors at U.S.
Universities.
classical texts; concepts derived from ancient traditions; rituals, ceremonies, and
communication as a process:
communication and a further apparent departure from social science. But from the
perspective of the other philosophies like the symbolic interactionists and the social
constructionists, it will be a valid option for Asians studying their own unique, postcolonial,
One way to find out whether this impetus has found acceptance among scholars in the
region is to browse the journals. The following were chosen for this paper because of their
and Communication Centre, Singapore), and Plaridel (University of the Philippines) and
sampled at least two recent issues for each publication. Then articles (N=56) were classified
Quantitative studies that examined causality and correlations between variables fell
under the first quadrant (foundational/empirical). Studies that used both quantitative and
qualitative data mainly for descriptive purposes were classified under the second
(reflexive/empirical). Here went the content and interview analyses, often descriptive (or
that reflected the “prophetic veridicality” about the universals of human life, while the last
quadrant (reflexive/analytical) listed those that called for value-based change in a culturally
produced reality.
Mariano p. 10 of 17
I will admit to the difficulty of compartmentalizing the articles and the possibility that
they could belong to another quadrant or multiple quadrants. I based my classification on the
theories invoked (in some cases there were none) and the nature of the data presentation and
analysis (similarly, some articles did not report any empirical data).
Most of the articles fell under the second quadrant (reflexive/empirical). These were
politeness, identity discussion, intellectual property, and policy. Some of them were inspired
by theories (like limited effects, behavior and framing) that allow for very quantitative and
causal methods, but the writers stopped short at descriptions. In all four journals, this was the
The first quadrant (foundational/empirical) had the second most numerous articles.
The analysis was statistical and words like predictors and direct effects appeared in the
discussion.
Only Plaridel had articles that went into the third quadrant (foundational/analytical).
Themes were archetypes, the public sphere, mythologies, folk narratives, virtual subcultures,
The last quadrant (reflexive/analytical) was all-China Media Research. The articles
were mainly on Chinese communication, with at least three identifying themselves with the I-
Ching philosophy.
Mariano p. 11 of 17
Conclusion
Chemistry is the same regardless of the chemist’s geographic location and ideology. A
rigid discipline has allowed it this universality. To a large extent, the same goes with the other
disciplines.
academic discipline in the classic sense, in the West as in the developing world. (This is of
course paradoxical, because even the “hardest” of social sciences, for as long as human
behavior cannot be universally predicted, will forever will be soft to physicists.) And yet,
there is also an established tradition that does not hesitate to throw conventional values like
objectivity and empiricsm out the window and say, unabashedly, that knowledge has been
achieved. It does sound like the black sheep of the communication family, but this black
sheep is nevertheless as much a member of the family. And with the emergence of
postcolonial, non-Western cousins – the other other other – who might proceed to investigate
communication along exotic orientations and using strange and unapproved methods, the
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