Internationalizing "International Communication"

by Chin-Chuan Lee (Editor)

Overview

International communication as a field of inquiry is, in fact, not very “internationalized.” Rather, it has been taken as a conceptual extension or empirical application of U.S. communication, and much of the world outside the West has been socialized to adopt truncated versions of Pax Americana’s notion of international communication. At stake is the “subject position” of academic and cultural inquirers: Who gets to ask what kind of questions? It is important to note that the quest to establish universally valid “laws” of human society with little regard for cultural values and variations seems to be running out of steam. Many lines of intellectual development are reckoning with the important dimensions of empathetic understanding and subjective consciousness.


In Internationalizing "International Communication," Lee and others argue that we must reject both America-writ-large views of the world and self-defeating mirror images that reject anything American or Western on the grounds of cultural incompatibility or even cultural superiority. The point of departure for internationalizing “international communication” must be precisely the opposite of parochialism - namely, a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Scholars worldwide have a moral responsibility to foster global visions and mutual understanding, which forms, metaphorically, symphonic harmony made of cacophonic sounds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472072446
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Series:	The New Media World
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Chin-Chuan Lee is Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Communication Research at City University of Hong Kong.

Read an Excerpt

Internationalizing "International Communication"

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By Chin-Chuan Lee

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2015 Chin-Chuan Lee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07244-6

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CHAPTER 1

International Communication Research

Critical Reflections and a New Point of Departure

Chin-Chuan Lee

Various attempts (Curran & Park, 2000; Thussu, 2009; Wang, 2011) have been made in recent years to "de-Westernize" or "internationalize" media studies. What justifies another volume seeking to "internationalize" what is purported to be the most "internationalized" subfield in the whole gamut of media and communication studies? In short, it is because international communication as a field of inquiry actually is not very "internationalized." But why should we fix our horizon on "international" instead of, say, "intercultural" communication, or the even trendier "global" communication? First, it should be acknowledged that nation-states remain central to any theories and practice of the contemporary world order, and that international communication is always (but not completely) intermixed with intercultural communication. Second, international processes obviously are increasingly globalized. However, we wish to emphasize a double-bind fact: if democracy is to survive in the post-communist world, as Alain Touraine (1997) maintains, it must "somehow protect the power of the nation-state at the same time as it limits that power," for only the state "has sufficient means to counterbalance the global corporate wielders of money and information."

Perusing three major handbooks as signposts immediately discloses that international communication has led a relatively marginal existence in the pantheon of media and communication studies. The more generous treatment was given in what was legitimately claimed to be the most comprehensive anthology, Handbook of Communication (1973), which ran over 1,000 pages under the eminent editorship of Ithiel de sola Pool and Wilbur Schramm. Six out of 31 chapters (approximately one-fifth), all written by political scientists, addressed in whole or in part selected issues of international communication. All the topics nonetheless concentrated on vital Cold War concerns of the United States: international propaganda, Third World modernization, communication systems in primitive societies, and Communist/totalitarian communication systems. There was a sequel after a lapse of 14 years, the Handbook of Communication Science, edited by Charles Berger and Steven Chaffee (1987). Amid its self-congratulatory claim to the self-sufficient status of "communication science," this volume turned cripplingly inward-looking. Showing little welcoming gesture to social scientists from other sister disciplines, it devoted only one chapter to cross-cultural comparisons, and none to substantive issues of international communication. An updated Handbook of Communication Science, edited by Berger, Roloff, and Roskos-Ewaldsen (2010), devoted only one token chapter out of 29 to "intercultural communication." What comes to mind is local TV news practice in the United States of covering "the world in a minute."

Surely international matters deserve more time, space, and concerted attention. Why have they been so neglected in our field? Asserting the hard-nosed presumption that "science" is of universal applicability, those defining the field through these influential anthologies did not seem to believe that cross-cultural, national, or systemic differences should matter. The world amounted, ontologically and epistemologically, to America writ large. This prevailing stream of (un)consciousness was widely shared among most members of the U.S. social science community for decades, following on Lerner's conviction (1958) that the entire developing world was emulating the American model in a linear progression to modernization. Moreover, well into the 1980s, even as scholars of communication sought to define their realm as one of overweening importance, the field's vision seemed to be narrowing. Even a cursory glance at the table of contents of the three defining volumes shows an inexorable move toward the process of what Geertz (1963) calls "involution," characterized by greater self-absorption, isolationism, internal development, and parochialism — and this in spite of the vast and rapid march of globalizing processes "out there." Under the pretense of science (more aptly, scientism), the succeeding generations of editors have embraced a far narrower horizon of global landscape than their mentors.

At long last, however, the critique of Cold War perspectives that accompanied political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, the progress of critical cultural approaches to inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s, and above all the growing participation of international scholars in international communication inquiry have generated a search for new directions. We hope this book can contribute to this movement.

Why Internationalizing "International Communication"?

In this introductory chapter I shall refer to the "West" as a generic term to make first-stroke comparisons with the "non-West," bearing in mind that the West is larger than the United States and both "the West" and "the non-West" are internally full of notable variations and conflicts. In other words, we are at this point more interested in understanding the "between variances" than the "within variances." Yet media studies remain, to borrow from Jeremy Tunstall (1977), largely "American" or Anglo-American, and the erosion of this dominance has been glacial. As a field of inquiry born out of the U.S. context of the 1950s, international communication still addresses the world largely through the prism of middle-class America, and the narrow agenda that prevailed for so long — focusing on Cold War propaganda, Third World development, political campaigns, and consumer persuasion — continues to exert its influence through the topics, methods, questions, and very vocabularies of our studies. As Colin Sparks sums up in his chapter, "Lasswell, Lippmann and Bernays in the first generation, and Lerner and Schramm in the second, were all deeply concerned with the ways in which states used the resources of propaganda both to secure internal consent and to undermine the support available to their enemies."

If we were to follow C. Wright Mills's (1959) call for the "sociological imagination," we should stand firm to reject any attempts to balkanize media studies into domestic and international turfs, because in principle all significant questions should be situated in the cross-nexus of comparative (world) and temporal (historical) contexts. But that is not how the academic division of labor or the bureaucratic ethos usually operate. In reality, international communication has been taken as a conceptual extension or empirical application of U.S. communication. Furthermore, it has provided territory for scholarly colonization: as early as six decades ago, Lazarsfeld (1952–53) foresaw that "the domestic area will not have many opportunities" in the years to come and postulated that international research could be a fertile land to "open up new and exciting subjects for investigation." Rather than taking advantage of the widened window of opportunity to produce "local knowledge" (Geertz, 1983) of general relevance and also in a comparative light, international communication more often than not has acted as an overseas testing station of U.S. or, secondarily, European worldviews.

Moreover, aside from fixating on a narrow range of conceptual problems, mainstream scholarship in our field has long promoted a positivistic methodology that in its extreme form has especially detrimental implications for international communication studies. Hard-core positivists assume that specificities can and should be subsumed into generality, but they seem comfortable with the fact that the supposed "generality" tends to be grounded in a specific U.S. cultural soil or European setting. The "West" is being generalized if not universalized, while the "exceptions" and outliers are explained away and cross-cultural meanings homogenized to the extent of defying the rigor of comparative logic. For many, systemic differences do not seem to be pertinent in the way of impinging on conceptualization or, for that matter, on the relationships between concepts and their empirical referents (Smelser, 1976). Nor is there room for any serious discourse about the crossing of cultural boundaries.

Worse yet, much of the non-West has been socialized to adopt truncated versions of Pax Americana's notion of international communication. U.S.-cum-international communication is taken for granted by way of the hegemonic process, with an army of non-Western disciples eagerly promoting, embracing, and reproducing the generalized model and wisdom from their Western tutors. The popularity of "diffusion of innovation" (Rogers, 2003), which comprised streams of overseas projects trying to copy or replicate models born in the specific settings of Iowa, Ohio, or New York, was celebrated as a seminal cross-cultural achievement.

How much has the situation been improved? Invited just recently to offer comments on papers presented by Asian PhD students at a research symposium, I asked the audience to judge whether we were witnessing a colored, colonized, Asian map of U.S. research trajectories. "Where is, for example, Korea — or Singapore — in scripting the scholarly agendas?" I asked. "Is there a real place to account for cultural flow and interaction?" Stunned to hear my remarks, most students did not seem to possess the kind of cultural awareness needed to feel anything was wrong with lifting a page from the U.S. research directory, asking the same set of technical (even trivial) questions, adopting the same conceptual frameworks, and imitating the same research techniques down to minute details. What could be faulted, they must have wondered, given that their vaunted display of sophisticated skills was, after all, coached by advanced Western authorities? And this is hardly an isolated encounter.

There is no reason to reject a concept or theory out of hand simply on account of its cultural origin, but it surely is unwise to buy into any theory without reflecting on its built-in premises and limitations. It is one thing to import or apply certain Western models as a critical choice because some problems are appropriate for more generalized lenses. It is quite another to unquestioningly accept a whole set of specific worldviews, problematics, and core agendas to serve a field boldly called "international communication." At stake is the "subject position" of academic and cultural inquirers: Who get to ask what kind of questions? Why shouldn't we treasure the right to ask original questions that are most important to us instead of submitting indigenous data or evidence only to further fuel the Western-cum-universal theories? This is a case of academic hegemony par excellence that naturalizes the process of ideological transfer and practical emulation. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense is never equal or simply coerced, but based in part on acts of mutual consent and willing collaboration between the intellectual patron and client, resulting in ideological conditioning in such a way that the fact of domination is unrecognized, accepted, or taken for granted. Hegemony rules unabated unless its fundamental and often hidden assumptions are openly exposed and questioned.

If the trajectory is depressing, the past also yields lessons that can further our attempts to promote wiser, more enlightened, and more cosmopolitan approaches to scholarship. We believe that the imperative of academic autonomy must be founded on active, open, and mutually respectful interaction with cultural currents of thought and interests from other traditions. Symbolizing a critical moment of cultural awakening, this volume intends to do just that and, further, to present alternative and critical discourses about the study of international communication. It is time to develop a more complex and integrated framework of multiculturalism and globalism as a new point of departure. All our contributors have long been immersed in rich intercultural or diasporic experiences, which Stuart Hall depicts as being "familiar strangers" between cultures who "know both places intimately" but are "not wholly of either place" (Chen, 1996, p. 490). Represented in this volume are a group of distinguished scholars from different generations and from an array of diverse cultural backgrounds — Argentinian, Italian, Dutch, American, British, Swedish, Belgian, Israeli, Indian, and Chinese — who have either received advanced training in the West or affiliated with major Western universities during various periods of their careers. Such "in-between" cross-cultural experiences form an essential part of intellectual biography and capital for them to traverse multiple borders and to dialectically negotiate and synthesize the insider's perspectives with the outsider's perspectives (Merton, 1972), thereby enabling them to emerge from critical reflections with refreshing views on where the field has come from and whither it goes.

Origin and Paradigm Shift

From the outset, international communication research has been affiliated with power and the nation-state, and most particularly with U.S. foreign policy interests and objectives. Setting the tone was Harold Lasswell (1927) in an early work on propaganda technique during World War I. Some 15 years later, social scientists were called on to advise the Office of War Information of the U.S. government in fighting Nazi propaganda during World War II, a war that paved the way for the rise of the United States to world hegemony. No sooner had the world war ended than the Cold War ensued, lasting for half a century. In this ideologically polarized world, in which the United States perceived itself as "a righter of wrongs around the world, in pursuit of tyranny, in defense of freedom no matter the place or cost" (Said, 1993, p. 5), propaganda concerns loomed ever larger.

In retrospect, however, the neo-imperial impetus driving U.S. communication studies was not the only dynamic. The field actually was developing in different institutional settings for different purposes, taking two parallel yet rather separate trajectories. One stream of academic pedigree could be traced back to the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, where urban sociologists (such as Robert Park and Herbert Blumer) under the influence of pragmatism (John Dewey) and symbolic interactionism (George Herbert Mead) pursued their fascination with the integrative role of the media in the building of community amid large-scale social transformation produced by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The preeminence of Chicago sociology in U.S. studies of mass communication was replaced in the 1950s by the structural-functionalist school of sociology and social psychology led by Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University. At this juncture, domestic communication research came to acquire another character, tenet, and direction as the Columbia researchers turned their primary attention to investigating how the media instrumentally altered voter intention or consumer behavior. Overall they were collectively frustrated to discover, time and again, that the media did not live up to the theorized expectation of swaying the public's attitudes and behaviors, but only served to reinforce their existing predispositions. As a result, Bernard Berelson (1959), a member of the Columbia group, was on the verge of announcing a funeral for communication research. The transition from Chicago's to Columbia's emphasis (Czitrom, 1982, pp. 91–146; Hardt, 1992, pp. 31–122) has far-reaching implications that provide a domestic counterpoint to the international focus of this essay.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

1. International Communication Research: Critical Reflections and a New Point of Departure Chin-Chuan Lee,
2. Window Shopping: On Internationalizing "International Communication" Elihu Katz,
3. Beyond Lazarsfeld: International Communication Research and Its Production of Knowledge Tsan-Kuo Chang,
4. Beyond Modernization and the Four Theories of the Press Jan Servaes,
5. Professional Models in Journalism: Between Homogenization and Diversity Paolo Mancini,
6. Conditions of Capital: Global Media in Local Contexts Michael Curtin,
7. The Enduring Strength of Hollywood: The "Imperial Adventure" Genre and Avatar Jaap van Ginneken,
8. Resurrecting the Imperial Dimension in International Communication Colin Sparks,
9. De-Westernization and Cosmopolitan Media Studies Silvio Waisbord,
10. Local Experiences, Cosmopolitan Theories: On Cultural Relevance in International Communication Research Chin-Chuan Lee,
11. Theorizing Media Production as a Quasi-Autonomous Field: A Reassessment of China News Studies Judy Columbaum,
12. Translation, Communication, and East-West Understanding Zhang Longxi,
13. Public Spheres, Fields, Networks: Western Concepts for a De-Westernizing World? Rodney Benson,
14. Cosmopolitanism and International Communication: Understanding Civil Society Actors Peter Dahlgren,
15. Postcolonial Visual Culture: Arguments from India Arvind Rajagopal,
Contributors,
Index,