作为一门横截面学科的传播学Craig-2008-Disciplines.pdfVIP

COMMUNICATION IN THE CONVERSATION OF DISCIPLINES ROBERT T. CRA IG 1 Communication has acquired many of the institutional-professiona l trappings of an academic discipline, but as an intellectual tradition it remains radically heterogeneous and largely derivative. What mainly expl ains the fi eld’s disciplinary emergence is its significant relationship to communication as a category of socia l practice, and it is, I argue, by reconstructing its intellectual traditions around that category that the field can best hope not only to be come more intellectually coherent and productive but more useful to society as well. A theory of d iscipl inarity is presented in which every discipl ine derives its identity and coherencefrom its participation in the conversation of discip lines, for w hich it draws on a specific mixture of intellectual, institutional, and sociocultural discursive resources. Communication’s specific character as a discipline thus can be understood in terms of its contributions to knowledge in certain intellectual traditions, its evolving institutionalform s, and its relevance to “communication” understood as a socioculturally constituted category of prob lems andpractice s. The third of these factors — the sociocultural context of disciplinarity — has, I maintain, a pri mary role. Communication as a pr actical discipl ine has been constructed upo n (even as it reflexively reconstructs) the found ation of communication as an increasingly central category in modern societies and global culture. Keywords: disciplines, practical discipline, problematization, social practices There is, of course, nothing ultimately sacred or immu