Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents

Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Cynthia Stohl. Cynthia Stohl is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is past director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. Cynthia’s research has been influential in many disciplines including organizational, political, media and interpersonal communication as well as management and political science. She has published two award winning books, Organizational Communication: Connectedness in Action and Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change with Bruce Bimber and Andrew Flanagin, as well over 120 articles and book chapters, many of which have received international awards. She has been elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and has held honorary professorships in Denmark, France and New Zealand. Cynthia is a past president of the International Communication Association and a recipient of the Steven H. Chaffee Career Productivity Award. Today, Cynthia is in conversation with Shiv Ganesh, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. And here is Shiv.

Shiv Ganesh 1:30
Hello, everyone. I met Cynthia on my very first day as a graduate student in the United States 28 years ago. I then took a class with her on global networks, and she has been my most consistent research collaborator and mentor ever since. Today, we will chat with Professor Stohl about how she got interested in communication, her intellectual trajectory, and her view of the field and ICA itself. Welcome, Cynthia.

Cynthia Stohl 1:57
Hi Shiv. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you.

Shiv Ganesh 2:01
Why don't we start with how you got interested in communication studies?

Cynthia Stohl 2:06
Well, it was certainly a circuitous route. In college, I was an English literature and elementary education major. For so many women of my generation, (especially for those of us who were first-generation or our parents or grandparents were immigrants) if you were a woman, and you went to college, being a teacher was what was expected of you. And so I did that. At the same time, my husband went on for his PhD, and he had encouraged me, but I didn't really know. I loved learning, I loved school. But I didn't know what I wanted to study. Initially, I thought about sociology, because as a teacher, I was really interested in structure and how the institutions themselves were constraining kids’ development. It wasn't allowing me to be the kind of teacher I really wanted to be. On the other hand, I was interested in psychology, and I was really interested in the cultural differences with my kids and how they were socialized and the families that I was working with as a teacher. And then, I discovered the communication department at Purdue. There, they had rhetoric, mass communication, organizational, and interpersonal. It seemed to be a field that will enable me to ask the kinds of questions I wanted to ask without being constrained by a particular, “We are psychologists.” The other part of it is that Durkheim’s comment about anytime a social phenomenon is explained through a psychological phenomenon, for sure we knew that explanation was false. So I knew that I was not really interested in just dyadic communication or just group communication, but I really found communication to be the field that let me look at multiple levels simultaneously.

Shiv Ganesh 3:51
What is interesting to me about what you're saying there is that you liked the fact that there was so much breadth in communication studies. I think that resonates with a lot of people, but the kind of breath that we saw in communication studies in the 70s and 80s, and its breath right now are two different things. Can you talk about the state of communication studies in the 70s and 80s, when you entered the field?

Cynthia Stohl 4:17
First of all, the field of communication from my perspective being in the US was very American-centric. But also it was insular methodologically. Organizations were containers, you did not look at embeddedness very much. And then in the 80s, that really began to change. In 1980, Ev Rogers published his book Communication Networks: Toward a New Paradigm for Research. And those networks were no longer just organizational. They were embedded in Korean society in health communication. In 1983, Linda Putnam and Mike Pacanowsky published Communication and Organizations: an Interpretive Approach. And moreover, in 1983, Jennifer Slack and others edited the special issue of Journal of Communication Ferment in the Field, and that really was looking at it. In globalization, we talk about global consciousness through processes of reflexivity. That's exactly what our field was doing in the 80s, we were being very self-reflexive. And it was very exciting to be a part of that.

Shiv Ganesh 5:21
Going back to this time of Ferment in the Field, who would you say were your early mentors and your most influential peers?

Cynthia Stohl 5:29
So in terms of mentors, Mark Knapp, who is an interpersonal person, he really taught me about asking the questions that interested you. He was a mentor in how to do rigorous, interesting, socially-grounded work. I always appreciated that from him. He and I did the work on memorable messages when I was just a grad student, and that built on and so he really gave me a foundation in what communication could be. Charles Redding, at Purdue again, he was really influential for me, along with Phil Tompkins, and the faculty there, because they showed me that organizational communication didn’t have to just be about corporate America. I had come in working in NGOs. That's where I really wanted to go, and they were able to do that for me. In terms of mentors and reading, Moreno was really important for me and sociograms. Peter Monge’s work on networks, I found very helpful methodologically. Terri Thompson, editor of Health Communication, Jon Nussbaum, editor of JOC: these were people I went to grad school with. Finally, I'm gonna say my mentors were my students, whether it be you, Patty Sotirin, Dennis Mumby, and Kasey Walker. Plus, I gotta add, from the minute I went to ICA, I met the most exceptional people. And I've published with many of them now.

Shiv Ganesh 6:48
I want to pick up on something that you said about ICA. You mentioned that as being influential early on. Can you talk about what ICA was like as an organization at the time? What was it like coming into this association as a student for the first time?

Cynthia Stohl 7:02
Well, first of all, you're overwhelmed by getting to meet the names of the people that you've now read the books from. But it was a very exciting place. I came from the International Peace Research Association. I had been at the International Studies. ICA was pretty parochial at the time. Every five years, we went international, meaning that America was the standard by which we judge our conferences. And I think over the last 30-40 years, it's extraordinary what we've done. We have a far way to go yet, but we've done some important steps in truly becoming a global organization. But I will say this, ICA was always the best natured, caring, supportive association that I had ever been a part of.

Shiv Ganesh 7:52
Why did internationalization take 30 years?

Cynthia Stohl 7:55
Certainly not because we didn't want it to. As we have become more global, we begin to learn and see what else is needed. So we started with making sure that economically we were able to get people to come. As we started to broaden, we began to realize we need some journals. Once we began the publications with the affiliate journals, we realized there's so much exciting work going on that we have not made space for. We did regional conferences first. And now we've moved to the hubs. So I think it's taken this much time because we've learned, but like everything else, as globalization happens, things speed up. It won't take another 30 years. In the next five years, we will continue to work towards being a truly global organization.

Shiv Ganesh 8:41
This podcast is called Architects of Communication. So what would you say you have designed and built in your career?

Cynthia Stohl 8:49
Architects is a somewhat presumptuous term because I don't see myself as an architect. I see myself with some nails, maybe a hammer, some tools, some ideas, but certainly everything that I've done has been built upon what others have done. But in terms of my contributions,some of it has to do with globalization.I am certainly not amongst the first to talk about globalization. But I think I helped shape organizations to think more in our studies about how we approached globalization. So I think one of the things I helped influence was our view of what globalization meant for organizational, interpersonal, and political communication. Another thing was context in general–the work on bonafide groups. So I see myself building that with workplace participation. It no longer was an individual phenomenon. It was grounded in a socio-political context that occurred. And so all the different paradoxes didn't arise within the organization but arose within a larger system. One other thing is my work in networks was very different than the work that others were doing because I didn't want networks to be a metaphor. But I did want networks to be a way of thinking, that way of seeing “Connectedness in Action. That's what I named my first book. In the first book, I talked about what happened inside an organization was affected by what happened outside and I gave all these vignettes. It was a network approach without any network data at all. Many others did much more in terms of networks as a methodology than I did, but I tried to use networks as a perspective.

Shiv Ganesh 10:36
I think that you are being very modest about your contribution. You were one of the early figures, not just in communication, but in the social sciences more broadly, who was doing work that was outside the United States, even while you were based in the United States. As a communication studies researcher, how were you approaching, back in the day, the study of globalization in a way that was different from, say, someone in sociology?

Cynthia Stohl 11:02
At the very beginning, I didn't call it globalization. When I was in New Zealand, it was at that moment when I was already there that I began to realize the global phenomenon. I was teaching in New Zealand as well as doing research, and I approached it by seeing what messages meant by seeing how people were interpreting what was happening in the world. I looked at what were the kinds of choices that we made. So in New Zealand, I was looking at an American owned factory, with a multicultural workforce from the South Pacific Islanders to the Pākehā, to the Caucasians in New Zealand. I didn't study it as cross-cultural, I studied it as a multi-leveled phenomenon. And in doing that, I began to see how the political, the economic, all the differences that were occurring, and the rapidness of the change. Surveys that were done three years ago were no longer appropriate. So you had to really be changing your research methods, the theoretical perspective. When I did the semantic network part in Europe, and I used five countries, and I went from country to country and did those interviews. I learned all about how you deal with issues of language, and how you need a team that doesn't just represent who you are, that you're comfortable working with. I always had to translate it from the native language that I was working in. So I began to realize that, and when you want to study globalization, you yourself need to become more global in how you approach your research questions.

Shiv Ganesh 12:37
You talked about what it was like and how intimidated you felt when you first came to your first ICA, and that is because we tend to set up these key figures or architects, if you will, as deities for whom work and scholarship is effortless. And I was hoping you might be able to help us deconstruct that a little by talking a bit about challenges or maybe even failures that you have experienced as a scholar.

Cynthia Stohl 13:02
Well, first of all, some of it is simply the first time I got a rejection. I will tell you it was from HCR, and it was from my dissertation, and I read this really painful letter. I threw it across the table and said, “I'm too old for this. I can't do this.” I had to learn that when you get a paper rejected, you really do need to use that as a learning experience. And I did. And I'm happy to say I rewrote that paper, and it ended up winning an award. And I can give you many other papers that were rejected that I then worked on. But in terms of failures, number one is when you do organizational research, you have to build relationships with the people that you're going to study. My most common failure that happens to all of us is when we are just mistaken. We think that we're making things better, and in fact, we make them worse. I wrote about this in a chapter in Dennis Mumby’s book that when I was working in the rubber factory in New Zealand, I had made a deal with management that I would give the same report to management and the union because I believed that everybody should have equal information. And the day I was leaving New Zealand, I went to the factory, and I had two reports in my hand. I met the union president on the stairwell. So I gave him his report. And then I went up to the CEO. I gave him the next report, and I left. Little do they realize that in the union, they distributed that immediately. They had all the information. The management worked through bureaucracy. So by the time the supervisor saw it, lo and behold, there was a strike because they felt that the management was not being responsive to their needs. And I got blamed, and it became a huge problem. The next time I did my research in New Zealand, I did it at a bar across the street from the factory. I really had meant to treat everybody equally, but I didn't understand the system. I think we all at some point have that sort of research nightmare, where the best intentions do not work out that way.

Shiv Ganesh 15:05
That's really nicely put. You've talked about some challenges that you've faced in the past. What would you say are some big intellectual challenges for communication scholarship over the next 10 years or so?

Cynthia Stohl 15:19
I think there are three kinds of intellectual challenges we face: theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic. Theoretically, we need to move beyond simply saying diversity is good. I think we really need to understand what different perspectives theoretically mean and how to integrate them so that we're not just doing cross-cultural work, where we can say organization as a concept means this here and means that there. But what does that mean in the global world? How do we create new constructs that represent the variations that we see in society? And how do we take those different interpretations and use them to ask questions that are no longer from our own perspective, that are no longer questions that we know are the answers are going to lie. So we really need to use theories from other countries. We need to take our theories and continue to develop them. Methodologically, I think that the rigid bifurcation between quantitative and qualitative research is no longer sustainable. If you're asking a question, intellectually, you need to look at big data. At the same time, you probably need to do observations or ethnographies, and talk with people and find out. So I think we'll be doing more historical kinds of analyses. I think that as communication, when we look at the influence of messaging, as well as the effects on ourselves, we really will need to consider socio-political, economic. In the future as we work, the sole researcher who's thinking individually, doing a study, and writing–that is already disappearing. We really do need teams of people with multiple skills. We can't learn it all. We need intellectually to have those other perspectives.

Shiv Ganesh 17:13
Over the years, your work has expanded theoretically, and you've worked with a number of critical scholars in the field. What would you say is the importance of taking multiple perspectives and of critical work in particular?

Cynthia Stohl 17:27
Well, it's interesting. I was a child of the 60s. I was a protester of the Vietnam War. “The whole world was watching” was my frame of being. And so a critical perspective (not theoretically but emotionally) always came to me. And as I began to ask the questions about my fifth grade students, and how it is that we can enhance development and make them more efficacious to address the problems they would face. I began to realize that one needed to approach it critically. One needed to look beyond the normative and begin to understand those unintended consequences of structure, the unintended consequences of the words and the language we use. And so I came to the critical perspective, working with people like you with Dennis Mumby with complete comfort. It wasn't a political stance, per se, but it was just the natural sense of asking how can we make society better? I have worked with people like you, who have really helped me to shape that into a research agenda.

Shiv Ganesh 18:36
You've talked about theoretical, methodological, and parochial challenges that we need to face as a field. Now, what would you say are the big societal challenges and opportunities, if you will, where communication scholarship could make a contribution?

Cynthia Stohl 18:54
I think in terms of crises. If we look at COVID, we look at climate change, one of the biggest issues has been the communication issues. And who better to address crises than communication people? Typically within crisis communication, we think about public relations. But crises are so embedded in every part of our lives that we really need as communication people to focus on how we create messages, how those messages are interpreted, how do we deal with linguistic diversity? So I think that's one of the biggest things that communications scholarship will really play a central role in the future in dealing with any of the global crises we have. I think the other thing that's changing is more and more engaged scholarship, not to just speak for ourselves, but for others as well and giving voice to those who do not have a voice. One thing I didn't say that I want to add, ethics has to become a bigger part of our mindset, as we approach our work. I've been very interested in corporate social responsibility. And I think it's corporate social responsibility, research social responsibility, institutional social responsibility. I think we are very privileged. And as scholars, we really need to think through the ethical implications of what we do but also, what am I studying? How am I making the world a better place for people?

Shiv Ganesh 20:26
Let's bring this back to ICA. What role do you think this association can play in helping researchers and communication scholars deal with these challenges?

Cynthia Stohl 20:37
I think that these regional conferences and the hubs are really bringing people together. These crises are way too big for any one of us to be dealing with by ourselves. So we need a community of scholars, and ICA certainly is helping to create that community of scholars. I think that our affiliate journals is a way to share our research with each other from other perspectives and what is going on. ICA also, as an association, had some work with the UN and with NGOs. I could see at some point where we give grants to researchers to work on certain global problems from all over the world. I also think that as a discipline, as we train and work with our grad students, that is a place where we can help encourage people to ask the questions that are most pressing to them to learn to embed your own research in global issues.

Shiv Ganesh 21:40
So in closing, in addition to any final reflections you might have for us, what advice would you give an early career researcher who is entering the field of communication studies now?

Cynthia Stohl 21:52
Go beyond your own circle of friends. So when you go to a conference, make sure that you approach and speak to people that you might not otherwise by asking them questions. Everybody likes to talk about their work. Engage others unlike yourself, who have different methodologies, who have different theoretical perspectives, who come from a different demographic than you do. Another thing, of course, is to read widely in areas that are not ours. Communication is very interdisciplinary, and we need to expand our readings. Other advice is do what you love. Find what's true to you and study that because that is important.

Shiv Ganesh 22:35
Thank you so much, Cynthia. It's been a privilege to talk with you today.

Cynthia Stohl 22:39
Well, thank you Shiv. And I will say that you were one of the many people that I have learned from over my career. So thank you.

Ellen Wartella 22:49
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by The School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Dominic Bonelli . Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai