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 Peter Monge. Peter Monge is Professor Emeritus of Communication at USC Annenberg and Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business. He and Manuel Castells co-founded the Annenberg Networks Network, a research center focused on communication network theory and research, where he served as co-director until 2021. He also served as director of the Communication PhD program for 10 years. He's published five books, the most recent of which is "Theories of Communication Networks" with Noshir Contractor. He's published more than 100 theoretical and research articles and book chapters on organizational communication networks, evolutionary and ecological theory, collaborative information systems, globalization and research methods. From 1986 to 1993, he served as editor of Communication Research. Today, Peter is going to be in conversation with Noshir Contractor. Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. and William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University. And here is my Noshir.
Peter, it is truly a delight for me to have this opportunity to talk with you.
Oh, thank you, Noshir. I'm glad to be here with you.
As part of your background, before venturing into communication, you studied theology. How did that shape your future intellectual trajectory and what got you interested in theology in the first place?
Well, I was raised in a very conservative Christian Evangelical, religious environment. And I went to religious schools as well. A lot of people told me I should be a minister. I lived in such an enclosed system, that I didn't have the chance to get beyond it and see what the rest of the world had to offer. And so when I went to college, I took a double major: Theology and English. But what I learned from theology is that there are lots of closed systems in the world, each of them competing and vying for people's loyalty, attention and contributions. And as I got older and began to see more of the world, I realized that that was not the way I wanted to live my life. I eventually no longer went to the church. But it did have an impact on who I was initially.
So I can see that your initial concepts about systems thinking were borne out of that experience and that particular context. You said that you started your career teaching. Tell us a little bit about where that was in Southern California and the time when you decided to get more involved in academia at a university level?
Yes. Well, actually, in my first year out of college, I taught in a one-room schoolhouse, in the interior desert of Southern California, a place called Elsinore. And the one-room schoolhouse actually had only one room. And it was really an enjoyable experience. After that, I moved to teaching elementary schools in a more urban environment, fifth- and sixth-grade class. And then because I had the equivalent of BA in English, I then went to a boarding high school up in central California as head of the English department. But by that time, I was pretty clear that I really wanted to say in the educational domain. I love to teach the kids, I really enjoyed helping to get them to think, to express their ideas, and to develop as people. That was really a satisfying thing. My father-in-law, at the time, was a professor of Speech Communication at San Jose State University. So I ended up getting a master's degree in that there. From there, my advisor in the master's degree was a graduate of Michigan State University and strongly recommended that I apply there. And he was certainly right to do that because it was a great program.
What got you interested in networks itself as an approach, because clearly there were people in communication who were looking at it from a variety of different perspectives? Was there something about the notion of looking at communication from a network perspective that first attracted you to it?
Well, networks are about structure and structure is part of what enables and constrains what most people in social systems can do. And so the ability to identify connectivity, groupness, information flow, bottlenecks, and all kinds of other communication properties are all an integral part of analyzing networks. Now, there's another side to it: you don't want to just study network by themselves. What you want to do is study the processes that go on and how they operate in time. It's important to be able to look at both sides of what's going on.
Well, one of the things that reminds me of your emphasis on process is that you co-authored one of the first textbooks in the area of organizational communication. I imagine you intentionally titled it "Communicating and Organizing" to underscore the processional nature of both.
Yes, that's true.
Your interest in process as well as your interest in networks led you to be one of the early advocates of a systems theory approach to the study of communication. At the time, the more dominant approaches were a covering laws paradigm and a rules paradigm. Tell us what the distinctions were between these and why you felt it was important for systems theory to be a viable and a productive way of studying communication.
Yes, well, covering laws perspective had been seriously criticized by those who believed that it was too narrow a focus. Certainly, it seemed to work in the physical worlds, but not so well in the less precise activities of individual humans and their collectivities. The rules paradigm, actually, was the opposite of the covering laws paradigm, because it suggested that there were rules that people generally followed but there was little or no way to specify what constituted a rule or how to find out, or indicate, when somebody was or was not following a rule. Systems theory offered a broader, more extensive way to conceptualize and theorize about how various entities were relating to one another, through networks and other means, so that you are focused on the actual processes that are inherent in relationships, that are tied together by the communication process. So it was not just a single particular theory, but a family of theories that could be used in different ways.
And so you were involved, not only in a debate, but a series of articles laying out the pros and cons of these approaches. That sounds like a very interesting way of showcasing three important approaches at the time. How did that come about?
The actual process of how the debate came about is a little foggy in my mind. I don't really remember what happened but I do know that Steve Chaffee and I debated Chuck Berger and-
Don Cushman.
Cushman, yes. It was amazing because it occurred at the NCA conference, I believe, and it was standing room only. There were like 6-700 people in the room. I was really quite surprised that it would have that kind of attraction. In the end, Steve and I won the debate.
And so there you were, at the time, being one of the ambassadors, along with Steve Chafee, of systems approaches. And yet something that stands out in my mind is that for a person who spends a lot of time, since then and before then, focusing on very sophisticated quantitative methods to study systems, network structures, and processes, your dissertation was a purely theoretical dissertation.
Remember, I was at Michigan State. I went in having some fairly good quantitative background. My committee said to me, "Okay, we know you can count. Now what you need to do is to demonstrate that you can think." And I went off and did this theoretical paper. And in it, I examined the three types of systems: the work of von Bertalanffy, the work of Norbert Wiener, and the work of JG Miller for the living systems aspects of it. I really enjoyed writing my dissertation: the reading the discussions, and so on with friends and colleagues, the issues that were being raised. It was really a lot of fun.
And so, by the end of it, was your committee convinced that you could not just count but also think?
Well, apparently.
Well, one of the things that you have done, at least since that theoretical dissertation, is made major contributions in the field of communication research in the area of methods. And one of your earlier papers made the case that the methods that we use shape the research questions that we ask. I believe you refer to that as the "correspondence principle". Talk a little bit about that and the extent to which you think that is still relevant today.
I do think it is still relevant today. Methods have a great deal to do with what you can and cannot do. You cannot draw process inferences very well from single-point-in-time data. You cannot talk about interconnectivity if you don't have some form of network. You cannot find out the nature of relationships if you're not using the right techniques for doing that. So I think its methods are really important. There's another aspect of that, too. From a paper by Kenneth Land, in the early 1970s, where he talked about invariant transformation. He showed how the theory that you work with had to be operationalized in a way that it actually captured the essence of the theory. So, that's a form of discipline that I always tried to convey to my students in any of the methods classes that I would teach. Once you knew what it was you wanted to do, you had to make sure that at each step of the way, you were preserving the transformation that was generated by the theory. Just like in a conclusion from a syllogism, you have to be sure that the logic that was generated by the first premise is carried through by the second into the actual thing that leads to the conclusion.
And so that explains in a very naive way, why most of us were trained on things like the analysis of variance, for example. All the questions that we were interested in answering were those that could be answered through techniques like an analysis of variance. And then of course, given your interest in systems theory, one of the methods that you advocated for were things like structural equation models, where you were able to look at the interrelationship between a very large number of variables simultaneously.
That's correct. The other technique, which I also thought quite highly of, was time series analysis. One of the good things about structural equation modelling is that you could attempt to make causal inferences with cross-sectional data with a fairly complex technique. But you could also use that technique with over-time data. It enabled you to deal with a problem that cross-sectional data gave you. But it also enabled you to analyze data, if you had it that was more dynamic.
Your more recent work in the last several decades have focused on ecological perspectives and communication. Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in looking at an ecological approach to communication and how that builds upon some of your earlier intellectual scholarship?
Well, it's both ecological and evolutionary. The thing about the evolutionary perspective is that the focus is on populations and not on individuals. It also forces you to look at over-time phenomena. So, everything about ecological tends to have built into it a sense of dynamics. We published an article back in 2016, in Social Networks that we called "The Evolution of What?" In the articles, we looked at things like YouTube videos, their ability to draw viewers, and the connections that would occur between the viewers. And the interesting thing about this paper is that, in general, evolutionary processes and scholars look at the attributes of things that go on. And so they want to know about colors of eyes, levels of intelligence, and so on. We wanted to ask whether the same questions could be asked about networks. And so what we did was we got five different datasets of networks and compared them to a number of other analyses for just the attributes. And we found out that the evolutionary model worked as well on predicting the changes that occurred in the evolutionary development of networks, as it did for the attributes. I think it opens interesting possibilities for looking at the dynamics of the evolutionary growth of networks.
Your approach gave us an opportunity to see within the larger industry, which industries might be more successful than others, as well as which organizations within a certain industry might be more likely to survive as compared to others.
Yes, that's right.
While you had written that classic book, "Communicating and Organizing" back in the 70s, the world was now facing a new level of globalization, a new level of virtual technologies that allowed us to rethink the way in which we organize.
I was working with Gerry DeSanctis, at the time. She was a terrific scholar in the organizational area and we spent a lot of time talking about what it meant to be virtual and how to define what it means to be virtual. I don't think we had any idea of how virtual everything would become. I mean, ICA had two virtual conferences, forced on it by the pandemic. We put together a special issue, invited a lot of good people to write, made a call for papers. It turned out really quite interesting. The special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and the issue of Organization Science, we were able to publish both same time.
So it was quite a fascinating innovation, both in terms of being able to publish it in two different journals simultaneously, in two different disciplines. One of the things, Peter, that I really admire about your work is that throughout your career, you have had a healthy intellectual engagement with scholars from diverse areas, including critical perspectives and interpretive perspectives. Why did that happen? And what do you think are the consequences of that for the field of communication as a whole?
Well, we are a very eclectic and diverse discipline. Actually, I find it really enlightening and inspiring to listen to other really smart people articulate their views of the world and defend them. And to have them ask me difficult questions, which I may or may not be able to answer. I also think that it's healthy, for the discipline, if we respect each other's points of view and perspectives. But basically defend, as best we can, those things we believe in. In the organizational communication area, there's been a norm that has said, "As new ideas and perspectives come along, we want to make room for them." Unless there's something truly faulty with them. Let's give everyone their chance to articulate what they think are interesting ideas. Let's help them develop them. And let's basically all get along.
And it really is fascinating to see how the area of organizational communication has created an ethos of being able to have mutual respect for those who come from very different intellectual perspectives. How would you rate the field of communication, as a whole, today as compared to two decades ago, in terms of having this engagement, and if not engagement, at least respect for different perspectives, as compared to when you started out in the field?
Well, when I started out in the field, ICA was a very, very different organization. I went to my first ICA conference, I believe was in 1970 in Minneapolis, and there were only half a dozen divisions at that point in time. Today, ICA has 32 divisions and interest groups. But the bigger you get, the more diversity you get. And I think one of the big differences is really the diversity from intellectual perspective, the diversity from the people who are now from all around the globe. I think the efforts to open up the association have been working, perhaps not as quickly as we would all like, but certainly in ways that are important. And I think that your effort at creating a more global ICA is a very, very important aspect of what needs to be done and how that's being done.
Needless to say, a lot of this builds upon the work that you and your fellow past presidents of ICA have done. I recall when you were president of ICA, 1997 to 1998, globalization was a major theme that you were pushing at the time.
That's true. And I gave my presidential speech about globalization that was published in the Journal of Communication. The other thing that we did at that time is we created a global regionalization of the board of directors. That, for one reason or another, did not seem to work as well as we had hoped it would. But then other efforts have been made since then, including electing other people who represent the global interest, even though it may not be in their particular area.
You have won many awards from ICA over the years, but the one that I want to spend a little time talking about is you being a recipient of the Aubrey Fisher Mentor Award from ICA. Talk a little bit about your philosophy of mentoring, what you see, and advice that you would give other scholars as they go about trying to mentor the next generation of communication scholars.
I've always enjoyed being with really smart people. Many graduate students are really smart and will go on to become real significant leaders in the field. They're just burgeoning, very competent, accomplished people. I always saw the idea of being a mentor as something that is more than just giving advice about what classes to take while you're in grad school. Once you establish the relationship that you can give halfway decent advice, that you're willing to listen to what their issues and concerns are, that you have their best interests in mind, then usually most people that I know are very willing to continue the relationship. And I consider myself extremely lucky to have 40-45 people who have finished their doctoral degrees, that I've advised, and they've gone on to great careers.
And as one of those mentors, I know that I can speak on behalf of all of those 40 or 45 mentees that we are all incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you. As we begin to close, I have two closing questions for you. One is: as you look towards the future, how do you see the role of communication research - the trajectory for communication research - evolving, and the role of communication research vis-à-vis the other social sciences, in our efforts to address global societal challenges as well as intellectual challenges?
It's hard to predict the future, of course, but what I see happening now and what I think is going to continue to happen is we're going to have considerably more diversity in both the content and in the techniques and technologies that are used to conduct research. So now, I think it is not uncommon to see issues of diversity, issues of identity, issues of equality, becoming legitimate issues for scholarly research, whether that be critical inquiry, or interpretive inquiry, or some new brand of theory. But at the same time, I think we also are going to have increase in the sophistication of the analytical tools. I think we're gonna see that blending come along. And how that's going to work out, I don't know. But I think it's going to be an interesting ride.
My final question for you, given the number of influential structures that you have architected, what structures are you most proud of architecting?
Well, one thing I would say is that I think I've been able to have some important influence on ICA, the way the association operates and the leadership of it and the kind of activities that go on. I actually think I've had a lot of influence on the development of the Annenberg School at USC. I was very lucky to be invited to join the faculty in the early 1980s when I was perfectly happy at Michigan State on the faculty there. But I saw that there was tremendous potential at USC to build a really good program. I think I've helped do that in a variety of ways. I think the cadre of graduate students I've had over the years and worked with has been a real blessing for me. I'm really, really glad about that.
Well, we began this interview by you sharing with us that when you were a young lad, studying theology, that people were advising you to be a minister. It seems to me that that's exactly what you have been, just in the platform of being a communication scholar. Communication scholars all over the world, for several generations now, are deeply indebted to all your intellectual contributions as well as your service contributions to the field of communication. So, thank you again, Peter, for joining us today.
Thank you, Noshir, it's been really fun to do this with you.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producers are Lucia Barnum and 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!
