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 Stan Deetz. Stan Deetz is president of Interaction Design for Innovation and also professor emeritus and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder. He's the author or co-author of over 150 published essays and several books, where his research is focused on conflict management, intersector government processes, micro-practices of power and organization, and design interaction processes. He's been a senior Fulbright Fellow and as a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar, as well as past president and Fellow of the International Communication Association. Today, Stan Deetz is in conversation with Shiv Ganesh. Professor Ganesh is a professor in the Moody College at the University of Texas at Austin. And here is Shiv Ganesh.
Today, we have the distinct pleasure of listening to Professor Stan Deetz, who needs no introduction to anyone familiar with both the fields of communication studies and organizational studies. I'm excited to talk to him today about his life, his work and his views of the field, because my own connection with Professor DT goes back many, many years. In fact, he was my PhD advisor and Dennis Mumby's PhD advisor. I first met Professor Deetz in 1998 at a convention. I was so awestruck that I was meeting this leader in the field that I barely managed a word in that first conversation. I hope I'll do better today. A very, very warm welcome, Stan! Welcome to the podcast! Let's just start by engaging in some time travel. What was that work like in the 1970s, as you were coming into communication studies as a field, in terms of what were people's scholarly commitments then? What was communication studies globally like 40 - 50 years ago?
People remind me I came into the field at a time as distant from now as 1925 was for now. A lot of stuff has happened. I came into it a little strange because I came out of a very small liberal arts program and was not intending to be into communication. I only was doing work with the communication people because I was on the debate team. Of course, it was clearly considered speech and drama. At that time, the department had theater, speech pathology, and rhetoric. I had a very interesting undergraduate instructor. His own work was on listening. People don’t normally know him, Paul Keller. His work was very different. I think the life-changing thing, just to give an idea of how life was different then, in one of his classes when I was a junior, and this would have been about 1968 or so, we read two books. He didn't like textbooks any more than I liked textbooks. And so we read books. We read Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson’s Pragmatics of Human Communication, Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. As a young 20-year-old, this simply changed your life. I mean, I was a hick farm kid, coming into a world that was very, very strange to me. I was struggling with language and so forth. All of a sudden, I had two books. One that starts understanding the systemic qualities of life and the other understanding social construction. This was heartfelt. I went on to read Berger’s The Homeless Mind, because this was my personal sense of being homeless, at this point, a betwixt and between, stuck in two cultures that didn't work, in some sense. Suddenly, I had a way of understanding that. At that point, I was a pre-law student in international economics, but this wasn't very satisfying. At some point, I went and talked to Paul and I said, “I don't think I want to do what I was going to do.”. Just out of the blue, he said, “Well, my old roommate in college is chair of the Department of Communication at Ohio University. Would you be interested in going to graduate school?” I said, “I'm broke.” He said, “They'll pay you for it”. I said, “Sign me up.” It's funny because in the communication field at that time, every place was a little bit different. A lot of places were gradually coming out of rhetoric as the primary way of seeing it. Ohio University was very different because it had already understood communication as an interdisciplinary field. When I went there, I actually was planning on studying with a guy by the name of Goyer, who was actually working with NASA at the time on information systems. He wanted me to work with him because he thought my econometrics background would really help in terms of understanding information systems. That's what I went there to do. In fact, I was very good at math, so I went over and actually took graduate work in the foundations of mathematics. Next thing I know, my mind is in another place. The communication field there understood that. They quickly embraced the idea that I was doing a fully interdisciplinary program. I probably took more work in philosophy and socio- and psycholinguistics than I did in communication. It was that kind of a place. And ICA was there. I mean, nobody in ICA remembers that the headquarters of ICA was at Ohio University when I was there. This is very small, run by a very small group of people, and gradually more and more dominated by Michigan State. It was most clearly oppositional to the speech tradition and clearly within the psychological thing. At that time, if you were coming in from a social science standpoint, which I thought I was, my work and philosophy kind of disqualified me to them. You were considered a rhetorician if you did philosophy. I was doing philosophy of social science. I was looking at interpreting social science, but for me, it was actually more scientific than the kind of abstracted empiricism, what they were doing. It was a very conflictual time because there was work to maintain an identity as a social science, to position it in a very specific way, and to keep it away from, of course, the rhetorical tradition. We call it the International Association, but it really wasn't very international at that point. You step into this environment at that time, and you basically made a choice: were you a rhetorician or a social scientist.
In your work since the 1990s, you've been talking about the limitations of liberal models of democracy and representative models of democracy. In your work, you've proposed this idea of generative democracy in a number of places. I was wondering, Stan, if you could talk about that just a little bit, especially in terms of some of the dysfunctions of our current age?
Eventually in our field, many of the people in cultural studies picked up on these themes, though, they don't really get into reformation ideas. The basic idea is fairly simple. If you believe in social constructivism, liberal democracy from a start has a flaw, because your freedom to speak (if you're speaking someone else's meanings) is meaningless. The fundamental flaw of liberal democracy always is a presumption that meanings that we speak are ours and that they're somehow freely formed somewhere and the only problem is expression. Therefore, we have taken the forms of expression–access to expression–, but the whole problem is considered in communication as one of expression. For me, the problem is one of formation because if the meanings are formed under systems of inequity, then the presentation of them simply amounts that you’d be unwittingly consenting to the constructions of the powerful, which are not your own. It begins with its most fundamental flaw with the notion of the expressionist model. Instead of democracy based in the formation of meaning, rather than simply the expression of meaning, and formation of meaning takes place in corporations and all these other places, as well as mass media, which the people in the media will talk a lot about this, but we don't talk so much about it as a power formation. Even when people today talk about constitution of meaning and organizations of this communication constitution, they seem to forget power, right? They seem to forget that this thing is constructed under systems of inequity. Therefore, democracy, to work, has to be a democracy that happens before the democracy of expression. While freedom of speech is a necessary condition, it’s hardly a sufficient condition for democracy. The same thing happens with theories of representation. We've studied systems of collaboration and so forth, and representation does not guarantee creativity. Representation makes sure that people buy in or feel happy enough with it, but really, diversity and difference creates the notion of creativity. And diversity may or may not give that, and representation may or may not get that. In fact, representation most often leads to things like what happens, unfortunately, with the Sierra Club. Everytime they speak in the meeting, they're looking over their shoulders instead of talking here in the meeting openly in such a way to form a new way of thinking about a problem. So it fails in every possible way. It fails, initially, in the theory of meaning. It fails, then, in understanding how reciprocity could actually occur, given that system of meaning. It fails in the notion of what we do with conflict because conflict in a liberal democracy model simply says that if we have conflict, we make an argument. The better argument should win. If the better argument doesn't win, or we can't come to an adjudication of our differences, then we vote. The way we deal with scales is representation. We should have collaboration rather than adjudication by voting. Certainly, representation doesn't get us the requisite diversity within our meetings and sessions to give us the creative answers we need.
How, then, do we generate democracy?
I mean, we cover democracy everywhere, right? Initially, my work before organization, glommed on to this, was in families. My question at that point was how do we create democratic citizens when the most fundamental and first institution a person is born into is autocratic? How can that possibly occur, right? Even to look at the family itself as either a source of the learning of democracy (or its ultimate demise), organizations become the next part of it. What's interesting about organizations is we often think about organizations as being resistant to democracy, and so forth. We treat that resistance as if it's simply a power structure and powerful people. That's not been my experience. My experience with most organizations is they love to be more collaborative: know they'd be more successful to collaborate. They just don't know how to have meetings. The system by which they do meetings is liberal democracy, and liberal democracy cannot give you the creative answers you need, right? Fundamentally, you have to think about democracy at every stage of the game, not just the voting that takes place every four years and not simply media exposure, right? In other words, democracy, if it doesn't happen in the most basic places in everyday life, isn't going to happen. To have it happen there both requires a set of preconditions that allow for democracy and a set of skills that make that democracy productive. Otherwise, democracy becomes like faculty meetings at the best, which is dysfunctional understanding, right?
Yes, the less we say about faculty meetings, the better. Everything you've said thus far leads me to reflect on how long you've been saying this. I've heard you talk about these very themes for more than two decades. I think about some of the things that have roiled the academy in the last three or four years. Everything from how the academy deals with issues of gender, sexual violence, race, and social justice. In a sense, you've been talking about the danger of this for a while, right? Would you agree with that?
Yeah, it's been my life. Yeah.
Now that we know that these dilemmas are in front of us, how do we actually try and address them?
I think there's a number of different things that come into . First of all, one of the things that you see the academy as well as the everyday life thing doing: as soon as you fundamentally challenge their paradigm, as well as the everyday life paradigm, they put you in a box. For example, when I was first writing about democracy, which challenged the communications field’s understanding of democracy, all they wanted to talk about was first amendment rights. All of a sudden, “Oh, he's an org comm person.” The fact that he thinks organizations are a significant place, if democracy can or cannot happen, is not the issue. Now, he's org comm person, so we don't have to worry about our democratic theory anymore. We do that kind of marginalization. Even in organization studies, as soon as you introduce power as an issue, you're a critical theorist. There's a really active process taking place that protects the dominant points of view. And those dominant points of view, then, stay there as these other things now get put into other kinds of spaces. The university can't reform in some sense because as soon as you have anybody who's fairly radical, they go in a department right? Or ICA, right? As soon as you do something this interesting, you're now a new division. We have this way of dividing, separating, and placing people that really is opposed to the deep re-understanding that has to take place. When I did my presidential address, I said, the most fundamental thing we have to do with communication is stop the notion of looking at presentation–good presentation–and start looking at how people collaborate because we have a new game. The new issues are not going to be around facts. It's going to be around issues of identity. If you challenge people's identity, the facts are not going to matter. Next, we can learn how to negotiate identity differences. In fact, from the time that I wrote this to now, millions of students went through our classes, and not a single one of those classes dealt with a new collaborative society in which we could actually productively deal with our differences. We simply failed in our social mission: we weren't discipline at the period of time where this society needed something, which was to think about a fundamentally different way of dealing with our differences. Instead, we did something which is probably important. We became angry about social injustice, we became angry about all these things, and put it in everybody's face, right? If you know anything about collaborating with people, you put your anger in their face, and they don't come closer to you. They pull into their own identity and our identity politics produced its ugly cousin, right? That is identity protection in the deepest way, which now leads to an ignorance of facts. I have hundreds and hundreds of communications students. When I ask them to do a simple problem of how to make a collaborative decision in the community under stress, they have no clue. Not one of those was ever taught in coursework–anything about how you help a community reach a positive decision. The best we do is deliberation, but deliberation, as we practice in our field, is all done under liberal democratic models.
In your critique of the discipline or the field, if you will, as continuing to focus on what you call produced identity conflict. Is that a fair representation? Is there anything more you would like to say about what these big intellectual questions that we need to grapple with actually are?
I don't want to characterize it simply as identity politics is a bad thing like a Sierra Club. Thank God their club helps me get at the table. I'm not sure I always want them at the table. Thank God, people are doing identity politics because it's gotten the issue on the table. The issue is, where do we go from there. In other words, have we done the job of giving the kind of positive responses, giving people the types of skills and understanding to take to make the next moves. We've been much better at critique, we've been much better at outrage than we've been in terms of getting our hands dirty, and actually moving forward on some of these issues. When I was asked at one point to reform the group discussion class, at Colorado, I said, “You understand if I do this, what I have an interest in is to try to figure out how we can get that many students engaged in a model of democracy.” And so we did deliberations and dialogues around controversial issues in the community. The students walked out of that and said, “I did not believe that we had the capacity to deal with these issues.” We do, but to deal with them at capacity means getting a lot of people on the ground to help people start finding ways to do these things. That's a goal I have for the field: that the field actually takes seriously its responsibility and look seriously at conflicts. You can't keep doing what we do, which is every time you get a new concept, you call it a “theory.” It's not a theory because you've got a concept. A theory means you have an organized way of understanding the world, which includes not only a system analysis, but also a system of change, and an intervention and how you actually would engage in doing that.
How would the field change in terms of us being able to deal with the kind of deep processual issues that you think we need to do to engage with? How would that change of focus come about? How would that shift work? Why do you think it has been such an obstacle in the first place?
The number of obstacles are, of course, immense. One is, obviously, the journal system rewards a particular kind of scholarship. The endless revise and resubmit systems we have now do not foster good use of time. In the end, the A journals have a tremendous distorting effect. We really need to rethink how we do these things. I've worked with some of the people and a couple universities in Canada, where they've actually been more policy centered. They can actually begin to say, this is what engaged scholarship looks like, and this is how we reward it. That's different than rewarding people that paint or people that play in orchestras or other things. We simply need to have a broader reward system, so people are not punished or have to do, on the side, these activities because the primary emphasis is on a very specific point, number of journals, most of which are not interesting and do not deal with big questions. They're very repetitive in terms of how they work. You have to start at that level. We have to change an attitude. Engaged work is not applied work. I think we quickly collapse one to the other. There's reasons why often we don't think of applied work as necessarily having the same intellectual problem, though, certainly, the sciences and medicine and others clearly see that translational research is very important. We need to see that too. We also need to think more deeply about engagement in the sense of this is not simply taking a concept and applying it to a community. This is a way of helping the community think through what the problem is, in which we learn about the problem and they learn about the problem in that interaction. That type of thing has to actually be rewarded.
Would you say that that's part of this larger crisis of what counts as knowledge in the first place and how we act on it?
That's right. The university system, always, in some sense, over rewarded knowledge. It truly believed that the knowledge would get you out of these things. It didn't understand that there's a complex set of things: that knowledge is one piece of the things that we negotiate, that we also negotiate identities. We also negotiate our social order. We also negotiate the kinds of affective responses. There's a whole bunch of things that get negotiated. We can't leave knowledge to be the enlightenment, and these other things hang on just as tradition, as if knowledge can now overcome tradition. We have to understand that enlightenment has to take place across these elements, that enlightenment is not a knowledge issue. Enlightenment is about the very understanding of what identities are possible, how those come to be understood and constructed, how they're chosen, and what feelings are possible within a society. In other words, we have to understand that enlightenment has a much bigger job. Admittedly, it did a very important job at its time. It also created a kind of elitism that naturally would have finally a public response against it.
I hear you talking about this, and I do see places in this broad field of communication studies where it seems to me that those very things are happening, whether or not it's praxis as knowledge with different ways of writing different kinds of engagement with different groups of stakeholders. However, it doesn't seem to be happening in the unified way in which you think it ought to happen. Is that a fair characterization?
Yeah, there are very few departments that have taken this on. I think, Kevin Barge at Texas A&M. I mean, here's a person who actually committed to it, has hired some faculty to do it, and has rewarded supportive faculty who have done it. There are significant places like that. There are individuals I can give you, almost every department has somebody in it doing these things, and (more often) they're tolerated rather than rewarded. I do think it takes more than hoping that we spread our spores and the mushrooms pop up here and there, right. It really takes a sense about getting a commitment to it, and understanding that commitment to joint things is not anti democratic. A joint commitment to something is, in fact, the outcome of the best democracy. I taught for years at Rutgers, and taught for years in Colorado, and I've never had a community of scholars that will allow me to have my graduate students have sufficient background to do this. Communication departments aren't filled, even in the best graduate programs with people who have a deep and big enough background to prepare students to understand the bigger questions. It's a matter of demanding something more of us than this kind of ecumenical sense about which we allow mediocracy as a support democracy rather than the notion of excellence as being what democracy can be.
Since this podcast is called Architects of Communication Scholarship, looking back now, what would you say you have built?
I would, even going back to the democracy book, look at that book as a very serious attempt to perform a full theory of communication, a concept about how meanings are formed, how democracy works, how this institution works. I take some pride in that level of thing, and it was able to help form some of the issues in terms of critical management studies throughout the world as well as to do some things in the communication field. I think it's a foundation. I think by bringing contemporary social philosophy into the field as a social science, the kind of critical hermeneutic tradition into the field as a social science is something I take some pride in. I don't know what the legacy of that is. I don't know if the legs have been very far. I think there's some good foundations in our field for lots of things. I'm not sure that we're building on them. I don't even think our students read back very far. I think they read some contemporary literature' in the field, and the textbooks, and the journal. I don't think they read back to say, “What is really foundational verses what simply passed?” I hope I did that. I'm very proud of all my students. The one thing I'm most proud of is, I think all my students are great teachers. I've got a couple that are distinguished scholars. The lasting contribution I really want to make here: my foundation is passion. That it should be a passionate place. The research should be passionate. It should be about something bigger than us, something that we believe in. If I could do anything to the field, or to the university, would be toput passion back in it. Not the kind of passion, “Oh, I love doing this. Therefore, I'm gonna do it.” The kind of passion that says I am a citizen of the world. I have been given gifts, opportunities, and privileges that no one else really gets. It is my obligation, my duty, and my passion to do something with that.
Stan, I think you have done that, and so much more. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I think the listeners of the series will as well. It’s been a pleasure.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producers are Daniel Christain 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.
