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 Howie Giles. Howie is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. He is best known for his creation of speech accommodation theory, later known as communication accommodation theory. He served as editor of Human Communication Research and was the founding co-editor of both the Journal of Language and Social Psychology and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. Howie is a former president and Fellow of the International Communication Association and received its inaugural Steven H. Chaffee Career Achievement Award. He is the author of 31 books, and his work has been cited over 57,000 times. Today, Howie is in conversation with Jake Harwood, a Professor of Communication at the University of Arizona. Here’s Jake.
Hello! Today it's my pleasure to interview Howard or Howie Giles. Welcome, Howie! I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to talk to you about your contributions to the field of communication.
I'm honored to be selected as an attributed architect and personally thrilled that you are my interviewer.
So, Howie, this podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship. Working with that metaphor, one of the things that you have built is communication accommodation theory. I wonder if you can talk a little about the early origins of that theory. Do you remember what sparked the idea?
I certainly do, Jake. Communication accommodation theory is my pet CAT, if you like. It goes back many years when I was born in Cardiff, Wales, which has its own particular accent, in fact, so novel that it's studied a number of times in sociolinguistics. I have that very accent and it goes a bit like this, and you have a few nonverbals to go along with it if you're a male. However, I loved rugby and used to go to rugby games in Cardiff itself. My accent changed fairly dramatically to the local regional accent, which is something like this. So I recognized this in myself in my adolescence and thought, “Geez, why am I doing this? I don't think other people do it so much.”Then I went to the University College of North Wales in Bangor. And they have a different accent up there. And it was a little bit like this. And there's not much mouth movement. And it's very somber. So I accommodated to that. Fellow students went Welsh, but they were from London. And they talked rather much like this: very standard received pronunciation, as they call it. So I became quadri-dialectal and this just fascinated me. I was about to go to grad school in Bristol, in social psychology, and I searched the literature. There wasn't much in there. What there was in sociolinguistics, from the very famous Bill Labov, who studied pronunciation in New York City, and he attributed changes to context norms. I thought it was a much richer phenomenon than that in terms of its antecedents, processes, and outcomes. And so, I began my PhD on that very topic, trying to find out its universality and find out, ultimately or not, we mostly all do this depending on the context and the mechanisms attending it.
So, CAT has grown into really one of the most widely cited and used frameworks in communication. It's also been cited extensively in linguistics, psychology, health sciences, and probably other disciplines I'm not even aware of.
Yeah, there are a few others that are interesting, one being biological and marine sciences, where there's a growing literature on communication and accommodation between various different species, wolves, birds, and whales. It also appears in the discipline of IT with accommodation in computer-mediated communication and also human-machine interactions then also, we've introduced CAT into the discipline of criminal justice.
Do you have any explanation for the broad appeal of this theory across so many disciplines or areas of study?
There are more than 20 satellite models that have emerged and spawned by CAT: bilingualism, tourism, acculturation, immigrant studies. Why their universal appeal? I think other disciplines don't cite us very often or as much as they should do. I've had the temerity with colleagues to push applying CAT variants into them. Maybe it's not so much the appeal of accommodation per se, as highlighting communication’s relevance in dentistry, foreign language, learning, counseling, etc. So put another way, CAT has perhaps been more vigorously applied by theorists in other domains.
Your work extends beyond accommodation theory. It spanned a huge variety of contexts domains, just to name a few: multilingualism, police-community relations, aging, and intergenerational communication. You've published work on humor, music, dance, and many other areas. I'm curious, are there particular themes or undercurrents that you see as connecting those diverse areas?
Yes, I think there are, for many of them. While my bread and butter is CAT, I self-identify as an intergroup communication scholar. What binds my CAT and my non-CAT work? There are intergroup undercurrents of discrimination (-isms, social change) when group and multiple group identities become salient, and how communication practices are fundamental to creating these social-psychological constructs in the first place, and social divisions that we need to begin to start tearing down from our discipline.
Let's talk a little about your work with the police. You were a reserve lieutenant or leftenant and detective with the Santa Barbara Police Department for many years. You've worked as a negotiator on their hostage negotiation crisis team. I understand you've received numerous outstanding service awards for your work with the police. And you did all this while you were a professor?
I had cops on both sides of my family. One side was Uncle Bill, who was returning to Cardiff, an officer in Tremorfa, which is an interesting area that has a pub on each corner. He turned down being a desk sergeant because he liked to be in the field. The field, for him, was to go to a pub for his entire shift. He became known there and became part of the community. And community-oriented policing is a buzzword now, particularly in times we have troubles with policing. I think he was one of the first people ever to be a community-oriented policeman. Now, you can't go to a pub as a cop anymore, but if there was a problem in the pub, he’d deal with it immediately. So that intrigued me, and in fact, I went to the Bristol constabulary and tried to join them. They told me I was too short, and I was too young. I was, I think, 32 at the time. Interesting enough, I retired from being a cop twice that age than I was thought to be too young in England, which introduces notions of ageism in lifespan issues. While I'd studied many intergroup settings, I'd never tackled police-community issues. I believe that the essence of intergroup is par excellence in police-community relations. So particularly in the United States, when officers wear their gun belts, tasers, and jackets, they're fairly formidable and very intergroup in terms of their appearance. To assist this new interest, I attended a citizens academy when I came to UCSB at the local police department, SBPD. I was enthralled by the work, and one of the things you had to do was going to the shooting range as part of this course, which scared me coming from Britain where you don't see guns. Cops didn't, at that time, wear guns. So I had to shoot. One bullet went into the ceiling. But the next two, as it happened, hit the bullseye. And the instructor said, “You should think about becoming a reserve.” And I thought, oh, if you're going to study other cultures, and cop culture is a culture, let me see if I can become a cop. I was lucky to pass all the testing and police academy, and only about 3% do that. So that is the background to how that occurred and led to all sorts of research from that–the blending of two aspects of my life, which has become my academic life, the planning of police community, communication and relations, and intergroup communication.
How has the practical work of being a police officer influenced your understanding of either communication processes or intergroup relations?
In many ways, when working on the street as an officer, you have to deal with situations in milliseconds. You don't have time to step back and muse about how communication affects this because you just have to get on with the job. But there are certain instances that have surprised me and drawn attention to communication theory. One example was when I was out on our fiesta with the officer I first partnered with. This was 10 years in. At that time, I was receiving a lot of comments about my age, and studying intergenerational communication, I said to this officer, “Do you think I should hang up my belt now? Do you think I'm getting too old?”And she answered, “That is so silly. This is a sign that they respect you in some ways. They'll look for things you're obviously sensitive about and go for the jugular and make a joke about it.” I've been writing about ageism for a long time now. This is a totally different view of it. This actually did affect my work and radically broaden my horizons on ageism and acknowledges very positive aspects of stereotyping (sometimes) in other domains. However, I noted, when I was in a situation that was problematic with another officer and had time to contemplate communication issues, more often than not, I would find it, difficult to think of the communication theory that would solve this dilemma, sometimes dangerous dilemma. So in fact, sometimes officers would do things I could not predict. You would think this is the wrong thing to do, but it would be extremely successful. We have a lot to learn from studying, police communication practices at the ground level of how they do things, why they do this, why it's successful, why it's not successful, etc.
I suspect there's a huge body of implicit communication skills for people who work in a high-risk situation like a police officer have. That would be wonderful to draw that out.
It's common knowledge that 80% or more of police work is actually communicating and accommodating (or not) to different aspects of society. And there's not much of that in the police academy training. It's more physical defense. Our agency does interview new recruits and looks to see if they have communication skills. They are selected in our agency for their ability to deal with different situations effectively. I think that's why our agency is pretty successful and doesn't have many problems.
I'm interested in how you balanced being a member of the organization while also doing research on police-community relations more broadly. It's sort of a participant-observation thing that you were involved in. Did you keep those two roles distinct or did they merge?
I wanted them to merge. But it was very difficult. And now, I am merging them with a lieutenant in our agency, who is now a PhD student of mine. I was never allowed to study communication at my own agency. That was a no-no. I had to go outside to other agencies to do this. Part of this is that cops are very wary of academics infiltrating and writing critical books about them. And this in sense is a very intergroup situation. It took many years for me to appreciate the culture and become accepted as part of the group. This lieutenant and I are working with a criminologist. We're able to use that discipline and all its resources to meld these two areas together, which I think is very important, particularly in the timeliness of George Floyd. Officers now are retiring much earlier. When I was recruiting, there were 300 of us at one point. The other day, only three turned up.
So your work has been very influential in the field. The pure quantity of stuff that you have produced is notable. Some listeners to this podcast, particularly junior scholars, might appreciate some insights you have on how to be that productive. How do you manage numerous simultaneous projects and see them all through to completion?
I think academically I'm a multi-tasker. My advisor used to say to me early in my grad career, “You pogo stick your way around life.” I found that almost offensive. So I like to think about myself as a juggler. I like to juggle many balls in the air. One can appreciate some cross-fertilization between what seemed initially to be very disparate projects. So there's a benefit to that. Of course, there's an optimal number of balls you can throw into the air before they plummet down on you. I've had, also, the tenacity not to get dismayed and disillusioned when work is rejected. And it is kind of a debilitating process, particularly if you take this personally, even though the work may be very good. And so rather than being dismayed and seeing it in terms of rejection, I've always thought about it as providing invaluable feedback, where ultimately, after a series of serious revisions, the work is massively improved and hits somewhere, maybe a boutique journal. I think if it hits somewhere and presents a real message, it will be cited. For instance, my first communication article in ‘73, was published in Anthropological Linguistics, which is not considered a mainstream article in communication, but it is one of my biggest citations. And so I say, get the word out there. Don't be dismayed. Don't see it as rejection. As a journal editor, I do not use the word with authors as rejection. I say non-acceptance. Not unrelatedly, I remember the late Bob Hopper at a conference, and he had a marvelous paper. I sent it out to reviews, and I had two reviews come back. They trashed it. Why do we need to trash someone's work? What are the processes underlying that? So I thought, I wonder whether my own views of quality are off base. So I sent it to another two reviewers who rejected it. So that's four now. I was so committed to the fact that this had something to say that I sent it out to two scholars whose views I hugely respected. Came back, same thing. As a new editor, I felt more dependent on my reviewers than I do now. So I reluctantly had to reject it. A few years later, I found out it appeared and is now one of the most cited papers in our discipline. So I say to students, “Don't be disillusioned. Think: I'm getting valuable feedback here.”
Yeah, it's good advice. You're also an incredibly productive mentor. You have more than 30 PhD students completed or in progress. Are there things you learned about mentoring from other people early in your career that helped you guide so many students through the doctorate degree?
Yes, I think there are. I was lucky enough, besides Henri Tajfel, to have another giant of a mentor. That was Wally Lambert, who was, I would argue, the pioneer of language and social psychology and communication. I was lucky enough to be a postdoc with him for two years. When first working with him, he gave me a paper to co-review. I thought, this is great honor to share this with him and I thought, oh, this has got holes in it. So I was interested in his views, and I didn't give him mine at that time. I said, “What did you think about that paper?” And he sat back with his pipe and thought for a few seconds, and he told me, “I've been thinking about this for many days. This is not the greatest paper ever seen, but they poured themselves into this work. I've got to be constructive. I got to promote them, continuing to do improved work as such.” And this kind of, “Whoa!” So I went back and changed my review dramatically. I try to pass this stance on to grads when they review other people's work and when they comment on others' work in colloquia with their peers and other faculty that benevolence and empathy is important it's a co-ownership of a project. It's mutual negotiation in a supportive way. Another fundamental thing I learned when I first came to UCSB was I was given notice a student was floundering on her master's. We had to get it going very quickly. She kind of liked my work. So she did a masters that followed from my early work. She then started floundering again when doing her dissertation. I said, “Don't do what I do, or what I tell you to do.” I encouraged her to look for issues that she had a passion for which is necessary for us to persevere through academia in general, let alone the dissertation process. She was shocked that I gave her this autonomy. And I was shocked that she was shocked. I was thinking this says a lot about us, that we want people to follow our own thinking. No, we learn from our students. It's interdependence. And she came up with some very compelling questions. And immediately after graduating, got a job at Stanford. And so this, for me, was an important signal that you do what drives you.
All right, we're gonna close with a couple of big-picture questions. So the first question is, what do you think are the big intellectual questions for communication scholars to address in the next decade?
In the general scheme of things as, again, a lifespan scholar, I've been intrigued by the meaning of life. Hopefully, one scratches the surface, but life is very fragile. It's finite. Sometimes it ends in youth. Sometimes it ends later in life, and tragically, we feel physical and sometimes cognitive changes over time that can be debilitating. I remember, as a young kid, my mother saying, “All age is a tragedy.”My dad would say at the end of his life, “Howard, the old grow old.” So these are large-scale existential questions that I think communication ought to orient itself about. Given my policing adventures, I feel intergroup communication has much to light up the road to more harmonious police-public relations that could yield a safer society. If I funnel back down from the larger scale to CAT where we started communication accommodation theory, a thorny issue for many decades that has not been resolved, is when do communication and other communication practices assume conscious awareness? And under what circumstances are they, in contrast, under the cognitive radar as more automatic processes?
The way your parents talked about old age, reminds me of how many people I know talk about old age. And I'm fascinated by that construction of what old age is. Finally, what do you think are the big societal challenges and opportunities where communication scholarship can make a contribution?
In the moment in the USA, the midterm elections and primaries, there's a lot of media attention given to what concerns the voter vis-a-vis politicians. We think here about economy, inflation, mass murderers in schools, gun control, causes and dire effects of homelessness in so many of our urban communities, the backtracking of 50 years of law and civil rights, the threats to democracy, just to name a few. Yet, if one were to pore through the pages of communication journals, one doesn't see any of these addressed. And maybe we shouldn't be just pawns of public opinion, but I think this puts us aside and distances ourselves from larger society. I believe we need to look for or address common communication threads between these various issues and events and articulate some compelling research questions arising from them if we're going to increase the societal value of our discipline.
This has been really a great conversation. I've enjoyed it so much. Your scholarship and your mentorship are justifiably legendary. And so thank you on behalf of all of the lives in our discipline that you've touched.
Thank you so much, Jake, thank you ICA.
Cheers
This episode of architects of communication scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network, and is sponsored by the School of Communication at pod and Kong Baptist University. This episode was produced by Dominic Bonelli, our executive producer is Devonte Brown. Our production consultant is Nick song. The theme music is by humans when for more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening
