In the introduction to this section on group communication, I refer to Harvard social psychologist Robert Bales’ work to categorize comments made in smallgroup discussions. On the basis of his research with zero-history problem-solving groups in his lab, Bales discovered that dramatizing was a significant type of communication that often fostered group cohesiveness.1 The late University of Minnesota communication professor Ernest Bormann picked up on Bales’ finding and undertook a more extensive study of newly formed groups to examine leadership emergence, decision making, norms, cohesiveness, and a number of other features of group life.2
Similar to Bales, Bormann and his team of colleagues observed that group members often dramatized events happening outside the group, things that took place at previous meetings, or what might possibly occur among them in the future. Sometimes these stories fell flat and the discussion moved in a different direction. But at other times group members responded enthusiastically by adding on to the story or chiming in with their own matching narratives. When the drama was enhanced in this way, members developed a common group consciousness and drew closer together. On the basis of extensive case studies, Bormann set forth the central explanatory principle of symbolic convergence theory (SCT): Sharing group fantasies creates symbolic convergence.3
When she read about Bormann’s theory, Maggie had no difficulty illustrating this core claim. Two weeks before my communication course began, she served as a student leader in the “Wheaton Passage” program for new freshmen that’s held at a camp in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. One of the stated goals of this optional offering is to build intentional community. In her application log, Maggie wrote of unplanned communication that achieved this end.
Cabin 8 was the rustic, run-down cabin that my group of Passage students was assigned to live in for the week. My co-leader and I decked the cabin out with decorations by hanging Christmas lights and origami doves, yet there was no escaping the massive holes in the screens, sticky messes in the drawers, and the spiders residing in the rafters. The night students arrived, we walked our group of girls past the brand new cabins, arrived at our old cabin, and presented Cabin 8— their home for a week. Needless to say, they were less than pleased. The next day as our group was trekking to our morning activity, one of the girls brought up what she thought the perfect cabin would look like. Others jumped in with their ideas. For 10 minutes, each girl contributed something to the discussion of the fantasy cabin. Hot tubs, screened-in porches, soft carpet, lounge chairs, and a glass roof for stargazing were all mentioned as features in their ideal cabin. Looking back on this experience, I see how this shared fantasy played a role in our cabin bonding. As the week went on, our dream cabin became a running joke within our group that helped students develop a sense of closeness—what they deemed “hardcoreness.” While living in the crummy cabin, they frequently revisited the image of the ideal cabin they created in their conversation.
DRAMATIZING MESSAGES: CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS OF THERE-AND-THEN
Dramatizing message
Imaginative language by a group member describing past, future, or outside events; creative interpretations of thereand-then.
Many comments in task-oriented discussion groups offer lines of argument, factual information, members’ opinions, and suggestions for how the group should proceed. That’s the kind of member contribution Hirokawa and Gouran’s functional perspective values (see Chapter 18). Advocates of rational discussion believe it’s usually disruptive and counterproductive when someone cracks a joke, describes a movie, or starts talking about plans for the upcoming weekend. Not so for Bormann. SCT classifies these examples and many other forms of speaking as dramatizing messages and believes that conversations about things outside of what’s going on right now can often serve the group well.
A dramatizing message is one that contains imaginative language such as a pun or other wordplay, double entendre, figure of speech (e.g., metaphor, simile, personification), analogy, anecdote, allegory, fable, narrative, or other creative expression of ideas. Whatever the form, the dramatizing message describes events occurring somewhere else and/or at some time other than the here-and-now.4 Notice first that a group member’s words must paint a picture or call to mind an image in order to be labeled a dramatizing message. A report that the Dow Jones stock average rose 500 points can be important news for members, but it’s not dramatizing in the way that Bormann used the term. Second, a vivid message would qualify as dramatizing if it either describes something outside the group or portrays an event that has happened within the group in the past or might happen to the group in the future. Comments that have no imagery or those that refer to what’s currently going on in the group make up the bulk of most group discussions. They aren’t dramatizing messages.
When Maggie’s girls started to verbally construct their ideal cabin, they were using imaginative language to talk about what they’d like to see in the future, probably wishing it would magically appear that night. If in a darker tone one of the girls expressed her hope that someone would set fire to the cabin before they returned, that message would also be dramatizing. But if the group of girls sat around in the cabin grousing about the spiders, mosquitoes, and sticky goo in the drawers, those comments would be about the here-and-now and wouldn’t be defined as dramatizing messages.
Why is this distinction so important to Bormann and SCT advocates? Because dramatizing messages are interpretive. They aren’t knee-jerk responses to experiences of the moment. “Dramatizing accounts of past occurrences artistically organize what are usually more complex, ambiguous, and chaotic experiences.”5 They help the speaker, and sometimes the listeners, make sense out of a confusing situation or bring some clarity to an uncertain future. Whether or not other group members connect with their imagery, dramatizing messages are creative interpretations of the there-and-then.
FANTASY CHAIN REACTIONS: UNPREDICTABLE SYMBOLIC EXPLOSIONS
Some people use the term fantasy to refer to children’s literature, sexual desire, or things “not true.” Bormann, however, reserved the term fantasy for dramatizing messages that are enthusiastically embraced by the whole group. Most dramatizing messages don’t get that kind of reaction. They often fall on deaf ears, or group members listen but take a ho-hum attitude toward what was said. Of course, an embarrassing silence or a quick change of subject makes it obvious that the dramatizing message has fallen flat. There may even be group members who openly oppose what was said. Yet as Bormann noted, “Some dramatizing messages cause a symbolic explosion in the form of a chain reaction in which members join in until the entire group comes alive.”6 He described what he had seen when a fantasy chains out in this way:
The tempo of the conversation would pick up. People would grow excited, interrupt one another, blush, laugh, forget their self-consciousness. The tone of the meeting, often quiet and tense immediately prior to the dramatizing, would
“Pardon us, Harrison, if the board fails to share your enthusiasm for the foliage up in Darien.” © Jack Ziegler/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com become lively, animated, and boisterous, the chaining process, involving both the verbal and nonverbal communication, indicating participation in the drama.7
Fantasy chain A symbolic explosion of lively agreement within a group in response to a member’s dramatizing message.
A concrete example of a fantasy chain and its results may be helpful. University of Kentucky communication professor Alan DeSantis asks us to picture a group of Kentucky-born, middle-aged white guys sitting around a cigar store smoking hand-rolled imported cigars. As the topic shifts from college basketball to the risk of smoking, the owner tells the story of a heart surgeon who came into the shop after having been on duty for 36 hours. After lighting up, the doctor blew out a big mouthful of smoke and said, “This is the most relaxed I have felt in days. Now how can that be bad for you?”8
Whether or not the doctor really said this isn’t the issue. Symbolic convergence theory is concerned with the group’s response to the tale. In this case the patrons chuckle in appreciation, nod in agreement, or say “You’ve got it!” to punctuate the narrative. Some vie to tell their own stories that dismiss the harm of cigar smoking, a pastime that they consider a benign hobby. Bormann said that we can spot a fantasy chain through a common response to the imagery. DeSantis, who was a cigar-smoking participant-observer among the shop’s regular customers, affirms that the group’s response to the owner’s story paralleled Bormann’s description above.
Symbolic convergence researchers have had little success predicting when a fantasy will ignite and trigger a chain reaction. They’ve found there’s a better chance of a fantasy chaining out when the group is frustrated (as were Maggie’s girls) or when they are bogged down in an effort to solve a thorny problem. Also, members with rhetorical skill seem to have a better chance of providing the spark, but there’s no guarantee that their words will ignite others. And even when a skillful image-maker does spark a fantasy chain, he or she has little control over where the conversation will go. Fantasy chains seem to have a life of their own. But once a fantasy chain catches fire, symbolic convergence theory predicts that the group will converge around a fantasy theme.
FANTASY THEMES—CONTENT, MOTIVES, CUES, TYPES
Fantasy
The creative and imaginative shared interpretation of events that fulfills a group’s psychological or rhetorical needs.
Fantasy theme
Content of the fantasy
that has chained out
within a group; SCT’s
basic unit of analysis.
Bormann’s technical definition of fantasy is “the creative and imaginative shared interpretation of events that fulfills a group’s psychological or rhetorical needs.”9 Think of a fantasy theme as the content of the dramatizing message that successfully sparks a fantasy chain. As such, it’s the theory’s basic unit of analysis. Because fantasy themes reflect and create a group’s culture, all SCT researchers seek to identify the fantasy theme or themes that group members share. When spotted, fantasy themes are consistently ordered and always interpretive, and they inevitably put the group’s slant on things. That is, fantasy themes act as a rhetorical means to sway doubters or naysayers.
When a fantasy chains out among core patrons in the cigar store, we would expect to see that same theme run throughout multiple narratives—à la Seinfeld. Perhaps the hero of every man’s account is a famous cigar smoker who lived into old age without ill effects—George Burns, Winston Churchill, or Fidel Castro. Or maybe each image reflects a meddling government bureaucrat who wants to limit their right to enjoy a cigar in a public place. Along with examples of long-lived smokers, group fantasies might focus on the difference between cigars and cigarettes, safety in moderation, inconsistent scientific findings concerning
Symbolic cue
An agreed-upon trigger that sets off group members to respond as they did when they first shared the fantasy.
Fantasy type A cluster of related fantasy themes; greater abstractions incorporating several concrete fantasy themes that exist when shared meaning is taken for granted.
cancer, the greater risks of everyday living, and the health benefits of relaxation that come from smoking a good cigar. All of these fantasies have the same basic theme—cigar smoking is safe.
Bormann suggested that group members’ meanings, emotions, motives, and actions are apparent in their fantasy themes. We can see all four of these in DeSantis’ description of the angst that the core group of patrons experienced at the premature death of their friend Greg. Like the rest of the store’s regulars who sat around smoking, Greg had scoffed at the health risks of their practice. Now they were confronted with the sobering fact of his fatal heart attack. Within a week of the funeral, however, his smoking buddies had constructed a verbal collage of images depicting Greg’s stressful lifestyle. The store owner voiced their consensus: “Smoking had nothing to do with his death. He lived, drank and played hard and it took a toll on him at the end.”10 Meaning: Hard living killed Greg. Emotion: Reduction of fear, relief. Motive: Desire to smoke with buddies. Action: Not
going to quit.
Bormann and symbolic convergence theory advocates have found that many fantasy themes are indexed by a symbolic cue. A symbolic cue is “an agreed-upon trigger that sets off the group members to respond as they did when they first shared the fantasy.”11 It could be a code word, nonverbal gesture, phrase, slogan, inside joke, bumper sticker, or any shorthand way of re-establishing the full force of shared fantasy. In the Kentucky smoke shop where these fantasy themes were voiced, any mention of criticism of cigar smoking from family or friends was the cue that set off a new round of protest among store regulars. Their emotional reaction was captured on a T-shirt sold at the store that satirized the Surgeon General’s cautionary statement: “Warning—Harassing me about my smoking can be hazardous to your health.”12
The meaning of a given fantasy theme is quite specific. Because clusters of related fantasy themes sometimes surface again and again in different groups, Bormann found it helpful to have a label to classify this phenomenon when it occurs. He used the term fantasy type to describe these well-worn symbolic paths. Fantasy types are “greater abstractions incorporating several concrete fantasy themes” and they exist “when shared meaning is taken for granted.”13 The cigar store group’s fantasy theme of family and friends criticizing their smoking could be considered part of a larger “get-off-my-case” fantasy type. Perhaps that’s a fantasy type that you and your friends have drawn upon when talking about your lifestyle, even if you’ve never smoked a cigar. Or students at your school may share stock fantasy types about Saturday night parties, the food on campus, professors who never seem to be in their offices, or the guy who always bails out at the last minute on a group project.
SYMBOLIC CONVERGENCE: GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS AND OFTEN COHESIVENESS
The discussion of dramatizing messages, fantasy chains, and fantasy themes has dealt with the first part of SCT’s core principle: Sharing group fantasies creates symbolic convergence. We’re now ready to look at what that sharing creates— symbolic convergence. For Bormann, symbolic convergence meant the
way in which “two or more private symbol worlds incline toward each other, come more closely together, or even overlap.”14 As those worlds intersect, group members develop a unique group consciousness. No longer do members think in terms of Symbolic convergence Two or more private symbol worlds incline toward each other, come more closely together, or even overlap; group consciousness, cohesiveness.
I, me, and mine. As symbolic overlap takes place, they begin to think and speak about we, us, and ours.
Do shared fantasies really cause this group transformation? Bormann insisted that they do. Some limited commonality of words and images may naturally occur when group members interact often enough over a long period of time. But the process is accelerated and extended way beyond what otherwise might happen when members participate in one or more fantasy chains that create joint fantasy themes. Bormann used a variety of terms to portray the effect of group consciousness—common ground, meeting of the minds, mutual understanding, groupiness, common social reality, and empathic communion.
Once a group experiences symbolic convergence, Bormann suggested that it’s important for members to memorialize their group consciousness with a name and recorded history (saga) that recalls moments when fantasies chained out. He did that with his U of M colleagues who met in the Bormann home every Wednesday night to discuss the ideas that make up symbolic convergence theory. They called themselves the Turtle Racers—presumably based on an illustrated poster with the caption “Behold the turtle who makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” The image of a turtle race seemed doubly appropriate to their history of theory building when Bormann described the work going forward in fits and starts. Symbolic convergence usually results in heightened group cohesiveness— members attracted to each other and sticking together through thick and thin. But not always. Bormann regarded symbolic convergence as usually a necessary but not sufficient cause of cohesiveness.
Groups that do little fantasizing are seldom highly attractive and cohesive. Such groups tend to be boring and ordinary. The cohesive groups have usually done considerable fantasizing, but not all groups that fantasize a lot are rewarding and cohesive. The fantasies that chain may contribute to creating a social reality that is warm, friendly and hard working, that provides the group with a strong identity and self image, and that gives members a sense of purpose and meaning for their group’s work. On the other hand, the fantasies may develop a group climate that is fascinating, frustrating, and punishing.15
Bormann went on to say that fantasy themes in those negative groups are riddled with conflict and that the humor expressed tends to be satire, ridicule, or sarcasm. I was in such a group my sophomore year of college, and he was right—it was fascinating. Fortunately I had enough sense to get out.
RHETORICAL VISION: A COMPOSITE DRAMA SHARED BY A RHETORICAL COMMUNITY
Rhetorical vision
A composite drama that
catches up large groups
of people into a common
symbolic reality.
Up to this point in the chapter, my description and illustration of symbolic convergence theory has focused on shared fantasies in small-group settings.
That’s where SCT was spawned. But early in the theory’s development, the Turtle Racers discovered that shared fantasies weren’t confined to a small-group context. As Bormann explained, “Fantasies that begin in small groups often are worked into public speeches, become picked up by mass media and ‘spread out across larger publics.’”16 Once attuned to the basic concepts of SCT, these scholars spotted swirling batches of related fantasy themes and types in all sorts of communication texts. Bormann coined the term rhetorical vision to designate “a composite drama that catches up large groups of people into a common symbolic reality.”17 He called the wide-ranging body of people who share that reality a rhetorical community.
The majority of research conducted using SCT has been aimed at capturing the rhetorical visions of dispersed rhetorical communities and figuring out how their communication created their unified fantasies. Researchers don’t have the benefit of sitting in a room with the whole community while waiting for a fantasy to chain out as evidence of a fantasy theme. So Bormann and his colleagues developed a procedure called fantasy theme analysis to discover fantasy themes and rhetorical visions that have already been created.
Fantasy Theme Analysis
A type of rhetorical criticism used to detect fantasy themes and rhetorical visions; the interpretive
methodology of SCT.
Fantasy theme analysis is a specific type of rhetorical criticism that’s built on two basic assumptions. First, people create their social reality—a premise shared by many interpretive theorists (see Chapters 5, 6, 12, and 13). Second, people’s meanings, motives, and emotions can be seen in their rhetoric. So when a dispersed community embraces the same rhetorical vision, that’s reality for them. They aren’t pretending.
A rhetorical critic using fantasy theme analysis looks for recurring fantasy themes in the text. If found, the critic should then discern if these shared fantasies are woven together into a rhetorical vision. In addition to using the basic SCT concepts already discussed, Bormann suggested that the critic look for at least four features that are present in all rhetorical visions.18 1. Characters: Are there heroes to root for and villains to despise? 2. Plot lines: Do characters act in a way consistent with the rhetorical vision? 3. Scene: How do descriptions of time and place increase the drama’s impact?
4. Sanctioning agent: Who or what legitimates the rhetorical vision? I’ll describe a fantasy theme analysis of Internet websites to show how these tools can reveal a rhetorical vision and show how it’s created and sustained within a dispersed rhetorical community.
The Symbolic Creation of a Pro-Eating Disorder Rhetorical Vision For those who are anorexic and/or bulimic, the world of face-to-face communication can be a lonely place. Afraid of condemnation if they reveal their eating disorder, they often live a life of secrecy, deception, and guilt. Although 12-step programs extend social support to those who want to overcome their disease, not all people with food disorders want to change. The Internet offers hundreds of pro-eating disorder websites where those who resist recovery can anonymously interact with like-minded others. Wayne State University communication professor Jessi McCabe conducted a fantasy theme analysis to “explore how group exchanges on these websites redefine a reality largely rejected by the cultural norm and what elements contribute to creating this worldview.”19 She chose the 12 most active pro-food disorder sites for her analysis. The message boards on the three most
popular sites—Blue Dragon Fly, Pro-Ana Suicide Society, and Fragile Innocence—had a combined membership of more than 25,000 users.
GROUP AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
Fantasy types are an SCT category midway between specific fantasy themes and an overall rhetorical vision. McCabe found that two contrasting fantasy types emerged in her analysis—a positive one and a negative one. She labeled the positive fantasy type “The humorous world of Ana and Mia.” Within this world, fantasy chains reinforce site users’ eating habits and shared reality. Across the message boards, members personify their disorders as characters in an ongoing drama. Members depict their own goals, struggles, and emotions through the personification of Ana and Mia. Anorexia and bulimia are given life and attributed humanlike emotions and qualities, which are justified by the sanctioning agent, humor. The most favorable depiction is a girl named Ana (anorexia), who represents the goal of the group, the idolization of perfection in this reality. Perfection is about having self-control and being thin. Personified through Ana is a yearning for being untouchable and perfect.20
Message-board users write about Ana as their hero. (“Ana knows what to say to make me feel better.”21) They also confess lapses and seek her forgiveness. (“Dear Ana, I am sorry that I failed you. . . . Not only did I fail you but I binged.”) Unlike Ana, Mia (bulimia) isn’t seen as perfect. Her role in the drama is to stir up the emotions users feel as they struggle to get down to the elusive perfect weight. Site users rarely describe Mia in positive terms. One post complains, “Mia is SO loud and annoying . . . my Mom heard Mia because she can’t keep her [stinking] mouth shut!” Yet other messages reluctantly suggest Mia is needed. “Sometimes she is all right . . . she lets me eat . . . keeps my body pure.”
The third character in this ongoing drama is the villainous ED (eating disorder). He represents the social norm of moderation and recovery from addiction. McCabe explains why he’s so feared: “Members not only try to avoid ED for fear of recovery but the group knows that accepting ED means a loss of community and a reentry into a reality in which eating disorders are a negative attribute.”22 The discussion of these three characters constructs an alternative world where high-risk dieters aren’t hassled. Despite the lurking presence of ED, who reminds everyone of another reality “out there,” this positive fantasy type is a closed world where anorexics and bulimics feel safe. McCabe sees humor as the sanctioning agent that makes this constructed reality legitimate for site users.
The satirical exchange of experiences turns discussion of a deadly disease into a game that validates what these users are doing, saying, and living. Conversely, the negative fantasy type portrayed on these message boards is “Surviving encounters with The Real World,” a distressing place for those who visit these websites. McCabe notes that almost all users log on to get tips on “safe” foods and how to hide their eating habits and symptoms from friends and family. The scene of the struggle in “the real world” is almost always part of this fantasy type. Many posts include references to time and space. I hate coming home at night. . . . I am with Ana all day and I cannot eat . . . but when I get home Ana stays at the door and I just binge.
How can I live with Mia if we are sharing community bathrooms in our dorm?
McCabe doesn’t explicitly address plot lines in her fantasy theme analysis, but from her rich description two plots seem paramount. The first is acting in multiple ways to reduce weight—dieting, exercising, and purging. The second plot is doing whatever one has to do to keep the extent of this obsession with food a secret from those who don’t share it.
McCabe concludes that the rhetorical vision of the pro-eating disorder community is the uneasy coexistence of these two contrasting fantasy types—The humorous world of Ana and Mia and Surviving encounters with The Real World. She writes, “The rhetorical vision shared by this group is the effort to maintain a disease within settings where their belief is challenged and get back to the state where the personification of the disease can proliferate.”23
THEORY INTO PRACTICE: ADVICE TO IMPROVE YOUR COLLEGE EXPERIENCE
As you’ve gained an understanding of symbolic convergence theory, you’ve probably thought about its implications for a group in which you take part. No matter what your role in the group, Bormann offered the following advice:
- When the group begins to share a drama that in your opinion would contribute to a healthy culture, you should pick up the drama and feed the chain.
- If the fantasies are destructive, creating group paranoia or depression, cut the chain off whenever possible.
- To build cohesiveness, use personification to identify your group.
- Be sure to encourage the sharing of dramas depicting your group history early in your meetings.
- Remember that a conscious rhetorical effort on your part can succeed in igniting a chain reaction, but the fantasy may take an unexpected turn.
Bormann and his followers have also used fantasy theme analysis to improve organizational communication, conduct market research, and assess public opinion. To illustrate the pragmatic value of the methodology, John Cragan (Illinois State University) and Donald Shields (University of Missouri–St. Louis) require students in their applied research classes to analyze the way that high school seniors talk about college. They find that most rhetorical visions employ one of three competing master analogues—a righteous vision, a social vision, or a pragmatic vision.
Potential applicants who embrace a righteous vision are interested in a school’s academic excellence, the reputation of its faculty, and special programs that it offers. Those who adopt a social vision view college as a means of getting away from home, meeting new friends, and joining others in a variety of social activities. High school seniors who buy into a pragmatic vision are looking for a marketable degree that will help them get a good job. (What was your vision when you entered college?) Knowledge of these distinct visions could help admissions officers at your school develop a strategy to appeal to high school students who would most appreciate the character of their campus. That knowledge could also help you figure out if you’re at a school that can best meet your needs.
CRITIQUE: JUDGING SCT AS BOTH A SCIENTIFIC AND INTERPRETIVE THEORY
Ernest Bormann claimed that symbolic convergence theory is both objective and interpretive. The theory’s basic explanatory hypothesis—sharing group fantasies creates symbolic convergence—is framed as a universal principle that holds for all people, in any culture, at any time, in any communication context.26 Definitely objective. But the methodology of determining fantasy themes, fantasy types, and rhetorical visions is rhetorical criticism—a humanistic approach that’s undeniably interpretive.
Perhaps this unusual mix has stimulated many of the 1,000 original research studies that have examined and applied the theory over the last 40 years.27 Bormann wryly noted that one positive result from SCT has been the collaboration between “muddleheaded anecdotalists and hardheaded empiricists.”28 When the six standards for judging a social science theory and the six criteria for evaluating an interpretive theory are applied to SCT, the theory stacks up remarkably well. I’ll single out
four of these benchmarks for further discussion.
1. A good objective theory explains what occurs and why it happened. The concept of symbolic convergence can help us make sense of chaotic group discussions. Even though group leaders urge members to speak one at a time and stick to the point, participants often go off on verbal tangents. According to SCT, graphic digressions and boisterous talk aren’t signs of a flawed process; rather, they are evidence that the group is chaining out a fantasy and developing a group consciousness. This explanation of how groups become cohesive is a strength of the theory. However, Boston College communication professor James Olufowote doesn’t believe Bormann’s explanation goes far enough. In a sympathetic critique aimed at making the theory better, he contends that “SCT does not sufficiently explain why humans are predisposed to dramatizing reality and sharing fantasy in the first place.”29
2. A good objective theory predicts what’s going to happen. SCT clearly predicts that when a fantasy chain erupts among members, symbolic convergence will occur. The theory even suggests that without shared fantasies, there will be no cohesiveness. But as discussed earlier in the chapter, SCT researchers have had little success predicting when a dramatizing message will trigger a chain reaction.
Bormann noted that uncertainty about the future isn’t bothersome in other scientific theories. He saw symbolic convergence theory as similar to Darwin’s biological theory of evolution in that respect. An evolutionary theory can explain the way modern humans evolved from earlier humanoid individuals. But, such theories cannot predict the future path of evolution. . . . SCT involves a careful cataloguing of group consciousness through time. The theory also includes a description of the dynamic forces that provide a necessary and sufficient set of causes to explain the discovered communication patterns. For an evolution theory the dynamic may be the survival of the fittest. For SCT the dynamic is the process of group sharing.30
3. A good interpretive theory clarifies people’s values. There’s no doubt that fantasy theme analysis uncovers the values of a rhetorical community.
It does that well. But Olufowote is concerned about the unexamined values that undergird SCT.31 One concern is an ideology of convergence. The terms that describe its effects— common ground, meeting of the minds, empathic communion, etc.—make it clear that the theory has a pro-social bias. Shall we look at the convergence of hate groups or pro-eating disorder websites as a positive outcome?
A second concern Olufowote expresses is an egalitarian assumption that ignores issues of power within groups. For example, do all members of a group benefit equally when a fantasy chains out? Does an inside joke become a symbolic cue at the expense of one of the members? A final concern is about the way members of a rhetorical community are characterized. The communities described come across as conflict-free, differences among members are ignored, and there’s little discussion of the inner tension a member feels when the multiple rhetorical visions he or she embraces don’t mesh.
4. A good interpretive theory offers a new understanding of people. SCT’s method of fantasy theme analysis does this exceptionally well by directing rhetorical critics to focus on symbolic language. A few scholars charge that the best fantasy theme analyses are the result of critics’ astute perception or acumen rather than the method they use.32 Bormann acknowledged that some critics do it better than others. But he noted that regardless of how perceptive the critic, the method used makes a huge difference. For example, a Marxist critique looks for economic exploitation; a feminist critique looks for patterns of male dominance. Think how different the analyses of cigar store smokers or pro-eating disorder messageboard users would be if DeSantis or McCabe hadn’t zeroed in on imaginative language. With that lens in place, fantasy theme analysts uncover rhetorical visions as varied as the communities they study. When I read a well-written fantasy theme analysis, I gain a greater appreciation for the fascinating diversity within the human race.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. As a rhetorically sensitive scholar, Bormann defined SCT terms carefully. Can you distinguish the difference between dramatizing messages and fantasies? Do you understand why it’s a difference that makes a difference?
2. Some critics dismiss SCT as a cookie-cutter approach to group analysis. Could this be said of most social science theories? Bormann regarded the charge as a compliment.33 Can you figure out why he was pleased rather than offended? 3. Bormann insisted that SCT is an objective theory that’s valid any time and in any culture, but that its methodology, fantasy theme analysis, is interpretive. Do you regard SCT as a better objective or interpretive theory? Why? 4. Bormann was intrigued with a T-shirt that proclaims, “I have given up my search for truth. Now I want to find a good fantasy.”34 Based on what you’ve read, does this slogan reflect the symbolic world of SCT advocates? Does it reflect yours?
A SECOND LOOK
Recommended resource: Ernest G. Bormann, John Cragan, and Donald Shields, “Three Decades of Developing, Grounding, and Using Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT),” in Communication Yearbook 25, William Gudykunst (ed.), Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2001, pp. 271–313.
Brief summary: Ernest Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence Theory,” in Small Group Communication Theory & Practice: An Anthology, 8th ed., Randy Hirokawa, Robert Cathcart, Larry Samovar, and Linda Henman (eds.), Roxbury, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, pp. 39–47. Early statement of the theory: Ernest G. Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social
Reality,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 58, 1972, pp. 396–407.
Small-group context: Ernest G. Bormann and Nancy C. Bormann, Effective Small Group Communication, 5th ed., Burgess, Edina, MN, 1992, pp. 105–126.
Organizational context: Ernest G. Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence: Organizational Communication and Culture,” in Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach, Linda Putnam and Michael Pacanowsky (eds.), Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1983, pp. 99–122. Fantasy theme analysis: Sonja K. Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, 4th ed., Waveland, Prospect Heights, IL, 2009, pp. 97–136. Practical applications of assessing rhetorical visions: John F. Cragan and Donald C. Shields, Symbolic Theories in Applied Communication Research: Bormann, Burke, and Fisher, Hampton, Cresskill, NJ, 1995, pp. 161–198.
Cigar store ethnography: Alan D. DeSantis, “Smoke Screen: An Ethnographic Study of a Cigar Shop’s Collective Rationalization,” Health Communication, Vol. 14, 2002, pp. 167–198. Pro-eating disorder website analysis: Jessi McCabe, “Resisting Alienation: The Social Construction of Internet Communities Supporting Eating Disorders,” Communication Studies, Vol. 60, 2009, pp. 1–15. Early critique: G. P. Mohrmann, “An Essay on Fantasy Theme Criticism” and “Fantasy Theme Criticism: A Peroration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 68, 1982, pp. 109–132, 306–313.
Response to early critics: Ernest G. Bormann, John Cragan, and Donald Shields, “In Defense of Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Look at the Theory and Its Criticisms After Two Decades,” Communication Theory, Vol. 4, 1994,
pp. 259–294. Contemporary critique: James O. Olufowote, “Rousing and Redirecting a Sleeping Giant: Symbolic Convergence Theory and Complexities in the Communicative Constitution of Collective Action,” Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 19, 2006, pp. 451–492.
Will our group stay like this or will it change?
That question is answered by Poole’s Adaptive Structuration Theory, which appeared in previous editions. Click on Theory List at www.afirstlook.com.
What do the following organizations have in common—the United States Navy, McDonald’s, General Motors, and the Green Bay Packers? The first three are gigantic organizations, the middle two sell a tangible product, and the last three are publicly owned corporations that try to make a profit. But in terms of organizational communication, their most important common feature is that each is a prime example of classical management theory in action. Figure OC–1 lists some of the principles of this traditional approach to management.
The Mechanistic Approach. Classical management theory places a premium on productivity, precision, and efficiency. As York University (Toronto) distinguished research professor Gareth Morgan notes, these are the very qualities that you expect from a well-designed, smoothly running machine. Morgan uses the machine metaphor because he finds significant parallels between mechanical devices and the way managers traditionally think about their organizations.1 In classical management theory, workers are seen as cogs in vast machines that function smoothly as long as their range of motion is clearly defined and their actions are lubricated with an adequate hourly wage.
more than 100 billion hamburgers, each one in exactly the same way. Machines have interchangeable parts that can be replaced when broken or worn out, just as a National Football League coach can insert a new player into the tight-end slot when the current starter is injured or begins to slow down. A new Chevrolet comes with a thick operator’s manual that specifies how the car should be driven, but the General Motors employees’ handbook is thicker and contains even more detailed instructions on how things are done within the company. As for the U.S. Navy, the fleet is an integral part of the country’s war machine, and officers at every level are most comfortable when it runs like one.
Unity of command—an employee should receive orders from only one superior. Scalar chain—the line of authority from superior to subordinate, which runs from top to bottom of the organization; this chain, which results from the unity-of-command principle, should be used as a channel for communication and decision making. Division of work—management should aim to achieve a degree of specialization designed to achieve the goal of the organization in an efficient manner. Authority and responsibility—attention should be paid to the right to give orders and to exact obedience; an appropriate balance between authority and responsibility should be achieved.
Discipline—obedience, application, energy, behavior, and outward marks of respect in accordance with agreed rules and customs.
Subordination of individual interest to general interest—through firmness, example, fair agreements, and constant supervision.
Both theories in this section view classical management theory as outmoded and reject the mechanistic analogies on which bureaucratic organizations are based. The theorists offer alternative ways of thinking about organizing people and the tasks they do. Each approach is based on a different image of the organization that counters the dominant machine model. The cultural approach looks for shared meanings that are unique to a given organization. The critical approach looks at organizations as political systems where conflict and power should be negotiated openly.
Karl Weick sees organizations as living organisms that must adapt or die. His information systems approach is a third alternative to mechanistic thinking. For his theory covered in previous editions, click on Theory List at www.afirstlook.com.
Agenda-Setting Theory of Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw
For some unexplained reason, in June 1972, five unknown men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters looking for undetermined information. It was the sort of local crime story that rated two paragraphs on page 17 of the Washington Post. Yet editor Ben Bradlee and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave the story repeatedly high visibility even though the public initially seemed to regard the incident as trivial.
President Nixon dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” but over the following year Americans showed an increasing public awareness of Watergate’s significance. Half the country became familiar with the word Watergate over the summer of 1972. By April 1973, that figure had risen to 90 percent. When television began gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate hearings on the matter a year after the break-in, virtually every adult in the United States knew what Watergate was about. Six months after the hearings President Nixon still protested, “I am not a crook.” But by the spring of 1974, he was forced from office because the majority of citizens and their representatives had decided that he was.
THE ORIGINAL AGENDA: NOT WHAT TO THINK, BUT WHAT TO THINK ABOUT
Agenda-setting
hypothesis
The mass media have
the ability to transfer the
salience of issues on
their news agenda to the
public agenda.
Journalism professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw regard Watergate as a perfect example of the agenda-setting function of the mass media. They were not surprised that the Watergate issue caught fire after months on the front page of the Washington Post. McCombs and Shaw believe that the “mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda.”1 They aren’t suggesting that broadcast and print personnel make a deliberate attempt to influence listener, viewer, or reader opinion on the issues. Most reporters in the free world have a deserved reputation for independence and fairness. But McCombs and Shaw say that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our attention. “We judge as important what the media judge as important.”
2 Although McCombs and Shaw first referred to the agenda-setting function of the media in 1972, the idea that people desire media assistance in determining political reality had already been voiced by a number of current events analysts. In an attempt to explain how the United States had been drawn into World War I, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Walter Lippmann claimed that the media act as a mediator between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads.”3 McCombs and Shaw also quote University of Wisconsin political scientist Bernard Cohen’s observation concerning the specific function the media serve: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”4 Starting with the Kennedy–Nixon contest in 1960, political analyst Theodore White wrote the definitive account of four presidential elections. Independent of McCombs and Shaw, and in opposition to then-current wisdom
that mass communication had limited effects upon its audience, White came to the conclusion that the media shaped those election campaigns:
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about—an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.5
A THEORY WHOSE TIME HAD COME
McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting theory found an appreciative audience among mass communication researchers. The prevailing selective-exposure hypothesis claimed that people would attend only to news and views that didn’t threaten their established beliefs. The media were seen as merely stroking pre-existent attitudes. After two decades of downplaying the influence of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the field was disenchanted with this limited-effects approach. Agenda-setting theory boasted two attractive features: it reaffirmed the power of the press while still maintaining that individuals were free to choose. McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting theory represents a back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research. Like the initial Erie County voting studies,6 the focus is on election campaigns.
The hypothesis predicts a cause-andeffect relationship between media content and voter perception. Although later work explores the conditions under which the media priorities are most influential, the theory rises or falls on its ability to show a match between the media’s agenda and the public’s agenda later on. McCombs and Shaw supported their main hypothesis with results from surveys they took while working together at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.7 (McCombs is now at the University of Texas.) Their analysis of the 1968 race for president between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey set the pattern for later agenda-setting research. The study provides an opportunity to examine in detail the type of quantitative survey research that Stuart Hall and other critical theorists so strongly oppose.
MEDIA AGENDA AND PUBLIC AGENDA: A CLOSE MATCH
Media agenda
The pattern of news coverage across major print and
broadcast media as measured by the prominence
and length of stories.
McCombs and Shaw’s first task was to measure the media agenda. They determined that Chapel Hill residents relied on a mix of nine print and broadcast sources for political news—two Raleigh papers, two Durham papers, Time, Newsweek, the outof-state edition of the New York Times, and the CBS and NBC evening news. They established position and length of story as the two main criteria of prominence. For newspapers, the front-page headline story, a three-column story on an inside page, and the lead editorial were all counted as evidence of significant focus on an issue. For news magazines, the requirement was an opening story in the news section or any political issue to which the editors devoted a full column. Prominence in the television news format was defined by placement as one of the first three news items or any discussion that lasted more than 45 seconds.
Because the agenda-setting hypothesis refers to substantive issues, the researchers discarded news items about campaign strategy, position in the polls, and the personalities of the candidates. The remaining stories were then sorted into 15 subject categories, which were later boiled down into 5 major issues. A composite index of media prominence revealed the following order of importance: foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public welfare, and civil rights. In order to measure the public’s agenda, McCombs and Shaw asked Chapel Hill voters to outline what each one considered the key issue of the campaign, regardless of what the candidates might be saying. People who were already committed to a candidate were dropped from the pool of respondents. The researchers assigned the specific answers to the same broad categories used for media analysis. They then compared the aggregate data from undecided voters with the composite description of media content. The rank of the five issues on both lists was nearly identical.
WHAT CAUSES WHAT?
McCombs and Shaw believe that the hypothesized agenda-setting function of the media is responsible for the almost perfect correlation they found between the media and public ordering of priorities:
Media Agenda → Voters’ Agenda
But as critics of cultivation theory remind us, correlation is not causation. It’s possible that newspaper and television coverage simply reflects public concerns that already exist:
Voters’ Agenda → Media Agenda
The results of the Chapel Hill study could be interpreted as providing support for the notion that the media are just as market-driven in their news coverage as they are in programming entertainment. By themselves, McCombs and Shaw’s findings were impressive, but equivocal. A true test of the agenda-setting hypothesis must be able to show that public priorities lag behind the media agenda. I’ll briefly describe two research studies that provide evidence that the media agenda is, in fact, the cause, while the public agenda is its somewhat delayed effect. Critics have suggested that both the media agenda and the public agenda merely reflect current events as they unfold, but that news professionals become aware of what’s happening sooner than most of us do. To examine that possibility, communication researcher Ray Funkhouser, now retired from Pennsylvania State University, undertook an extensive historical review of stories in news magazines from
1960 to 1970.8 He charted the rise and fall of media attention on issues and compared these trends with annual Gallup poll responses to a question about “the most important problem facing America.” Funkhouser’s results make it clear that the twin agendas aren’t mere reflections of reality. For example, the number of American troops in Vietnam increased until 1968, but news coverage peaked two years before that. The same was true of urban violence and campus unrest. Press interest cooled down while cities and colleges were still heating up. It appears that Walter Lippmann was right—the actual environment and the pictures in our mind are two different worlds.
This historical study provides strong support for McCombs and Shaw’s basic agenda-setting hypothesis. But it took a tightly controlled experiment run by Yale researchers to establish a cause-and-effect chain of influence from the media agenda to the public agenda.9 Political scientists Shanto Iyengar, Mark Peters, and Donald Kinder spliced previously aired news features into tapes of current network newscasts. For four days straight, three groups of New Haven residents came together to watch the evening news and fill out a questionnaire about their own concerns. Each group saw a different version—one version contained a daily story on environmental pollution, another had a daily feature on national defense, and a third offered a daily dose of news about economic inflation. Viewers who saw the media agendas that focused on pollution and defense elevated those issues on their own lists of concerns—definite confirmation of a cause-and-effect relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda. (As it turned out, inflation was already an important topic for most participants, so there wasn’t any room for that issue to move up on the third group’s agenda.)
WHO IS MOST AFFECTED BY THE MEDIA AGENDA?
Index of curiosity
A measure of the extent
to which individuals’
need for orientation
motivates them to let the
media shape their views.
Even in their original Chapel Hill study, McCombs and Shaw understood that “people are not automatons waiting to be programmed by the news media.”10 They suspected that some viewers might be more resistant to the media’s political priorities than others—that’s why they filtered out the responses of voters who were already committed to a candidate. In follow-up studies, McCombs and Shaw turned to the uses and gratifications approach, which suggests that viewers are selective in the kinds of TV programs they watch (see Chapter 28). The theorists sought to discover exactly what kind of person is most susceptible to the media agenda. They concluded that people who have a willingness to let the media shape their thinking have a high need for orientation. Others refer to it as an index of curiosity. Need for orientation arises from high relevance and uncertainty. For example, because I’m a dog and cat owner, any story about cruelty to animals always catches my attention (high relevance). However, I don’t really know the extent to which medical advances require experimentation on live animals (high uncertainty). According to McCombs and Shaw, this combination would make me a likely candidate to be influenced by media stories about vivisection. If the news editors of Time and ABC think it’s important, I probably will too.
FRAMING: TRANSFERRING THE SALIENCE OF ATTRIBUTES
Framing
The selection of a
restricted number of
thematically related
attributes for inclusion
on the media agenda
when a particular object
or issue is discussed.
Until the 1990s, almost every article about the theory included a reiteration of the agenda-setting mantra—the media aren’t very successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about. In other words, the media make some issues more salient. We pay greater attention to those issues and regard them as more important. By the mid-1990s, however, McCombs was saying that the media do more than that. They do, in fact, influence the way we think. The specific process he cites is one that many media scholars discuss—framing. James Tankard, one of the leading writers on mass communication theory, defines a media frame as “the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration.”11 The final four nouns in that sentence suggest that the media not only set the agenda for what issues, events, or candidates are most important, they also transfer the salience of specific attributes belonging to those potential objects of interest. My own “final four” experience may help explain the distinction. I’m writing this section while visiting relatives in St. Petersburg, Florida. The St. Petersburg Times is filled with stories about the finals of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that starts here tomorrow. The field of 64 teams has now been narrowed to 4, and it’s hard to imagine anything the newspaper or television stations could do to make this Final Four event more prominent for local residents. No one seems to talk
about anything else.
What is it about the Final Four extravaganza that captures people’s attention? For some it’s the high quality of basketball play they expect to see. For others it’s a rooting interest for a particular team. But beyond these inherent characteristics of a basketball tournament, there are many other potential features of the event that might come to mind:
Gambling—there’s more money bet on this game than on the Super Bowl. Party scene—a guy leans out the window and yells, “This is where it’s at.” Local economy—this is the weekend that could keep Florida green. Exploitation of players—how many of these guys will ever graduate? Beach forecast—it will be sunny and warm both today and tomorrow.
“Your royal command has been obeyed, Highness. Every town crier in the land is crying: ‘Old King Cole is a merry ole soul.’ Before nightfall we’ll have them all believing it.” Cartoon by Ed Frascino. Reprinted by permission.
The morning paper carried separate stories on each of these features, but coverage on benefits to the local economy and the gambling angle were front-page features that ran five times as long as the brief article on player exploitation buried inside. We see, therefore, that there are two levels of agenda setting. The first level, according to McCombs, is the transfer of salience of an attitude object in the mass media’s pictures of the world to a prominent place among the pictures in our head. The Final Four becomes important to us. This is the agenda-setting function that survey researchers have traditionally studied. The second level of agenda
setting is the transfer of salience of a dominant set of attributes that the media associate with an attitude object to the specific features of the image projected on the walls of our minds.12 Now when I think of the Final Four, I imagine money changing hands for a variety of reasons. I don’t think about GPAs or diplomas. According to McCombs, the agenda setting of attributes mirrors the process of framing that Robert Entman describes in his article clarifying the concept:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communication text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.13
NOT JUST WHAT TO THINK ABOUT, BUT HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT
Is there evidence that the process of framing as defined by agenda-setting theorists actually alters the pictures in the minds of people when they read the newspaper or tune in to broadcast news? Does the media’s construction of an agenda with a cluster of related attributes create a coherent image in the minds of subscribers, listeners, and viewers? McCombs cites national election studies in Spain, Japan, and Mexico that show this is how framing works.14 I also find compelling evidence in another framing study conducted by Salma Ghanem for her doctoral dissertation under McCombs’ supervision at the University of Texas.15 Ghanem analyzed the changing percentage of Texans who ranked crime as the most important problem facing the country between 1992 and 1995. The figure rose steadily from 2 percent of respondents in 1992 to 37 percent in 1994, and then dipped down to a still high 21 percent a year later. Ironically, even as public concern about crime was on the rise the first two years, the actual frequency and severity of unlawful acts were going down. On the basis of many first-level agenda-setting studies like the Chapel Hill research, Ghanem assumed that the increased salience of crime was driven by media that featured crime stories prominently and often. She found a high correlation (+0.70) between the amount of media coverage and the depth of public concern.
Ghanem was more interested in tracking the transfer of salience of specific
crime attributes—the second level of agenda setting. Of the dozen or so media frames for stories about crime, two bundles of attributes were strongly linked to the public’s increasing alarm. The most powerful frame was one that cast crime as something that could happen to anyone. The stories noted that the robbery took place in broad daylight, or the shooting was random and without provocation.
The second frame was where the crime took place. Out-of-state problems were of casual interest, but when a reported felony occurred locally or in the state of Texas, concern rose quickly. Note that both frames were features of news stories that shrank the psychological distance between the crimes they described and the average citizens who read or heard about them. Many concluded, “I could be next.” The high correlations (+0.78, +0.73) between these media frames and the subsequent public concern suggest that attribute frames make compelling arguments for the choices people make after exposure to the news. Framing is not an option. Reporters inevitably frame a story with the personal attributes of public figures they select to describe. For example, the media continually reported on the “youthful vigor” of John F. Kennedy while he was alive but made no mention of his extramarital affairs, which were well-known to the White House press corps. The 1988 presidential race was all but over after Time framed the contest between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis as “the Nice Man vs. the Ice Man.” In 1996 Republican spin doctors fought an uphill battle positioning their candidate once media stories focused on Bob Dole’s lack of passion—“Dead Man Walking” was the quip of commentator Mark Shields.
And the press picked up on George W. Bush’s claim to be a “compassionate conservative” in the 2000
presidential election, whereas Senator John Kerry, his opponent in 2004, was repeatedly described as “flip-flopping” on the issues. In all of these cases it’s easy to spot the affective tone of the attribute. For the last decade, researchers seeking to determine the public’s agenda during an election campaign have asked potential voters, “Suppose one of your friends has been away a long time and knows nothing about the candidates. . . . What would you tell your friend about ___________?” They take note of each attribute mentioned and later sort them into content categories such as experience, competence, personality, and morality. They then code each attribute as positive, neutral, or negative. Summing all of these affective aspects of attributes gives researchers a reliable measure of voters’ attitudes toward the candidate. In most studies, the voters’ agenda mirrors the media’s agenda in substance and in tone, and also predicts the outcome of the election.16
McCombs and Shaw no longer subscribe to Bernard Cohen’s classic remark about the media’s limited agenda-setting role. They now headline their work with a revised and expanded version that describes agenda setting as a much more powerful media function:
The media may not only tell us what to think about,
they also may tell us how and what to think about it,
and perhaps even what to do about it.17
BEYOND OPINION: THE BEHAVIORAL EFFECT OF THE MEDIA’S AGENDA
Most of the research studies on agenda setting have measured the effect of media agendas on public opinion. But some intriguing findings suggest that media priorities also affect people’s behavior. For example, Alexander Bloj, a graduate student of McCombs’, had access to the sales records of a major airline in a large northeastern city.18 He was also able to find out about the purchase pattern of flight insurance sold at the airport. Bloj predicted that prominent stories of airplane crashes and hijackings in the New York Times would both lower ticket sales and increase the purchases of trip insurance the following week. He defined media salience of flight safety as any story running for two days that reported a crash with double-digit
fatalities or a skyjacker gaining control of a plane in the air.
Fortunately, disaster-salient weeks over a five-year period in the early 1970s were much less common than were weeks when air safety wasn’t an issue. But when the stories appeared, fewer people bought tickets and more people bought flight insurance. Of course, 30 years later no one doubts that saturation media coverage affects travel behavior. Most of us have a televised image of an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center etched in our minds, with the result that the number of people flying plummeted and didn’t recover for more than two years.
Nowhere is the behavioral effect of the media agenda more apparent than in the business of professional sports. In his book The Ultimate Assist, John Fortunato explores the commercial partnership between network television’s agenda and the National Basketball Association’s (NBA).19 Television dramatically raised the salience of the sport (the first level of agenda setting) by scheduling games in prime-time viewing slots. It also put basketball’s best attributes forward (the second level of agenda setting) by selecting the teams with the premier competitors to play in those games and focusing on those players. During the peak years of Michael Jordan’s basketball career, it was “all Michael, all the time.” Television shaped an attractive picture of the NBA in viewers’ minds through a series of off-court frames. Interviews with select players and coaches, color commentary, graphics, and instant replays of players’ spectacular moves all created a positive image of the NBA. As for the rape accusation against L.A. Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, and later his feud with teammate Shaquille O’Neal that split the team, the media cooperated in downplaying those attributes that tarnish the NBA’s image. As McCombs and other researchers have discovered by analyzing multiple presidential elections, it’s the cumulative effect of long-term attribute salience that can alter attitudes and behavior.20 This 30-year effort to shape the public agenda has not only had a spectacular effect on fan behavior, it has also altered the face of popular culture. From 1970 to 2000, the number of NBA teams and the number of games doubled. The number of fans going to games quadrupled. But the astronomical difference is in the money. In 1970, television provided $10 million in revenue to the NBA. In 2000, the payout was $20 billion—no small change. McCombs’ comment: “Agenda setting the theory can also be agenda setting the business plan.”21
WHO SETS THE AGENDA FOR THE AGENDA SETTERS?
News doesn’t select itself. So who sets the agenda for the agenda setters? One view regards a handful of news editors as the guardians, or “gatekeepers,” of political dialogue. Nothing gets put on the political agenda without the concurrence of a few select people—the operations chiefs of the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Although there is no evidence to support right-wing conservative charges that the editors are part of a liberal, eastern-establishment conspiracy, when one of them features an issue, the rest of the nation’s media tend to pick up the story.
An alternative view regards candidates and office holders themselves as the ultimate source of issue salience. George H. W. Bush put the tax issue on the table with his famous statement “Read my lips—no new taxes!” But he was unable to get the issue off the table when he broke that pledge. He also tried to dismiss the economic recession as a “mild technical adjustment.” The press and the populace decided it was major.
Current thinking on news selection focuses on the crucial role of public relations professionals working for government agencies, corporations, and interest groups. Even prestigious newspapers with large investigative staffs such as the Washington Post and the New York Times get more than half of what they print straight from press releases and press conferences.22
Interest aggregations are becoming increasingly adept at creating news that must be reported. This term refers to clusters of people who demand center stage for their one overriding concern, whatever it might be—antiabortion, antiwar, anticommunism, antipollution, anti-immigration, anti-gay-marriage. As the examples indicate, these groups usually rally around a specific action that they oppose. They stage demonstrations, marches, and other media events so that television and the press will be forced to cover their issue. The prominence of the Tea Party’s campaign against government spending and taxes is a striking example. The media seem to pay attention to those who grab it.
On rare occasions, news events are so compelling that editors have no choice but to feature them for extended periods of time. The monthlong Florida recount in 2000 to determine whether George W. Bush or Al Gore would be president was one such case. And, of course, the 9/11 terrorist attack totally dominated U.S. print and broadcast news, pushing almost every other story off the front page and television screen for the rest of the year.
WILL NEW MEDIA STILL SHAPE THE AGENDA, OPINIONS, AND BEHAVIOR?
Ironically, the power of agenda setting that McCombs and Shaw describe may be on the
wane. In a creative experiment, University of Illinois researchers Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury predicted that traditional print media would be more effective than new electronic media in setting a reader’s agenda.23 They reasoned that people who are reading a newspaper know that editors consider a long, front-page article under a banner headline more important than a short story buried on an inside page. Not only are these comparative cues absent on the computer screen, but online readers can click on links to similar stories and never see accounts of events that paper readers see as they thumb through the pages.
Althaus and Tewksbury recruited students to spend 30–60 minutes a day for 5 days reading either a print version or an online version of the New York Times under controlled conditions. For both groups it was their only exposure to news that week. On the sixth day, the researchers tested recognition and recall of the week’s stories and assessed which problems facing the country students personally regarded as most important. Not only did those who read the traditional paper remember more content, they also selected a higher percentage of international issues as more important to them, thus aligning them closer to the prioritized agenda of the Times’ editors. The researchers concluded that “by providing users with more content choices and control over exposure, new technologies may allow people to create personalized information environments that shut them off from larger flows of public information in a society.”24 Abby’s application log illustrates this point.
I confess to being an online newsreader who only clicks on links that interest me. I easily bypass information and headlines on my computer that I couldn’t avoid when reading a print version of the news. This caught up with me in my class in American politics. Our assignment was to stay informed about worldwide current events by reading the New York Times. I chose to read the paper online—to my detriment. I found myself clicking on stories of personal interest and didn’t even notice headlines on other issues. My weekly quiz grades let me know that my study agenda didn’t match the media agenda.
McCombs wouldn’t be surprised that Abby chose to get news online rather than through newspapers or news broadcasts. In a study reported in 2007, he and Renita Coleman, a colleague at the University of Texas, found that most of the younger generation (18 to 34) relied on the Internet for news, middle-aged viewers (35 to 54) tended to favor TV, and older readers (55+) preferred newspapers. The correlation between the media agenda and the younger generation was somewhat lower than for boomers or the older generation, but at 0.70, it was still high. McCombs thinks that’s because “most Internet news sources are subsidiaries of traditional news media, and there is a high degree of redundancy in the media agendas even on diverse media.”25 He does note, however, that young adults are also learning what’s important from late-night comedians like Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. It’s not yet clear if the news they parody parallels the agenda of other media outlets.
ETHICAL REFLECTION: CHRISTIANS’ COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS
Clifford Christians is the former director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the lead author of Good News: Social Ethics and the Press.26 Although he values free speech, he doesn’t share the near-absolute devotion to the First Amendment that seems to be the sole ethical commitment of many journalists. Christians rejects reporters’ and editors’ insistence on an absolute right of free expression that is based on the individualistic rationalism of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. In our age of ethical relativism where continue the conversation is the best that philosophy has to offer,27 Christians believes that discovering the truth is still possible if we are willing to examine the nature of our humanity. The human nature he perceives is, at root, personhood in community.28
Christians agrees with Martin Buber that the relation is the cradle of life. (“In the beginning is the relation.”29) He is convinced, therefore, that mutuality is the essence of humanness. People are most fully human as “persons-in-relation” who live simultaneously for others and for themselves.
Communitarian ethics
A moral responsibility to
promote community,
mutuality, and personsin-relation who live
simultaneously for others
and for themselves.
A moral community demonstrates more than mere interdependence; it is characterized by mutuality, a will-to-community, a genuine concern for the other apart from immediate self-interest. . . . An act is morally right when compelled by the intention to maintain the community of persons; it is wrong if driven by self-centeredness.30
Christians understands that a commitment to mutuality would significantly alter media culture and mission. His communitarian ethics establish civic transformation rather than objective information as the primary goal of the press. Reporters’ aim would thus become a revitalized citizenship shaped by community norms—morally literate and active participants, not just readers and audiences provided with data.31 Editors, publishers, and owners—the gatekeepers of the media agenda—would be held to the same standard. Christians insists that
MASS COMMUNICATION
Agape love
An unconditional love for others because they are created in the image of God.
media criticism must be willing to reestablish the idea of moral right and wrong. Selfish practices aimed at splintering community are not merely misguided; they are evil.32
Christians’ communitarian ethics are based on the ChrHarry: No you don’t. . . .
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You’re saying I’ve had sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry: No, what I’m saying is that they all want to have sex with you. Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.istian tradition of agape love—an unconditional love for others because they are created in the image of God. He believes journalists have a social responsibility to promote the sacredness of life by respecting human dignity, truthtelling, and doing no harm to innocents.33 With an emphasis on establishing communal bonds, alienated people on the margins of society receive special attention from communitarians. Christians ultimately judges journalists on the basis of how well they use the media’s power to champion the goal of social justice. For example, Christians asks:
Is the press a voice for the unemployed, food-stamp recipients, Appalachian miners, the urban poor, Hispanics in rural shacks, the elderly, women discriminated against in hiring and promotion, ethnic minorities with no future in North America’s downsizing economy?34
If the media sets that kind of agenda and features attributes that promote community, he believes they are fulfilling their communitarian responsibility.
CRITIQUE: ARE THE EFFECTS TOO LIMITED, THE SCOPE TOO WIDE?
When McCombs and Shaw first proposed the agenda-setting hypothesis, they saw it as a sharp break from the limited-effects model that had held sway in media research since Paul Lazarsfeld introduced the concept of selective exposure (see the Introduction to Media Effects). Although not reverting to the old magicbullet conception of media influence, McCombs and Shaw ascribed
to broadcast and print journalism the significant power to set the public’s political priorities. As years of careful research have shown, however, agenda setting doesn’t always work. Perhaps the best that could be said until the mid-1990s was that the media agenda affects the salience of some issues for some people some of the time. So in 1994, McCombs suggested that “agenda setting is a theory of limited media effects.”35 That would be quite a comedown from its original promise. The new dimension of framing reasserts a powerful media-effects model. As Ohio State University journalism professor Gerald Kosicki states, Media “gatekeepers” do not merely keep watch over information, shuffling it here and there. Instead, they engage in active construction of the messages, emphasizing certain aspects of an issue and not others.36
But Kosicki questions whether framing is even a legitimate topic of study under an agenda-setting banner. He sees nothing in McCombs and Shaw’s original model that anticipates the importance of interpretive frames. As McCombs is fond of pointing out, the evidence is there. In the lead article of a 1977 book that he and Shaw edited, they clearly previewed the current “New Frontiers” of agendas of attributes and framing:
Agenda setting as a concept is not limited to the correspondence between salience of topics for the media and the audience. We can also consider the saliency of various attributes of these objects (topics, issues, persons or whatever) reported in the media. To what extent is our view of an object shaped or influenced by the picture sketched in the media, especially by those attributes which the media deem newsworthy?
McCombs’ definition of framing appears to be quite specific: “Framing is the selection of a restricted number of thematically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object is discussed.”38 In contrast, the popularity of framing as an interpretive construct in media studies has resulted in diverse and ambiguous meanings. The way Stuart Hall and other critical theorists use the term is so elastic that the word seems to refer to anything they don’t like. Thus, I regard a narrow view of framing as a distinct advantage for empirically based media-effects research.
As for the six criteria for evaluating a social science theory, agenda setting fares well. It predicts that the public’s agenda for the salience of attitude objects and key attributes will follow the media’s lead, and it explains why some people are more susceptible to media influence than others. Those predictions are testable by using content analysis to establish the media agenda, surveys to determine public opinion, and quantitative statistical tests to determine the overlap. More than 400 empirical studies have supported and refined the theory. Even with the theorists’ added concern for the affective tone of attributes, their theory remains relatively simple. And as for practical utility, agenda setting tells journalists, advertisers, political operatives, and media scholars not only what to look for, but how they might alter the pictures in the heads of those who read, view, or listen to the news.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. If the media aren’t telling you what to think, why is their ability to tell you what to think about so important?
2. What type of person under what type of circumstances is most susceptible to the media’s agenda-setting function?
3. Sarah Palin is one of the most controversial public figures in America. What dominant set of attributes could you use to frame her visit to a children’s hospital to make her look good? How could you make her look bad?
4. Is there a recent issue that news reporters and commentators are now talking about daily that you and the people you know don’t care about? Do you think you’ll still be unconcerned two months from now?
CONVERSATIONS
View this segment online at
www.mhhe.com/griffin8 or
www.afirstlook.com.
In our conversation, Max McCombs discusses the process of framing and how this concept has changed the scope of his theory. He also answers questions posed by my students: How many issues can a person focus on at one time? If he ran the classic Chapel Hill study today, would he use CNN as a media outlet that sets the public agenda? Do TV entertainment shows have an agendasetting function? I wanted to know how he saw potential media bias. Are all news stories delivered with a spin? Does he see anything sinister about intentionally framing a story? Is there a liberal bias in the national media? I think you’ll be surprised by his direct responses.
MASS COMMUNICATION A SECOND LOOK
Recommended resource: Maxwell McCombs and Amy Reynolds, “How the News Shapes our Civic Agenda,” in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (eds.), Routledge, New York, 2009, pp. 1–16. Comprehensive summary of theory and research: Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda, Polity, Cambridge, UK, 2004.
Historical development: Maxwell McCombs and Tamara Bell, “The Agenda-Setting Role of Mass Communication,” in An Integrated Approach to Communication
Theory and Research, Michael Salwen and Donald Stacks (eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1996, pp. 93–110. Five stages of agenda-setting research and development: Maxwell McCombs, “A Look at Agenda-Setting: Past, Present and Future,” Journalism Studies, Vol. 6, 2005, pp. 543–557. Prototype election study: Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 36, 1972, pp. 176–187. Framing: Maxwell McCombs and Salma Ghanem, “The Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing,” in Framing Public Life, Stephen Reese, Oscar Gandy Jr., and August Grant (eds.), Lawrence ErlbaHarry: No you don’t. . . .
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You’re saying I’ve had sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry: No, what I’m saying is that they all want to have sex with you. Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.um, Mahwah, NJ, 2001, pp. 67–81. Relationship among agenda setting, framing, and priming: Dietram Scheufele and David Tewksbury, “Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 57, 2007, pp. 9–20. Bundles of attributes: Maxwell McCombs, “New Frontiers in Agenda Setting: Agendas of Attributes and Frames,” Mass Comm Review 24, 1997, pp. 4–24. Anthology of earlier agenda-setting research: Maxwell McCombs, Donald Shaw, and David Weaver, Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in AgendaSetting Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1997. Israeli election study: Meital Balmas and Tamir Sheafer, “Candidate Image in Election Campaigns: Attribute Agenda Setting, Affective Priming, and Voting Intentions,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 22, 2010, pp. 204–229. Focus on the theorist: William Davie and T. Michael Maher, “Maxwell McCombs: AgendaSetting Explorer,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Vol. 50, 2006, pp. 358–364. Critique: Gerald Kosicki, “Problems and Opportunities in Agenda-Setting Research,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1993, pp. 100–127.
For a theory that explains the role of media in shaping public opinion, read the chapter from previous editions on the spiral of silence.
“Male–female conversation is cross-cultural communication.”1 This simple statement is the basic premise of Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, a book that seeks to explain why men and women often talk past each other. Tannen is a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, and her research specialty is conversational style—not what people say but the way they say it. In her first book on conversational style she offers a microanalysis of six friends talking together during a two-and-a-half-hour Thanksgiving dinner.2 Tannen introduces this sociolinguistic study with a quote from E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India: “A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry.”3 Forster’s novel illustrates how people of goodwill from different cultures can grossly misunderstand each other’s intentions.
Tannen is convinced that similar miscommunication occurs all the time between women and men. The effect may be more insidious, however, because the parties usually don’t realize that they are in a cross-cultural encounter. At least when we cross a geographical border we anticipate the need to bridge a communication gap. In conversing with members of the opposite sex, Tannen notes, our failure to acknowledge different conversational styles can get us in big trouble. Most men and women don’t grasp that “talking through their problems” with each other will only make things worse if it’s their divergent ways of talking that are causing the trouble in the first place. Tannen’s writing is filled with imagery that underscores the mutually alien nature of male and female conversation styles.
When she compared the style of boys and girls who were in second grade, she felt she was looking at the discourse of “two different species.” For example, two girls could sit comfortably face-to-face and carry on a serious conversation about people they knew. But when boys were asked to talk about “something serious,” they were restless, never looked at each other, jumped from topic to topic, and talked about games and competition. These stylistic differences showed up in older kids as well. Tannen notes that “moving from the sixth-grade boys to the girls of the same age is like moving to another planet.”4 There is no evidence that we grow out of these differences as we grow up. She describes adult men and women as speaking “different words from different worlds,” and even when they use the same terms, they are “tuned to different frequencies.”
CULTURAL CONTEXT
Genderlect
A term suggesting that
masculine and feminine
styles of discourse are
best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects.
Tannen’s cross-cultural approach to gender differences departs from much of feminist scholarship that claims conversations between men and women reflect men’s efforts to dominate women. She assumes that male and female conversational styles are equally valid: “We try to talk to each other
honestly, but it seems at times that we are speaking different languages—or at least different genderlects.”5 Although the word genderlect is not original with Tannen, the term nicely captures her belief that masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects rather than as inferior or superior ways of speaking.
Tannen realizes that categorizing people and their communication according to gender is offensive to many women and men. None of us like to be told, “Oh, you’re talking just like a (wo)man.” Each of us regards himself or herself as a unique individual. But at the risk of reinforcing a simplistic reductionism that claims biology is destiny, Tannen insists there are gender differences in the ways we speak. Despite these dangers, I am joining the growing dialogue on gender and language because the risk of ignoring differences is greater than the danger of naming them.6
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY: THE CLASH OF TWO CULTURES
Do men and women really live in different worlds? Tannen cites dialogue from Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and Jules Feiffer’s Grown Ups to support her claim that the different ways women and men talk reflect their separate cultures.
Whenever I discuss Tannen’s theory in class, students are quick to bring up conversations between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in the 1989 Rob Reiner film When Harry Met Sally. I’ll use the words of Harry and Sally in the film written by Nora Ephron to illustrate the gender differences that Tannen proposes. The movie begins as two University of Chicago students who have never met before share an 18-hour ride to New York City. Harry is dating Sally’s good friend Amanda. Their different perspectives become obvious when Harry makes a verbal pass at his traveling companion just a few hours into the drive: Sally: Amanda is my friend!
Harry: So?
Sally: So, you’re going with her.
Harry: So?
Sally: So you’re coming on to me.
Harry: No I wasn’t. . . .
Sally: We are just going to be friends, OK?
Harry: Great, friends, best thing. [Pause] You realize of course we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I’m saying is . . . , and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form . . . , is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally: That’s not true, I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry: No you don’t. . . .
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You’re saying I’ve had sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry: No, what I’m saying is that they all want to have sex with you. Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: How do you know?
Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds
unattractive. Harry: No, you pretty much want to nail them too.
Harry next meets Sally five years later on an airplane. He surprises her when he announces that he’s getting married. Sally obviously approves, but the ensuing conversation shows that they are still worlds apart in their thinking: Sally: Well it’s wonderful. It’s nice to see you embracing life in this manner. Harry: Yeah, plus, you know, you just get to a certain point where you get tired of the whole thing.
Sally: What whole thing?
Harry: The whole life of a single guy thing. You meet someone, you have the safe lunch, you decide you like each other enough to move on to dinner. You go dancing, . . . go back to her place, you have sex, and the minute you’re finished you know what goes through your mind? How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can get up and go home? Is thirty seconds enough? Sally: [Incredulous tone] That’s what you’re thinking? Is that true? Harry: Sure. All men think that. How long do you like to be held afterward? All night, right? See that’s the problem. Somewhere between thirty seconds and all night is your problem.
Sally: I don’t have a problem.
Harry: Yeah you do.
The casual viewer of these scenes will hear little more than two individuals quarreling about sex. Yet neither conversation is about the desirability of sex per se, but about what sex means to the parties involved. Tannen’s theory of genderlect styles suggests that Harry’s and Sally’s words and the way they are said reflect the separate worlds of men and women. Harry would probably regard Sally as a resident of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, while Sally might see Harry as coming from the Planet of the Apes or Animal House. But each person obviously finds the other’s view alien and threatening. Sally, as a woman, wants intimacy. Harry, as a man, wants independence.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
WOMEN’S DESIRE FOR CONNECTION VS. MEN’S DESIRE FOR STATUS
Tannen says that, more than anything else, women seek human connection. Harry’s initial come-on irritates Sally because he is urging her to ignore her friendship with Amanda. She is further saddened at Harry’s conviction that women and men can’t be friends. But she is especially shocked at Harry’s later revelation that for him the act of sex marks the end of intimacy rather than its beginning. Both times Harry insists that he is speaking for all men. If what Harry says is true, Sally does indeed have a problem. Harry’s words imply that true solidarity with a man would be difficult to achieve, if not impossible. According to Tannen, men are concerned mainly with status. They are working hard to preserve their independence as they jockey for position on a hierarchy of competitive accomplishment.
In both conversations, Harry is the one who introduces the topic, starts to argue, talks the most, and enjoys the last word. In other words, he wins. For Harry, sexual intercourse represents achievement rather than communion. “Nailing” a woman is a way to score in a never-ending game of who’s on top. A woman’s desire for intimacy threatens his freedom and sidetracks him from his quest to be one up in all his relationships. Harry’s opinion that all men think like he does may strike you as extreme. Tannen agrees. She believes that some men are open to intimacy, just as some women have a concern for power.
You’ll recall that Baxter and Montgomery’s relational dialectics assumes that all people feel a tension between connection and autonomy in their relationships (see Chapter 12). Tannen agrees that many men and women would like to have intimacy and independence in every situation if they could, but she doesn’t think it’s possible. As a result, these differences in priority tend to give men and women differing views of the same situation. Girls and women feel it is crucial that they be liked by their peers, a form of involvement that focuses on symmetrical connection. Boys and men feel it is crucial that they be respected by their peers, a form of involvement that focuses on
asymmetrical status.
RAPPORT TALK VS. REPORT TALK
Why is Tannen so certain that women focus on connection while men focus on status? Her answer is that she listens to men and women talk. Just as an ethnographer pores over the words of native informants to discover what has meaning within their society, so Tannen scrutinizes the conversation of representative speakers from the feminine culture and the masculine culture to determine their core values. She offers numerous examples of the divergent styles she observes in everyday communication. These linguistic differences give her confidence that the connection–status distinction structures every verbal contact between women and men.
Consider the following types of talk, most of which are evident in the film When Harry Met Sally. At root, each of these speech forms shows that women value rapport talk, while men value report talk.
1. Private Speaking Vs. Public Speaking
Folk wisdom suggests that women talk more than men. Tannen cites a version of an old joke that has a wife complaining to her husband, “For the past 10
CHAPTER 34: GENDERLECT STYLES
Rapport talk
The typical conversational style of women,
which seeks to establish
connection with others.
Report talk
The typical monologic
style of men, which seeks to command attention, convey information,
and win arguments.
years you’ve never told me what you’re thinking.” Her husband caustically replies, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.” Tannen grants the validity of the wordy-woman–mute-male stereotype as it applies to a couple alone. She finds that women talk more than men do in private conversations, and she endorses Alice Walker’s notion that a woman falls in love with a man because she sees in him “a giant ear.”8 Sally continually tries to connect with Harry through words. She also shares the details of her life over coffee with her close friends Alice and Marie. But according to Tannen, Sally’s rapport style of relating doesn’t transfer well to the public arena, where men vie for ascendancy and speak much more than women do.
Harry’s lecture style is typical of the way men seek to establish a one-up position. Tannen finds that men use talk as a weapon. The function of the long explanations they use is to command attention, convey information, and insist on agreement. Even Harry’s rare self-disclosure to his buddy Jess is delivered within the competitive contexts of jogging, hitting a baseball in a batting cage, and watching a football game. When men retreat from the battle to the safety of their own homes, they no longer feel compelled to talk to protect their status. They lay their weapons down and retreat into a peaceful silence. Harry is unusual in that he’s willing to talk about the nuances of his life with Sally. Most men avoid this kind of small talk. But in private conversation with Sally, Harry still speaks as though he were defending a case in court. He codifies rules for relationships, and when Sally raises a question, he announces an “amendment to the earlier rule.” Men’s monologic style of communication is appropriate for report, but not for rapport.
2. Telling a Story
Along with theorists Clifford Geertz, Michael Pacanowsky, and Walter Fisher (see Chapters 20 and 24), Tannen recognizes that the stories people tell reveal a great deal about their hopes, needs, and values. Consistent with men’s focus on status and Billy Crystal’s portrayal of Harry, Tannen notes that men tell more stories than women do—especially jokes. Telling jokes is a masculine way to negotiate status. Men’s humorous stories have a can-you-top-this? flavor that holds attention and elevates the storyteller above his audience. When men aren’t trying to be funny, they tell stories in which they are heroes, often acting alone to overcome great obstacles. On the other hand, women tend to express their desire for community by telling stories about others. On rarer occasions when a woman is a character in her own narrative, she usually describes herself as doing something foolish rather than acting in a clever manner. This downplaying of self puts her on the same level with her hearers, thus strengthening her network of support.
3. Listening
A woman listening to a story or an explanation tends to hold eye contact, offer head nods, and react with yeah, uh-huh, mmmn, right, or other responses that indicate I’m listening or I’m with you. For a man concerned with status, that overt style of active listening means I agree with you, so he avoids putting himself in a submissive, or one-down, stance. Women, of course, conclude that men aren’t listening, which is not necessarily true.
Cooperative overlap
A supportive interruption
often meant to show
agreement and solidarity
with the speaker.
When a woman who is listening starts to speak before the other person is finished, she usually does so to add a word of agreement, to show support, or to finish a sentence with what she thinks the speaker will say. Tannen labels this cooperative overlap. She says that from a woman’s perspective, cooperative overlap is a sign of rapport rather than a competitive ploy to control the conversation. She also recognizes that men don’t see it that way. Men regard any interruption as a power move to take control of the conversation, because in their world that’s how it’s done. Those who win the conversational game can take a don’t-talkwhile-I’m-interrupting-you stance and make it stick. Tannen concludes that these different styles of conversation management are the source of continuing irritation in cross-gender talk. “Whereas women’s cooperative overlaps frequently annoy men by seeming to co-opt their topic, men frequently annoy women by usurping or switching the topic.”9
4. Asking Questions
Tag question
A short question at the
end of a declarative statement, often used by
women to soften the sting
of potential disagreement
or invite open, friendly
dialogue.
When Sally and Harry started out on their trip to New York, Sally produced a map and a detailed set of directions. It’s safe to assume that Harry never used them. According to Tannen, men don’t ask for that kind of help. Every admission of ignorance whittles away at the image of self-sufficiency that is so important to a man. “If self-respect is bought at the cost of a few extra minutes of travel time, it is well worth the price,” she explains.10
Women ask questions to establish a connection with others. Even a five-minute stop at a gas station to check the best route to New York can create a sense of community, however brief. Tannen notes that when women state their
opinions, they often tag them with a question at the end of the sentence: “That was a good movie, don’t you think?” Tag questions soften the sting of potential disagreement that might drive people apart. They are also invitations to participate in open, friendly dialogue. But to men, they make the speaker seem wishy-washy. Ever since You Just Don’t Understand was published, Tannen has entertained questions during television interviews, radio call-in shows, and discussions following lectures. Women almost always seek more information or offer their own experiences that validate her insights. That’s now true for men as well. But when the book was riding high on best-seller lists, men would often pose questions that seemed designed to bring her down from her high horse or to establish their own expertise. Even though she understands that public face is crucially important to men, she identifies with the words of a wife in a short story: “I’d have been upset about making the mistake—but not about people knowing. That part’s not a big deal to me.” Her husband replied, “Oh, is it ever a big deal to me.”11
5. Conflict
In the second half of When Harry Met Sally, Harry blows up at their friends Jess and Marie and then storms out of the room. After making an excuse for his behavior, Sally goes to him to try to calm him down.
Harry: I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it.
Sally: Harry, you’re going to have to try and find a way of not expressing every feeling that you have every moment that you have them.
HAPTER 34: GENDERLECT STYLES
Harry: Oh, really?
Sally: Yes, there are times and places for things.
Harry: Well the next time you’re giving a lecture series on social graces, would you let me know, ’cause I’ll sign up.
Sally: Hey. You don’t have to take your anger out on me.
Harry: Oh, I think I’m entitled to throw a little anger your way. Especially when I’m being told how to live my life by Miss Hospital Corners. Sally: What’s that supposed to mean?
Harry: I mean, nothing bothers you. You never get upset about anything.
This scene illustrates Tannen’s description of much male–female strife. Since they see life as a contest, many men are more comfortable with conflict and are therefore less likely to hold themselves in check. By trying to placate Harry and excuse his anger toward their friends, Sally responds in what Tannen believes is an equally typical fashion. “To most women, conflict is a threat to connection—to be avoided at all costs.”12
The dialogue illustrates another feature of conflict between men and women. As often happens, Sally’s attempt to avert a similar outburst in the future sparks new conflict with Harry. Tannen says men have an early warning system that’s geared to detect signs that they are being told what to do. Harry bristles at the thought that Sally is trying to limit his autonomy, so her efforts backfire.
“NOW YOU’RE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND”
What if Tannen is right and all conversation between men and women is best understood as cross-cultural communication? Does this mean genderlect can be taught, like French, Swahili, or any other foreign language? Tannen offers a qualified yes. She regards sensitivity training as an effort to teach men how to speak in a feminine voice, while assertiveness training is an effort to teach women how to speak in a masculine voice. But she’s aware of our ethnocentric tendency to think it’s the other person who needs fixing, so she expresses only guarded hope that men and women will alter their linguistic styles. Tannen has much more confidence in the benefits of multicultural understanding. She believes that understanding each other’s style, and the motives behind it, is a first move in overcoming destructive responses. The answer is for both men and women to try to take each other on
their own terms rather than applying the standards of one group to the behavior of the other. . . . Understanding style differences for what they are takes the sting out of them.13
Tannen suggests that one way to measure whether we are gaining cross-gender insight is a drop in the frequency of the oft-heard lament You just don’t understand. Sally basically says that when Harry declares his love for her at a New Year’s Eve party after months of estrangement. “It just doesn’t work that way,” she cries. But Harry shows that he does understand what’s important to Sally and that he can cross the cultural border of gender to connect through rapport talk.
“And do you, Deborah Tannen, think they know what they’re talking about?” © Peter Steiner/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com
Then how ’bout this way. I love that you get cold when it’s seventy-one degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts. I love that after I spend a day with you I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night.
Dumbfounded, Sally realizes that Harry understands a lot more than she thought he did, and he used her linguistic style to prove it. The viewer hopes that Sally has an equal understanding of report talk, which is the native tongue of Harry and other men who live in the land of the status hierarchy.
CHAPTER 34: GENDERLECT STYLES
ETHICAL REFLECTION: GILLIGAN’S DIFFERENT VOICE
For more than 30 years, Carol Gilligan was a professor of education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her book In a Different Voice presents a theory of moral development claiming that women tend to think and speak in an ethical voice different from that of men.14 Gilligan’s view of gender differences parallels Deborah Tannen’s analysis of men as wanting independence and women as desiring human connection. Gilligan is convinced that most men seek autonomy and think of moral maturity in terms of justice. She’s equally certain that women desire to be linked with others and that they regard their ultimate ethical responsibility as one of care. On the basis of the quantity and quality of feminine relationships, Gilligan contrasts women who care with men who are fair. Individual rights, equality before the law, fair play, a square deal—all these masculine ethical goals can be pursued without personal ties to others. Justice is impersonal. But women’s moral judgment is more contextual, more immersed in the details of relationships and narratives.15 Sensitivity to others, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and peacemaking all reflect interpersonal involvement.
Gilligan’s work arose in response to the theory of moral development of her Harvard colleague Lawrence Kohlberg, who identified increasing levels of ethical maturity by analyzing responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas.16 According to his justice-based scoring system, the average young adult female was a full stage behind her male counterpart. Women were rated as less morally mature than men because they were less concerned about abstract concepts like justice, truth, and freedom. Instead, they based their ethical decisions on considerations of compassion, loyalty, and a strong sense of responsibility to prevent pain and alleviate suffering. Their moral reasoning was more likely to reflect Buber’s call for genuine I-Thou relationships than Kant’s categorical imperative. Gilligan is comfortable with the idea that men and women speak in different ethical voices. But she’s disturbed that when women don’t follow the normative path laid out by men, “the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with women.”17 She points out “the unfair paradox that the very traits that have traditionally defined the ‘goodness’ of women are those that mark them as deficient in moral development.”18
Although Gilligan’s theory is more descriptive than prescriptive, the underlying assumption is that the way things are reflects the way things ought to be. Most ethical theorists are bothered by the idea of a double standard—justice from some, care from others. Traditional moral philosophy has never suggested different ethics for different groups. Yet readers of both sexes report that Gilligan’s theory resonates with their personal experience.
CRITIQUE: IS TANNEN SOFT ON RESEARCH—AND MEN?
Is male–female conversation really cross-cultural communication? Tannen suggests we use the aha factor to test the validity of her two-culture hypothesis: Aha factor
A subjective standard
ascribing validity to an
idea when it resonates
with one’s personal
experience.
If my interpretation is correct, then readers, on hearing my explanation, will exclaim within their heads, “Aha!” Something they have intuitively sensed will be made explicit. . . . When the subject of analysis is human interaction—a process that we engage in, all our lives—each reader can measure interpretation against her/his own experience.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
If we agree to this subjective standard of validity, Tannen easily makes her case. For example, in the book You Just Don’t Understand, she describes how women who verbally share problems with men are often frustrated by the masculine tendency to offer solutions. According to Tannen, women don’t want advice; they’re looking for the gift of understanding. When I first read her book, I had the kind of aha reaction that Tannen says validates her theory. I suddenly realized that her words described me. Anytime my wife, Jean, tells me about a problem she’s facing, I either turn coldly analytic or dive in and try to fix things for the woman I love. I now know that Jean would rather have me just listen or voice some version of I feel your pain.
Brittany’s application log suggests that she’s convinced. Perhaps her masculine upbringing explains why she experienced the aha factor even before she read about Tannen’s theory.
From ages 4 to 11, I was raised by my single father. During this developmental time in my life, I conversed mainly with Dad, and therefore adopted the kind of report talk that Tannen characterizes as primarily male. Most of my friends were boys and I had difficulties in making connection with girls my age. After my dad eventually remarried and I had a stepmother to talk with, I began to develop friendships with girls in high school. During a conversation one of them said, “You always try to think of a solution rather than just listen.” I understand now that I picked up this communication trait from my dad. Whenever we faced conflict in our home, we immediately addressed it and figured out how we should deal with it. As I have developed more relationships with women I feel my genderlect style has moved towards rapport talk, which Tannen categorizes as primarily female. Sometimes though, I’ll have a conversation with a close guy friend back home who will say, “You are the only girl who I’ve ever been able to talk with like this.”
Apparently Tannen’s analysis of common misunderstandings between men and women has struck a responsive chord in a million other readers. You Just Don’t Understand was on the best-seller list for most of the 1990s. And in that decade it was rated by hundreds of mental health professionals as the best of 1,000 self-help books.20 But does a chorus of ahas mean that she is right? The late astrologer and psychic Jeane Dixon might have made 10 predictions, and if only one came true, that’s the prophecy people remembered and lauded her for. They forgot that the other nine turned out to be wrong. According to many social scientists, Tannen’s “proof” may be like that.
Perhaps using selective data is the only way to support a reductionist claim that women are one way and men are another. Tannen’s theme of intimacy versus independence echoes one of the dialectics Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery observe in Chapter 12. However, Tannen suggests none of the flux, internal contradiction, or ongoing complexity of human existence that relational dialectics describes. Tannen’s women are programmed within their gendered culture to embrace connection and deny any desire for autonomy. Her men seek autonomy but avoid connection. Neither group feels any sense of internal contradiction. Saying it’s so may eventually make it so—self-fulfilling prophecy is a powerful force. But as I stated in the introduction to this section, most gender researchers spot more diversity within each gender than between them.
Adrianne Kunkel (University of Kansas) and Brant Burleson directly challenged the different-cultures perspective that is at the heart of Tannen’s genderlect
CHAPTER 34: GENDERLECT STYLES
theory. Recall that Burleson headed a long-term research program on comforting communication as a skill of cognitively complex people who are able to craft person-centered messages (see Chapter 8). According to Tannen’s two-culture worldview, this kind of verbal support should be highly desired in the world of women but of little value in the competitive world of men. Kunkel and Burleson’s empirical research doesn’t bear out Tannen’s claim. They said while it’s true that women often do it better, both sexes place an equally high value on comforting communication:
Both men and women view highly person-centered comforting messages as most sensitive and effective; both see messages low in person-centeredness as relatively insensitive and ineffective. . . . Both sexes view comforting skills as important in the context of various personal relationships and as substantially more important than instrumentally focused communication skills.21
On the basis of this shared meaning, Kunkel and Burleson rejected the differentcultures perspective. They believed it was a myth that had lost its narrative force. Men and women do understand.
A very different critique comes from feminist scholars. For example, German linguist Senta Troemel-Ploetz accuses Tannen of having written a dishonest book that ignores issues of male dominance, control, power, sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and verbal insults. “If you leave out power,” she says, “you do not understand talk.”22 The two genderlects are anything but equal. “Men are used to dominating women; they do it especially in conversations. . . . Women are trained to please; they have to please also in conversations.”23 Contrary to Tannen’s thesis that mutual understanding will bridge the culture gap between the sexes, Troemel-Ploetz believes that “men understand quite well what women want but they give only when it suits them. In many situations they refuse to give and women cannot make them give.”24 She thinks it’s ridiculous to assume that men will give up power voluntarily. To prove her point, she suggests doing a follow-up
study on men who read Tannen’s best seller. Noting that many women readers of You Just Don’t Understand give the book to their husbands to read, Troemel-Ploetz states that if Tannen’s theory is true, a follow-up study should show that these men are now putting down their papers at the breakfast table and talking empathetically with their wives. She doesn’t think it will happen.
The discussion of gender and power will continue in the next two chapters.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. Based on Tannen’s genderlect analysis, do you agree with Harry that men and women can’t be friends? Why or why not?
2. Apart from the topics of conflict, questions, listening, storytelling, and public vs. private speaking, can you come up with your own examples of how rapport talk is different from report talk?
3. What are the practical implications for you if talk with members of the opposite sex is, indeed, cross-cultural communication? 4. Tannen’s aha factor is similar to Carl Rogers’ standard of basing our knowledge on personal experience (see Chapter 4). What are the dangers of relying solely on the aha factor?
CULTURAL CONTEXT
SELF-QUIZ
A SECOND LOOK
www.mhhe.com/griffin8
Recommended resource: Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, Ballantine, New York, 1990.
Conversational style: Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant! William Morrow, New York, 1986.
Linguistic microanalysis of conversation: Deborah Tannen, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1984.
Gender differences in children’s talk: Deborah Tannen, “Gender Differences in Topical Coherence: Creating Involvement in Best Friends’ Talk,” Discourse Processes, Vol. 13, 1990, pp. 73–90.
Discourse analysis: Deborah Tannen, Gender and Discourse, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, 1994/96.
Gendered language in the workplace: Deborah Tannen, Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work—Language, Sex, and Power, Avon, New York, 1994. Gendered language in the family: Deborah Tannen, I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking in Families, Ballantine, New York, 2002.
Support of two-culture hypothesis: Anthony Mulac, James Bradac, and Pamela Gibbons, “Empirical Support for the Gender-as-Culture Hypothesis: An Intercultural Analysis of Male/Female Language Differences,” Human Communication Research, Vol. 27, 2001, pp. 121–152.
Communication scholars’ dialogue on two-culture hypothesis: “Reflections on the Different Cultures Hypothesis: A Scholars’ Symposium,” Sandra Metts (ed.), Personal Relationships, Vol. 4, 1997, pp. 201–253.
Critique of two-culture hypothesis: Adrianne Kunkel and Brant Burleson, “Social Support and the Emotional Lives of Men and Women: An Assessment of the Different Cultures Perspective,” in Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication, Daniel Canary and Kathryn Dindia (eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1998, pp. 101–125. Critique centering on power discrepancy: Senta Troemel-Ploetz, “Review Essay: Selling the Apolitical,” Discourse and Society, Vol. 2, 1991, pp. 489–502.
For a chapter-length description of
Carol Gilligan’s different voice,
click on Theory List at
www.afirstlook.com.
Objective
Interpretive
Critical tradition
Phenomenological tradition
Muted Group Theory of Cheris Kramarae
Cheris Kramarae maintains that language is literally a man-made construction. The language of a particular culture does not serve all its speakers equally, for not all speakers contribute in an equal fashion to its formulation. Women (and members of other subordinate groups) are not as free or as able as men are to say what they wish, when and where they wish, because the words and the norms for their use have been formulated by the dominant group, men.1
According to Kramarae and other feminist theorists, women’s words are discounted in our society; women’s thoughts are devalued. When women try to overcome this inequity, the masculine control of communication places them at a tremendous disadvantage. Man-made language “aids in defining, depreciating and excluding women.”2 Women are thus a muted group.
For many years Kramarae was a professor of speech communication and sociology at the University of Illinois. She has also served as a dean for the International Woman’s University in Germany and is now a visiting professor at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. She began her research career in 1974 when she conducted a systematic study of the way women were portrayed in cartoons.3 She found that women were notable mostly by their absence. A quick survey of the cartoon art I’ve used in this book will show that little has changed since Kramarae’s study. Only 20 of the 54 cartoons contain female characters, and only 10 of these women speak. All but two of the cartoonists are men.
Kramarae discovered that women in cartoons were usually depicted as emotional, apologetic, or just plain wishy-washy. Compared with the simple, forceful statements voiced by cartoon males, the words assigned to female characters were vague, flowery, and peppered with adjectives like nice and pretty. Kramarae noted at the time that women who don’t appreciate this form of comic put-down are often accused by men of having no sense of humor or simply told to “lighten up.” According to Kramarae, this type of male dominance is just one of the many ways that women are rendered inarticulate in our society. For the last 35 years Kramarae has been a leader in the effort to explain and alter the muted status of women and other marginalized groups.
MUTED GROUPS: BLACK HOLES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S UNIVERSE
Muted group
People belonging to lowpower groups who must
change their language
when communicating
publicly, thus, their ideas
are often overlooked;
e.g., women.
The idea of women as a muted group was first proposed by Oxford University social anthropologist Edwin Ardener. In his monograph “Belief and the Problem of Women,” Ardener noted the strange tendency of many ethnographers to claim to have “cracked the code” of a culture without ever making any direct reference to the half of society made up of women. Field researchers often justify this omission by reporting the difficulty of using women as cultural informants. Females “giggle when young, snort when old, reject the question, laugh at the topic,” and generally make life difficult for scholars trained in the scientific (masculine) method of inquiry.4 Ardener acknowledged the challenge, but he also reminded his colleagues how suspicious they’d be of an anthropologist who wrote about the men of a tribe on the sole basis of talking to the women.
Ardener initially assumed that inattention to women’s experience was a problem of gender unique to social anthropology. But along with his Oxford co-worker Shirley Ardener, he began to realize that mutedness is due to the lack of power that besets any group occupying the low end of the totem pole. People with little clout have trouble giving voice to their perceptions. Mutedness doesn’t mean that low-power groups are completely silent.5 The issue is whether people can say what they want to say when and where they want to say it. Muted groups must change their language when communicating in the public domain, and thus cannot fully share their true thoughts.6 As a result, they are often overlooked, muffled, and rendered invisible—”mere black holes in someone else’s universe.”7 Cheris Kramarae is certain that men’s dominant power position in society guarantees that the public mode of expression won’t be directly available to women. Her extension of the Ardeners’ initial concept offers insight into why women are muted and what can be done to loosen men’s
lock on public modes of communication. Kramarae argues that the ever-prevalent public–private distinction in language is a convenient way to exaggerate gender differences and pose separate sexual spheres of activity. This is, of course, a pitfall into which Deborah Tannen virtually leaps (see Chapter 34). Within the logic of a two-sphere assumption, the words of women usually are considered appropriate in the home—a “small world” of interpersonal communication. This private world is somehow less important than the “large world” of significant public debate—a place where the words of men resonate.
Elizabeth, who is now a grad student at Purdue University preparing to become a professor of critical rhetoric, describes how men’s public discourse shapes the meaning of one of her favorite activities:
I am a passionate knitter. In the dominant communication code, knitting is associated with domestic women. I cannot count the number of times when men have made jokes or comments about me preparing to be a good wife, or looking for a husband, while I am knitting. But I knit because I enjoy it. I love working with my hands and knitting makes a good change from schoolwork. My choice to knit has nothing to do with finding a husband or preparing to be a housewife. Still, even though knitting is an activity that is primarily engaged in by women, it is men who define its meaning.
Kramarae wonders what it would be like if there were a word that pointed to the connection of public and private communication. If these spheres have equal worth and that similarities between women and men are more important than their differences. Since there is no such word in our lexicon, I think of this textbook as a public mode of communication. I am a male. I realize that in the process of trying to present muted group theory with integrity, I may unconsciously put a masculine spin on Kramarae’s ideas and the perceptions of women. In an effort to minimize this bias, I will quote extensively from Kramarae and other feminist scholars. Kramarae is just one of many communication professionals who seek to unmask the systematic silencing of a feminine voice. I’ll also draw freely on the words and experiences of other women to illustrate the communication double bind that Kramarae says is a feminine fact of life. This reliance on personal narrative is consistent with a feminist research agenda that takes women’s experiences seriously.
THE MASCULINE POWER TO NAME EXPERIENCE
Kramarae starts with the assumption that “women perceive the world differently from men because of women’s and men’s different experience and activities rooted in the division of labor.”8 Kramarae rejects Freud’s simplistic notion that “anatomy is destiny.” She is certain, however, that power discrepancies between the sexes ensure that women will view the world in a way different from men. While women vary in many ways, in most cultures, if not all, women’s talk is subject to male control and censorship. French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir underscored this common feminine experience when she declared, “‘I am woman’: on this truth must be based all further discussion.”9 The problem facing women, according to Kramarae, is that further discussions about how the world works never take place on a level playing field. “Because of their political dominance, the men’s system of perception is dominant, impeding the free expression of the women’s alternative models of the world.”10 Note that my phrase level playing field is a metaphor drawn from competitive team sports—an experience familiar to more men than women. This is precisely Kramarae’s point. As possessors of the public mode of expression, men frame the discussion.
If a man wants to contest the point about a tilted playing field, he can argue in the familiar idiom of sports. But a woman who takes issue with the metaphor of competition has to contest it with stereotypically masculine linguistic terms. Mead’s symbolic interactionist perspective asserts that the extent of knowing is the extent of naming (see Chapter 5). If this is true, whoever has the ability to make names stick possesses an awesome power. Kramarae notes that men’s control of the dominant mode of expression has produced a vast stock of derogatory, gender-specific terms to refer to women’s talking—catty, bitchy, shrill, cackling, gossipy, chitchat, sharp-tongued, and so forth. There is no corresponding vocabulary to disparage men’s conversation. In case you think this lexical bias is limited to descriptions of speech, consider the variety of terms in the English language to describe sexually promiscuous individuals. By one count, there are 22 gender-related words to label men who are sexually loose—playboy, stud, rake, gigolo, player, Don Juan, lothario, womanizer, and so on. There are more than 200 words that label sexually loose women—slut, whore, hooker, prostitute, trollop, mistress, harlot, Jezebel, hussy, concubine, streetwalker, strumpet, easy lay, and the like.11 Since most surveys of sexual activity show that more men than women have multiple sexual partners, there’s no doubt that the inordinate number of terms describing women serves the interests of men.
Under the socio-cultural tradition in Chapter 4, I introduced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that language shapes our perception of reality. Kramarae suggests that women are often silenced by not having a publicly recognized vocabulary through which to express their experience. She says that “words constantly ignored may eventually come to be unspoken and perhaps even unthought.”12 After a while, muted women may even come to doubt the validity of their experience and the legitimacy of their feelings.
MEN AS THE GATEKEEPERS OF COMMUNICATION
Gatekeepers
Editors and other arbiters
of culture who determine
which books, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts,
etc. will appear in the
mass media.
Even if the public mode of expression contained a rich vocabulary to describe feminine experience, women would still be muted if their modes of expression were ignored or ridiculed. Indeed, Kramarae describes a “good-ole-boys” cultural establishment of gatekeepers that virtually excludes women’s art, poetry, plays, film scripts, public address, and scholarly essays from society’s mass media. She notes that women were locked out of the publishing business for 500 years. It wasn’t until the 1970s and the establishment of women’s presses in the Western world that women could exercise ongoing influence through the print medium. For that reason, Kramarae sees traditional mainstream communication as malestream expression. Long before Edwin Ardener noted women’s absence in anthropological research, Virginia Woolf protested women’s nonplace in recorded history. The British novelist detected an incongruity between the way men characterize women in fiction and how women concurrently appear in history books. “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”13 Feminist writer Dorothy Smith claims that women’s absence from history is a result of closed-circuit masculine scholarship.
Men attend to and treat as significant only what men say. The circle of men whose writing and talk was significant to each other extends backwards in time as far as our records reach. What men were doing was relevant to men, was written by men about men for men. Men listened and listen to what one another said.14
As an example of men’s control of the public record, Cheris Kramarae cites the facts surrounding her change of name. When she was married in Ohio, the law required her to take the name of her husband. So at the direction of the state, she became Cheris Rae Kramer. Later, when it became legal for her to be her own person, she reordered the sounds and spelling to Cheris Kramarae. Many people questioned Kramarae about whether her name change was either loving or wise. Yet no one asked her husband why he kept his name. Kramarae points out that both the law and the conventions of proper etiquette have served men well.
SPEAKING ONLINE: THE POTENTIAL OF THE INTERNET
With the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, some thought the technology might end men’s gatekeeping role. Gender is difficult to ignore when faceto-face, but as social information processing theory observes, nonverbal cues indicating gender are often absent when communicating online (see Chapter 11). Kramarae was skeptical, noting that most leading computer scientists were male. Dominant Internet metaphors like information superhighway and new frontier bore a masculine flavor. In the Internet’s early days, women often appeared only as objects of men’s sexual gratification, such as on sex-oriented listservs and popular pictures of Playboy nudes.15 Though recent history suggests that the Internet hasn’t ended women’s muting, Kramarae is cautiously optimistic. Her recent work identifies three forms of online communication that, with a bit of creativity, might give voice to muted groups.
Second shift/third shift
Work as family caretaker,
then work as a student,
both undertaken after
working a full-time job.
Online education. Many women work at least eight hours a weekday— their first shift. The second shift begins when they commute home to cook dinner, tidy the house, and corral resistant children for bedtime. After completing these traditionally feminine chores, some women begin what Kramarae describes as the third shift—education. Compared to studying in brick-and-mortar classrooms, online education allows such students to learn around the demands of their first two shifts.16 But despite the flexibility of online classes, men often dominate women in online class discussions. Kramarae argues that professors should serve as discussion moderators who actively work against muting and sexual harassment. She also criticizes university administrators for treating female online students like they’re “on the sidelines of higher education” while ignoring the social realities that limit women’s participation in traditional classrooms.17 Blogs. Kramarae is enthusiastic about blogs—online journals that are immediately publishable and available to all Internet users—because they are “more decentralized forms of interaction than the traditional essay or argument. . . . For example, many woman bloggers post personal stories, which may invite empathy, critical reflection, and an open conversation.”18 On the other hand, not all blogs are created equal. News media and Internet users in general regard political and news blogs as particularly important. Kramarae claims that these “A-list” blogs are in the masculine mode of public expression. Perhaps that’s why women bloggers who enter this stream of conversation receive more abusive comments than do their male counterparts.
Wikis. You’ve probably accessed Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia editable by anyone. But you may not know that many other wikis exist, devoted to topics ranging from cooking to job hunting to Harry Potter. Kramarae experimented with the use of a wiki to co-author an academic article. Comparing with other methods of collaboration, she praised wikis as “more like a nurturing and reflective dialogue rather than a threatening and oppositional conflict which might silence one or the other collaborator.”20 You can access her wiki online,21 but as of this writing, few have contributed to the essay. Only time will tell whether wikis foster the sort of creative collaboration that Kramarae and other feminists value.
SPEAKING WOMEN’S TRUTH IN MEN’S TALK: THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION
Assuming masculine dominance of public communication to be a current reality, Kramarae concludes that “in order to participate in society women must transform their own models in terms of the received male system of expression.”22 Like speaking a second language, this translation process requires constant effort and usually leaves a woman wondering whether she’s said it “just right.” One woman writer said men can “tell it straight.” Women have to “tell it slant.”23 Think back again to Mead’s symbolic interactionism (see Chapter 5). His theory describes minding as an automatic pause before we speak in order to consider how those who are listening might respond. These periods of hesitation grow longer when we feel linguistically impoverished. According to Kramarae, women have to choose their words carefully in a public forum.
“What women want to say and can say best cannot be said easily because the language template is not of their own making.”24
I have gained a new appreciation of the difficulty women face in translating their experiences into man-made language by discussing Kramarae’s ideas with three women friends. Marsha, Kathy, and Susan have consciously sought and achieved positions of leadership in professions where women are rarely seen and almost never heard.
Marsha is a litigation attorney who was the first woman president of the Hillsborough County Bar Association (Florida) and was chair of a branch of the Federal Reserve Board that advised Alan Greenspan. A local magazine article spotlighted five “power players of Tampa Bay”: The hero of the 1991 Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was one; Marsha was another. Marsha attributes her success to a conscious shifting of gears when she addresses the law. I’ve learned to talk like a man. I consciously lower my voice, speak more slowly, think bigger, and use sports analogies. I care about my appearance, but a woman who is too attractive or too homely has a problem. A man can be drop-dead gorgeous or ugly as sin and get along OK. I’ve been told that I’m the most feared and respected attorney in the firm, but that’s not the person I live with day by day. After work I go home and make reindeer pins out of dog biscuits with my daughters.
Kathy is an ordained minister who works with high school students and young adults. She is the best speaker I’ve ever heard in a public address class. Working in an organization that traditionally excludes women from up-front speaking roles, Kathy is recognized as a star communicator. Like Marsha, she feels women have little margin for error when they speak in public. Women have to work both sides to pull it off. I let my appearance and delivery say feminine—jewelry, lipstick, warm soft voice. But I plan my content to appeal to men as well. I can’t get away with just winging it. I prepare carefully, know my script, use lots of imagery from the world of guys. Girls learn to be interested in whatever men want to talk about, but men aren’t used to listening to the things that interest women. I rarely refer to cooking or movies that might be dismissed as “chick flicks.”
“The committee on women’s rights will now come to order.” Reproduced by permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk Susan is the academic dean of a professional school within a university. When her former college closed, Susan orchestrated the transfer of her entire program and faculty to another university. She recently received the Professional of the Year award in her field. When she first attended her national deans’ association, only 8 out of 50 members were women. I was very silent. I hated being there. If you didn’t communicate by the men’s rules you were invisible. The star performers were male and they came on strong. But no one was listening; everyone was preparing their own response. The meeting oozed one-upmanship. At the reception it was all “Hail fellow well met.” You wouldn’t dare say, “Look, I’m having this rough situation I’m dealing with. Have you ever faced this problem?” It was only when some of the women got together for coffee or went shopping that I could be open about my experiences.
Although their status and abilities clearly show that Marsha, Kathy, and Susan are remarkable individuals, their experience as women in male hierarchical structures supports muted group theory. Kramarae says that “men have structured a value system and a language that reflects that value system. Women have had to work through the system organized by men.”25 For women with less skill and self-confidence than Marsha, Kathy, or Susan, that prospect can be daunting.
SPEAKING OUT IN PRIVATE: NETWORKING WITH WOMEN
Susan’s relief at the chance to talk freely with other female deans illustrates a central tenet of muted group theory. Kramarae states that “females are likely to find ways to express themselves outside the dominant public modes of expression used by males in both their verbal conventions and their nonverbal behavior.”26 Kramarae lists a variety of back-channel routes that women use to discuss their experiences—diaries, journals, letters, oral histories, folklore, gossip, chants, art, graffiti, poetry, songs, nonverbal parodies, gynecological handbooks passed between women for centuries, and a “mass of ‘noncanonized’ writers whose richness and diversity we are only just beginning to comprehend.”27 She labels these outlets the female “sub-version” that runs beneath the surface of male orthodoxy. Men are often oblivious to the shared meanings women communicate through alternative channels. In fact, Kramarae is convinced that “males have more difficulty than females in understanding what members of the other gender mean.”
She doesn’t ascribe men’s bewilderment to biological differences between the sexes or to women’s attempts to conceal their experience. Rather, she suggests that when men don’t have a clue about what women want, think, or feel, it’s because they haven’t made the effort to find out. When British author Dale Spender was editor of Woman’s Studies International Quarterly, she offered a further interpretation of men’s ignorance. She proposed that many men realize that a commitment to listen to women would necessarily involve a renunciation of their privileged position. “The crucial issue here is that if women cease to be muted, men cease to be so dominant and to some males this may seem unfair because it represents a loss of rights.”
A man can dodge that equalizing bullet by claiming, “I’ll never understand women.” the man-made linguistic system that keeps women “in their place.” According to Kramarae, reform includes challenging dictionaries that “ignore the words and definitions created by women and which also include many sexist definitions and examples.” Traditional dictionaries pose as authoritative guides to proper language use but, because of their reliance on male literary sources, lexicographers systematically exclude words coined by women. Kramarae and Paula Treichler have compiled a feminist dictionary that offers definitions for women’s words that don’t appear in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and presents alternative feminine readings of words that do. The dictionary “places women at the center and rethinks language from that crucially different perspective.”31 Kramarae and Treichler don’t claim that all women use words the same way, nor do they believe women constitute a single, unified group. But they include women’s definitions of approximately 2,500 words in order to illustrate women’s linguistic creativity and to help empower women to change their muted status. Figure 36–1 provides a sample of brief entries and acknowledges their origin.
Appearance: A woman’s appearance is her work uniform. . . . A woman’s concern with her appearance is not a result of brainwashing; it is a reaction to necessity. (A Redstockings Sister) Cuckold: The husband of an unfaithful wife. The wife of an unfaithful husband is just called a wife. (Cheris Kramarae)
Depression: A psychiatric label that . . . hides the social fact of the housewife’s loneliness, low selfesteem, and work dissatisfaction. (Ann Oakley) Doll: A toy playmate given to, or made by children. Some adult males continue their childhood by labeling adult female companions “dolls.” (Cheris Kramarae) Family man: Refers to a man who shows more concern with members of the family than is normal. There is no label family woman, since that would be heard as redundancy. (Cheris Kramarae) Feminist: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” (Rebecca West) Gossip: A way of talking between women in their roles as women, intimate in style, personal and domestic in topic and setting; a female cultural event which springs from and perpetuates the restrictions of the female role, but also gives the comfort of validation. (Deborah Jones) Guilt: The emotion that stops women from doing what they may need to do to take care of themselves as opposed to everyone else. (Mary Ellen Shanesey)
Herstory: The human story as told by women and about women. . . . (Anne Forfreedom) Ms.: A form of address being adopted by women who want to be recognized as individuals rather than being identified by their relationship with a man. (Midge Lennert and Norma Wilson) One of the boys: Means NOT one of the girls. (Cheris Kramarae) Parenthood: A condition which often brings dramatic changes to new mothers — “loss of job, income, and status; severing of networks and social contacts; and adjustments to being a ‘housewife.’ Most new fathers do not report similar social dislocations.” (Lorna McKee and Margaret O’Brien) Pornography: Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. (Andrea Dworkin) Sexual harassment: Refers to the unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power. (Catharine MacKinnon)
Silence: Is not golden. “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” (Zora Neale Hurston) “In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppressive, is violence.” (Adrienne Rich)
SEXUAL HARASSMENT: COINING A TERM TO LABEL EXPERIENCE
Sexual harassment
An unwanted imposition
of sexual requirements in
the context of a relationship of unequal power.
Perhaps more than any other single entry in the Kramarae and Treichler dictionary, the inclusion of sexual harassment illustrates a major achievement of feminist communication scholarship—encoding women’s experience into the received language of society. Although stories of unwanted sexual attention on the job are legion, women haven’t always had a common term to label what has been an ongoing fact of feminine life.
In 1992, the Journal of Applied Communication Research published 30 stories of communication students and professionals who had been sexually embarrassed, humiliated, or traumatized by a person who was in a position of academic power. All but 2 of the 30 accounts came from women. As Kramarae notes, “Sexual harassment is rampant but not random.”32 The following testimony is typical. He was fifty; I was twenty-one. He was the major professor in my area; I was a first year M.A. student. His position was secure; mine was nebulous and contingent on his support of me. He felt entitled; I felt dependent. He probably hasn’t thought much about what happened; I’ve never forgotten.
Like most beginning students, I was unsure of myself and my abilities, so I was hungry for praise and indicators of my intellectual merit. . . . Then, one November morning I found a note in my mailbox from Professor X, the senior faculty member in my area and, thus, a person very important to me. In the note Professor X asked me to come by his office late that afternoon to discuss a paper I’d written for him. The conversation closed with his telling me that we should plan on getting to know each other and working together closely. I wanted to work with him and agreed. We stood and he embraced me and pressed a kiss on me. I recall backing up in surprise. I really didn’t know what was happening. He smiled and told me that being “friends” could do nothing but enhance our working relationship. I said nothing, but felt badly confused. . . . This man was a respectable faculty member and surely he knew more about norms for student–faculty relationships
than I did. So I figured I must be wrong to feel his behavior was inappropriate, must be misconstruing his motives, exaggerating the significance of “being friendly.” . . . So I planned to have an “open talk” with him.
I was at a disadvantage in our “open talk,” because I approached it as a chance to clarify feelings while he used it as an occasion to reinterpret and redefine what was happening in ways that suited his purposes. I told him I didn’t feel right “being so friendly” with him. He replied that I was over-reacting and, further, that my small-town southern upbringing was showing. . . . I told him I was concerned that he wasn’t being objective about my work, but was praising it because he wanted to be “friends” with me; he twisted this, explaining he was judging my work fairly, BUT that being “friends” did increase his interest in helping me professionally. No matter what I said, he had a response that defined my feelings as inappropriate.33
Muted group theory can explain this woman’s sense of confusion and lack of power. Her story is as much about a struggle for language as it is a struggle over sexual conduct. As long as the professor can define his actions as “being friendly,” the female student’s feelings are discounted—even by herself. Had she been equipped with the linguistic tool of “sexual harassment,” she could have validated her feelings and labeled the professor’s advances both inappropriate and illegal. According to Kramarae, when sexual harassment was first used in a court case in the late 1970s, it was the only legal term defined by women. Senatorial response to Anita Hill’s testimony at the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings showed that there is more work to be done before women can make their definition stick. For muted group theory, the struggle to contest manmade language continues.
CRITIQUE: DO MEN MEAN TO MUTE?
In 2005, a group of scholars met at George Mason University to celebrate muted group theory’s insight into how people use language to shape power relations. Convention speakers from two continents addressed the theory’s relevance not only for women, but also for any group at the margins of society. The convention reflected the theory’s broad community of agreement, and their words, later published in a special issue of the journal Women and Language, revealed their dedication to understanding people, clarifying values, and reforming society.34 Muted group theory stands up well to these criteria for good critical scholarship (see Chapter 3). Feminist scholars insist that “the key communication activities of women’s experiences—their rituals, vocabularies, metaphors, and stories—are an important part of the data for study.”35 In this chapter I’ve presented the words of 30 women who give voice to the mutedness they’ve experienced because they aren’t men. I could have easily cited hundreds more. It strikes me that ignoring or discounting women’s testimony would be the ultimate confirmation of Kramarae’s muted group thesis.
Readers might be uncomfortable with muted group theory’s characterization of men as oppressors and women as the oppressed. Kramarae addresses this issue:
Some people using the theory have boxed oppression within discrete, binary categories, e.g., women/men; AfricanAmericans/EuroAmericans. A focus only on the categories of women and men, or white and non-white, for example, is simplistic and ignores other forms of struggle. . . .36
Kramarae acknowledges that oppression is more complex than identification with any one group. Yet she also states that “fixing names to the ones we call ‘oppressors’ may be necessary in order to have clear discussions” about oppressive power differences.37 How can we name an oppressive group without speaking in terms of demographic categories? The theory’s lack of clarity
regarding this thorny question may frustrate activists looking for practical answers. The question of men’s motives is also problematic. Tannen criticizes feminist scholars like Kramarae for assuming that men are trying to control women. Tannen acknowledges that differences in male and female communication styles sometimes lead to imbalances of power but, unlike Kramarae, she is willing to assume that the problems are caused primarily by men’s and women’s “different styles.” Tannen cautions that “bad feelings and imputation of bad motives or bad character can come about when there was no intention to dominate, to wield power.”38
Kramarae thinks Tannen’s apology for men’s abuse of power is naïve at best. She notes that men often ignore or ridicule women’s statements about the problems of being heard in a male-dominated society. Rather than blaming style differences, Kramarae points to the many ways that our political, educational, religious, legal, and media systems support gender, race, and class hierarchies.
Your response to muted group theory may well depend on whether you are a beneficiary or a victim of these systems.
For men and women who are willing to hear what Kramarae has to say, the consciousness-raising fostered by muted group theory can prod them to quit using words in a way that preserves inequities of power. The term sexual harassment is just one example of how women’s words can be levered into the public lexicon and give voice to women’s collective experience. Phrases like glass ceiling and second shift weren’t even around when Kramarae and Treichler compiled their feminist dictionary in 1985, but now these terms are available to label social and professional injustices that women face.
Cheris Kramarae’s insights and declarations of women as a group muted by men have helped shake up traditional patterns of communication between the sexes.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. What words do you use with your same-sex friends that you don’t use with members of the opposite sex? Does this usage support Kramarae’s hypothesis of male control of the public mode of expression?
2. In a journal article about dictionary bias, Kramarae wrote the sentence “I vaginated on that for a while.”39 Can you explain her wordplay in light of the principles of muted group theory? How does the meaning of the sentence change when you replace her provocative term with alternative verbs? 3. Given a definition of sexual harassment as “unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power,” can you think of a time you harassed or were harassed in this way by someone?
4. Do you tend to agree more with Tannen’s genderlect perspective or Kramarae’s muted group theory? To what extent is your choice influenced by the fact that you are a male or a female?
CONVERSATIONS
In my conversation with Cheris Kramarae, she suggests that the creation of university departments of women’s studies is an encouraging sign that women aren’t doomed to remain muted. When I asked if there should also be a “men’s studies” program, her unexpected response not only made me laugh but also underscored the rationale for her theory. Describing her Encyclopedia of Women’s Experience entry on witches, she gives a fascinating account of how the meaning of that word has changed to women’s disadvantage. I conclude the interview by asking Kramarae to look back on our conversation to see if I had said or done something that constrained what she said. See if you agree with her assessment.
A SECOND LOOK
Recommended resource: “Cheris Kramarae,” in Feminist Rhetorical Theories, Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999, pp. 38–68. Comprehensive statement: Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking, Newbury House, Rowley, MA, 1981, pp. v–ix, 1–63.
Original concept of mutedness: Edwin Ardener, “Belief and the Problem of Women” and “The ‘Problem’ Revisited,” in Perceiving Women, Shirley Ardener (ed.), Malaby, London, 1975, pp. 1–27.
Kramarae’s reflection on her theory: Cheris Kramarae, “Muted Group Theory and Communication: Asking Dangerous Questions,” Women and Language, Vol. 22, 2005, pp. 55–61. Dictionary of women’s words: Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary: Amazons, Bluestockings and Crones, 2nd ed., Pandora, London, 1992. Worldwide feminist scholarship: Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (eds.), Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge (4 vol.), Routledge, New York, 2000. Unfulfilled promise of the Internet: Jana Kramer and Cheris Kramarae, “Women’s Political Webs: Global Electronic Networks,” in Gender, Politics and Communication, Annabelle Sreberny and Liesbet van Zoonen (eds.), Hampton, Cresskill, NJ, 2000, pp. 205–222. Reviewing books on women in CMC vocations: Cheris Kramarae, “Women, Work and Computing/Unlocking the Clubhouse,” NWSA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 207–210. Sexual harassment: Julia T. Wood (ed.), “Special Section—’Telling Our Stories’: Sexual Harassment in the Communication Discipline,” Journal of Applied
Communication Research, Vol. 20, 1992, pp. 349–418.
Giving voice to women through online learning: Cheris Kramarae, The Third Shift: Women Learning Online, American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, Washington, DC, 2001.
Alternative interpretations of gender differences in discourse: Candace West, Michelle M. Lazar, and Cheris Kramarae, “Gender in Discourse,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, Vol. 2, Teun van Dijk (ed.), Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997, pp. 119–143. Further theoretical construction based on muted group and standpoint theories: Mark Orbe, “From the Standpoint(s) of Traditionally Muted Groups: Explicating a Co-Cultural Communication Theoretical Model,” Communication Theory, Vol. 8, 1998, pp. 1–26. Critique: Celia J. Wall and Pat Gannon-Leary, “A Sentence Made by Men: Muted Group Theory Revisited,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 6, 1999, pp. 21–29.
To access titles and cue points from feature films
that illustrate muted group theory, click on
Suggested Movie Clips under Theory Resources at
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