my travels in the communication field

In Chapter 4, Griffin provides a map of the communication discipline, identifying seven traditions in the field. Staking out my place on the map requires a bit of history.

My father is a (now retired) experimental psychologist, so I was raised in the socio-psychological, empiricist, logical positivist tradition. When I was growing up, if I couldn't quantify and measure it, it didn't exist. Then I took a class in interpersonal communication from Peter Northhouse at Western Michigan U and was introduced to a phenomenological approach, which I found quite appealing. I started my master's at the U of Massachusetts, where classes with Barnett Pearce and Vern Cronen introduced me to the coordinated management of meaning (CMM, Chapter 6), which falls within the socio-cultural and phenomenological traditions. At Central Michigan U, where I completed my master's, David Ling's class in rhetorical criticism got me interested in Kenneth Burke's (Chapter 22) and Ernest Bormann's (Chapter 3) work; my thesis was on the rhetoric of Al-Anon.

When I began my doctoral work at the University of Kentucky, I pursued my interest in the cybernetic tradition, but soon realized I was more interested in conversations than network links and nodes. So Jim Applegate became my advisor at UK, and my research turned to a constructivist approach to social support in health care teams (Chapter 8). Although the author of your text places constructivism within socio-psychological and rhetorical traditions, recent work my colleagues and I have done takes a more interpretive, socio-cultural approach. Finally, my latest publications in organizational storytelling, metaphors of disability, and organizational surveillance take a decidedly critical stance. As you can tell, with the exception of semiotics, I've roamed the communication theoretical and metatheoretical territory.

~ Professor Cyborg