Communication Theory

Hearing loss is common, with approximately 17% of the population reporting some degree of a hearing deficit. Hearing loss has profound impacts on health literacy, health information accessibility, and learning. Much of existing health information is inaccessible. This is largely due to the lack of focus on tailoring the messages to the needs of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals with hearing loss. DHH individuals struggle with a variety of health knowledge gaps and health disparities. This demonstrates the importance of providing tailored and accessible health information for this population. While hearing loss is heterogeneous, there are still overlapping principles that can benefit everyone. Through adaptation, DHH individuals become visual learners, thus increasing the demand for appropriate visual medical aids. The development of health information and materials suitable for visual learners will likely impact not only DHH individuals, but will also be applicable for the general population. The principles of social justice and universal design behoove health message designers to ensure that their health information is not only accessible, but also equitable. Wise application of technology, health literacy, and information learning principles, along with creative use of social media, peer exchanges, and community health workers, can help mitigate much of the health information gaps that exist among DHH individuals.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a contemporary philosopher who taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes-St. Denis. He produced a wide range of work, from commentaries on philosophers (Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Hume, Liebniz, and Foucault) to analyses of film, literature, and painting. Two of his key contributions to philosophy are The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. With his collaborator, the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, he wrote four influential books, including Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze did not develop a coherent and set framework of concepts, but rather an approach to philosophy that was based on immanence rather than transcendence, becoming rather than being, and multiplicity rather than singularity. Deleuze’s work is an affirmation of life and creativity, a vitalism. “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and events” (p. 143). Each book of Deleuze’s seems to generate a new collection of concepts to grapple with the problem at hand. Three key concepts for Deleuze are rhizome, multiplicity, and assemblage.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the guiding image of thought was that of the rhizome. The idea of the rhizome is contrasted with that of the tree or the root. In the latter, there is the singular origin, the center. A rhizome is a structure without a center; it grows by sending off shoots (like crabgrass or potatoes). You are always in the middle with a rhizome, never at the start or end. The point is to connect. Like rhizomes, multiplicities must be made, and they are made by subtracting the unique. Multiplicities and rhizomes have sections that get structured, stratified, and pinned down, but then also always have lines of flight by which to escape.

An assemblage “establishes connections between certain multiplicities” (p. 23) and “stake[s] out a territory” (p. 503). An assemblage is always territorializing (bringing together various elements in a particular arrangement) and de-territorializing (opening up onto other territories, de-organizing). In addition to this dimension of an assemblage, it is also the stratification of systems of language and systems of technology in a relation of expression and content. The former they call collective assemblages of enunciation and the latter, machinic assemblages (of bodies, “actions and passions”). An assemblage is always articulating arrangements of bodies, discourses, affects, and other elements. Crucially, assemblages are always in process and are not stable structures; they are becomings.

How then to think of communication within this conceptual context? Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea of communication as intersubjective. There is not an individual subject speaking, there is only the collective assemblage of enunciation. They speak instead of language, but a language of order words. Communication is not about representation or signification. Deleuze tends to treat communication as a form of control. Some of Deleuze’s final essays and interviews were spent explicating this new social power of control. Contrasting with Michel Foucault’s influential ideas on the rise of disciplinary society, Deleuze maps the emergence of societies of control “that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” (p. 174).

For those studying communication, Deleuze’s legacy is featured in three areas: the material turn in communication studies and critical theory; the rise in theories of affect; and notions of control with regard to theories of contemporary surveillance.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article.

Organizational socialization is the process by which people learn about and adjust to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, expectations, and behaviors needed for a new or changing role within an organization. Thus, organizational socialization focuses on organizational membership. This includes how people move from being organizational outsiders to being organizational members and how people move between organizational roles within and across organizations over time. To date, research has focused on the ways in which organizations encourage individuals to learn and to adjust to existing expectations for particular roles via tactics that encourage assimilation into a particular role. However, organizational socialization is a dynamic process. Individuals can also influence and shape the organization to align with what they want for the organization, via tactics that allow for personalization (or individualization) of the role. Thus, organizational socialization helps an individual assume a new or changing role that meets the organization’s needs as well as his or her own needs.

Most of the research on organizational socialization focuses on how newcomers enter into paid work environments. Much attention has been given to the tactics used by organizations to encourage people to assimilate into the organization. Research also focuses on the early stages of organizational socialization, in particular anticipatory socialization and entry and initial participation. Until very recently, less attention has been given to later stages in socialization, active participation, metamorphosis, and exit; non-work organizations; and transitions between roles within particular organizations. However there is a growing body of research on organizational socialization into volunteer roles; new or changing roles, within the same organization; and later stages of socialization, such as exit and disengagement. Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize how individual, organizational, and contextual factors, including socioeconomic class, race, gender, new media technologies, globalization, and others, may alter how organizational socialization works; they offer insight into the underlying processes implicated in organizational socialization. Future areas of research related to context, time, boundaries, and communication are highlighted.