ABSTRACT
Communication studies can be thought of as a practical discipline-an organized effort to cultivate the social practice of communication through research, criticism, theory, and application.1 Communication is not, of course, the only practical discipline. Many other fields of study, maybe even the human sciences in general, can usefully be thought of in this way. Professional fields like counseling, education, management, and planning are obvious candidates. Academic fields like modern languages, literature, history, and sociology are perhaps less obvious candidates. Nonetheless, each of theses disciplines can be thought of as an organized effort to cultivate its particular field of social practice (respectively, practices of language use, literacy and literary culture, collective memory, and social membership).
