ABSTRACT

In this chapter, Bradford ‘J’ Hall compares three theoretical perspectives on culture and communication that have been predominant since the 1980s: (1) the traditional postpositivist paradigm, (2) the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) paradigm, and (3) the Ethnography of Communication paradigm. He elaborates on the conceptualizations of culture and communication and clarifies the research goals from these paradigmatic perspectives, paying particular attention to how each research tradition conceives the forms, functions, and locus of culture and communication. He also characterizes the relationship between culture and communication in the three approaches as synecdoche, irony, and metaphor. Hall finally explores practical implications of the postpositivist, CMM, and Ethnography of Communication paradigms for understanding and analyzing communication competence and acculturation.