ABSTRACT
The focal purpose of this entry is to lay out the contours, within historical contexts, of the structural arrangements and intellectual foci of the various areas of study and emphases in institutions of higher education generally clustered under the much used and abused term “communication.” Because communication studies has been a presence in the academy for less than 60 years, and because it has evolved in the midst of an exploding and rapidly changing communication environment, there are necessarily multiple and competing stories to be told. This entry attempts to focus both on convergences and divergences. The entry reviews in turn: different meanings for the word “communication” and how and when the term came into popular usage; the two primary historical lineages out of which communication studies has emerged—speech communication and mass communication; the forces leading to institutionalization, including the exploding emergence of mass media. The entry examines the phases in which communication studies became institutionalized and how supporting structures of organizations and journals have handled seemingly overwhelming diversity. The entry concludes with a discussion of how communication studies necessarily holds within its core a series of contradictions that are in essence symptom and cause of both centralities and dispersions, struggles and successes.
