Communication Researchers and Policy Making

Citation

Murphy, P. (2005), "Communication Researchers and Policy Making", Online Information Review, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 216-217. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520510598084

This volume subtitles itself a “sourcebook”, and it lives up to its subtitle. It is a collection of classic articles on policy and communication research going back 120 years. The material is mainly North American. It includes pieces on policy making by notables such as John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson and Harold Laswell.

The core of the volume concentrates on the relation between policy and research – a tricky area for a number of reasons. One is the problem of “translating principle into policy” (as Don DeLuc's article neatly sums it up). Another is the sensitivity of certain policy areas. How do researchers cope when “radio research” becomes “communications intelligence”? How do policy makers cope when “mass communications” is labelled “propaganda” by researchers?

The volume touches on many difficult issues: does research change the object of what it investigates? For example: does audience research change the nature of public radio? Does opinion polling determine Supreme Court decisions? Does research about researchers change the nature of research? The volume also ponders the equally gnarly question: does the policy process and policy regulation transform or even determine what researchers do? Are their questions and answers determined by the expectations of policy players? In other words, does the object of inquiry shape the outcomes of inquiry?

These and other perennial themes percolate through Braman's admirable collection. What is notable, though, is how traditional the collection is. Little of it reflects the way in which informatics has transformed the nature of research, communications and policy in the last 30 years.

Donald Lamberton's 1974 article on “National information policy” is very insightful about knowledge production and information‐driven industries. Like all great essays, it has not aged. But too little else in this volume mirrors the sea change that information technology has caused in the policy domain, whether the policy is concerned with radio, defence intelligence, public opinion, pornography or free speech.

The volume references the internet in only eight of its 604 pages. Even for a book spanning 12 decades of policy development that seems a tad underdone. Yet in all other respects the collection does a sterling job of compressing a huge literature into a representative and authoritative sample collection.