Stanley A. Deetz is President of Interaction Design for Innovation and Professor Emeritus and a President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance and long term Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program when he taught at the University of Colorado.
Stanley Deetz grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana. [1] He received his B.S. in Economics and Speech/ Drama from Manchester College in 1970. Deetz attended Ohio University for both his M.A. (1972) and his Ph.D. (1973) in Communication, both under the advisement of Kenneth Williams. His master's thesis was titled, "An ethnomethodological analysis of selected approach to the speech act." His doctoral dissertation was titled, "Essays on hermeneutics and communication research." Deetz was a Claude Kantner Fellow in his final year of graduate study in 1973.
Deetz has taught at several institutions: Bridgewater State College from 1973–77; Southern Illinois University from 1977–84; and Rutgers University from 1984–97. From 1997 to 2014, Deetz was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. [2] He spent the spring semester of 1994 as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Göteborgs Universitët in Sweden.
Deetz has held visiting appointments at Arizona State University, the University of Texas, the University of Iowa, Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), and the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). [3] Colegio Mayor University (Colombia), Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa (Mexico).
He served as president of the International Communication Association from 1996–97. [4]
Deetz's specialization in organizational studies and organizational communication began from a philosophical understanding of the social (interactional) construction of human experience developing to a critical and cultural perspective about power and practices of corporations. [3] Summarizing his position, "If human experience is social constructed, it is done so under various conditions of inequality, and hence we have a practical and moral obligation to make actual places of construction more democratic." [5]
Deetz has authored, co-authored, and edited twelve books and more than 140 scholarly articles. Selected books include:
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about and analyzing key events, processes, and commitments that together form communication. Theory can be seen as a way to map the world and make it navigable; communication theory gives us tools to answer empirical, conceptual, or practical communication questions.
Molefi Kete Asante is an American philosopher who is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.
Randall Collins is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. His current research involves macro patterns of violence including contemporary war, as well as solutions to police violence. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.
Lawrence Grossberg is an American scholar of cultural studies and popular culture whose work focuses primarily on popular music and the politics of youth in the United States. He is widely known for his research in the philosophy of communication and culture. Though his scholarship focused significantly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s on the politics of postmodernism, his more recent work explores the possibilities and limitations of alternative and emergent formations of modernity.
Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. Boulding was the author of two citation classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (1956) and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962). He was co-founder of general systems theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to sociologist Elise M. Boulding.
Mark L. Knapp is the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Professor Emeritus and a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is internationally known for his research and writing on nonverbal communication and communication in developing relationships. He has also done research and published books on lying and deception. The Mark L. Knapp Award for career contributions to the study of interpersonal communication is awarded annually by the National Communication Association. The Mark L. Knapp Professorship, Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, was established in 2017.
Ted Robert Gurr was an American author and professor of political science who most notably wrote about political conflict and instability. His widely translated book Why Men Rebel (1970) emphasized the importance of social psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.
Ray L. Birdwhistell was an American anthropologist who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and research. Birdwhistell coined the term kinesics, meaning "facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements". He estimated that "no more than 30 to 35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words." Stated more broadly, he argued that "words are not the only containers of social knowledge." He proposed other technical terms, including kineme, and many others less frequently used today. Birdwhistell had at least as much impact on the study of language and social interaction generally as just nonverbal communication because he was interested in the study of communication more broadly than is often recognized. Birdwhistell understood body movements to be culturally patterned rather than universal. His students were required to read widely, sources not only in communication but also anthropology and linguistics. "Birdwhistell himself was deeply disappointed that his general communicative interests and goals were not appropriately understood." Collaborations with others, including initially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and later, Erving Goffman and Dell Hymes had huge influence on his work. For example, the book he is best known for, Kinesics and Context, "would not have appeared if it had not been envisaged by Erving Goffman" and he explicitly stated "the paramount and sustaining influence upon my work has been that of anthropological linguistics", a tradition most directly represented at the University of Pennsylvania by Hymes.
Sarah J. Tracy is an organizational communication scholar and full professor in Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.
Francis A. Beer is an American professor emeritus of political science, University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on war and peace. Honors and awards include listings in Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in America, as well as other directories. He was president of the International Studies Association/West and co-edited, with Ted Gurr at the University of Colorado, a series of Sage books on "Violence, Conflict, Cooperation." In addition to two Fulbright awards to France and the Netherlands he has received other awards from the Earhart Foundation, the Institute for World Order, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the University of Colorado, he represented the faculty as chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly.
Robert T. Craig is an American communication theorist from the University of Colorado, Boulder who received his BA in Speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his MA and PhD in communication from Michigan State University. Craig was on the 1988 founding board of the journal "Research on Language and Social Interaction," a position he continues to hold. From 1991 to 1993 Craig was the founding editor of the International Communication Association journal "Communication Theory" which has been in continuous publication since 1991. He is currently the editor for the ICA Handbook series. In 2009 Craig was elected as a Lifetime Fellow for the International Communication Association, an organization he was president for in 2004–2005.
George E. Cheney is an educator, writer, speaker, facilitator, and consultant. Together with his wife and colleague, Sally Planalp, he has a primary residence in Moab, Utah. Cheney is an internationally recognized leader in the area of organizational communication and focuses his work on the improvement of organizational processes with special attention to the triple bottom line and the pursuit of socially and environmentally responsible economic development. Cheney draws from a variety of disciplines and professions in his work, including sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, marketing, management, and applied ethics.
Karen Ashcraft is an American communication scholar and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her area of research is in social justice and organizational studies. She looks at identity in the workplace and organizational structures. Specifically she studies issues of diversity, hybrid organizations, gender and power. Being an organizational communication scholar, she sees discourse as central to understanding our human condition as well as how communication amounts to organizing. She examines discourse through a lens of a feminist communicology model to look at the critical role that communication has in one's identity creation.
Mats Alvesson is a Swedish management scholar and professor of business administration at Lund University, particularly known for having made key contributions in forming the field of critical management studies.
Dr. Robert Martin Shuter was an American author, academic, and consultant specializing in intercultural communication. He was Research Professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University and Professor Emeritus at the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University, where he taught for 41 years and chaired the Department of Communication Studies for 29 years.
Professor Priyankar Upadhaya holds the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at Banaras Hindu University(Asia's largest residential university), Varanasi. Professor Upadhyaya heads the Malaviya Center for Peace Research situated in the University.
Sonja K. Foss is a rhetorical scholar and educator in the discipline of communication. Her research and teaching interests are in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist perspectives on communication, the incorporation of marginalized voices into rhetorical theory and practice, and visual rhetoric.
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is an American author and scholar working as an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. She specializes in environmental communication and rhetoric, public advocacy, tourist studies, and cultural studies.
Norman Kent Denzin was an American professor of sociology. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was research professor of communications, College of Communications scholar, professor of sociology, professor of cinema studies, professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Denzin's academic interests included interpretive theory, performance studies, qualitative research methodology, and the study of media, culture and society.
Linda Putnam is an American scholar and professor in the department of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is known for her theories on organizational communication, centered on conflict management and negotiation, solutions within organizations, gender studies in organizations, and organizational space.