2009 Outstanding Scholarship

  • Barnett Pearce & Vernon Cronen was awarded the Old Chestnut Award for their classic work, “Communication, action, and meaning” (1980), which elaborated the basic argument for the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). This important scholarship was ground breaking because it helped to open a space for LSI work because it offered a way to understanding something between people rather than recycling (social) psychological variables that were popular in mainstream communication research of that era. This work recognizes the role of context in communication as generating multiple meanings. This work was notable because it called attention to little-recognized influences of communication along the lines of Goffman. This work contributed fundamental building blocks to LSI scholarship by offering cogent scholarship that strived to bridge theory with practice.