New Book - James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University's Margins

Jefferson Pooley

Series editor: David W. Park

Peter Lang, 2016

James W. Carey, by the time of his 2006 death, was a towering figure in U.S. communication research. His intellectual contributions came from the outside: He made his career as a critic of the discipline’s scientific pretensions, in a series of impossibly eloquent essays published in the 1970s and 1980s. As collected in his 1989 *Communication as Culture*, these essays opened up intellectual space for a different kind of scholarship. *James W. Carey and Communication Research* explores the geography of disciplinary prestige, as it made (and unmade) the Carey's reputation. The book's puzzle is the discrepancy between Carey’s blinding in-field renown and total obscurity without. He was a border-dwelling importer, a skilled exegete and creative synthesizer who translated ideas from surrounding, higher status fields. His eloquent, field-specific critique of scientism was a re-narration of the arguments of high-profile dissenters like Richard Rorty and Clifford Geertz. It was!
  Carey’s position upstream from the field that, more than anything, helps to explain his lopsided reputation. On the one hand he benefitted from his location, accruing intellectual capital from the high-prestige fields of origin. On the other hand, his one-way brokerage—his identity as a communication scholar addressing the field— meant that he suffered the same fate as his colleagues: His ideas failed to win the upstream struggle back to the source. The book traces the evolution of Carey's media theorizing from his graduate school years through to the publication, in 1989, of his landmark *Communication as Culture*.

Green open-access version: http://www.jeffpooley.com/pubs/pooley-carey-reputation.pdf