Parks' ideology article wins 1996 Woolbert Award

Mac Parks has been celebrating a lot lately. No sooner did the fizz go stale from his trip to San Antonio, where he received a Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore for his contributions to a team of military and civilian personnel associated with the U.S. Air Force Office for Prevention and Health Services Assessment (OPHSA) at Brooks Air Force Base, but he started to stock up for the NCA convention in San Diego, where he will receive the 1996 Charles H. Woolbert Award for an article on ideology in interpersonal communication that he published in 1982. Somehow, these two awards seem to be appropriate for a scholar who signs his e-mail with the motto, "Honor Cultural Diversity: Attend Both Opera & Hockey."

The Hammer Award is given to teams, not individuals, and is designed to honor efforts to make government more efficient and cost-effective. It is an award given to hard-nosed pragmatists who make a difference in the real world of government. The Woolbert Award is given to a scholarly article published in the last 10 to 15 years that has been judged to have "stood the test of time" and been influential in shaping thought within the discipline. It is often given to work that has affected the development of theory or methodology and is given by members of the NCA Research Board. In informing Parks that he had won, Isa Engleberg, Research Board Chair, wrote:

"We were particularly impressed by your examination of how an idealization of self-disclosure and intimacy became one of the guiding assumptions in interpersonal communication research and pedagogy. By offering a powerful critique of the limited empirical evidence that supported this ideology, you demonstrated, as many now confirm, that self-disclosure does not have an invariant relationship to attraction and interpersonal ties, that it is not necessarily therapeutic. Written with fluidity, lucidity, and grace, your essay has had a profound influence on interpersonal communication scholarship and teaching since its publication."

Not bad for a guy who also got an award for helping to reinvent the government.

Actually, Parks' 1982 article was about reinventing interpersonal communication. Titled "Ideology in Interpersonal Communication: Off the Couch and Into the World," and published in Communication Yearbook 5, the article challenged the little-questioned assumptions that disclosure is good and intimacy is the goal in interpersonal communication. Parks argued that one could not separate interpersonal communication from group identities and cultural roles and that there were plenty of effective interpersonal communication relationships that were not based on intimacy and disclosure but which were based instead on social necessity. In particular, he took to task textbook writers in interpersonal communication who propagated this ideological stance without a great deal of empirical evidence to support their claims. In fact, Parks demonstrated, the evidence was not only spotty in its support but was often contradictory and based on questionable measurement techniques.

When asked about his motives for writing the 1982 piece, Parks replied, "As a practicing scientist, I believe that empirical claims are subject to test. We can and should evaluate them, regardless of how intuitively or politically appealing they may be. There is a certain 'anything goes' mentality out there when it comes to methodology. While I honor and teach a number of different methodologies, it is worth remembering that not every methodology is capable of making a verifiable empirical claim and that only science is capable of evaluating the generality of empirical claims in a systematic, verifiable way."

Nor has Parks let the matter drop. In a 1995 article published in Communication Yearbook 18 he revisited his 1982 critique and found that while it had some effect, particularly on how textbook writers approached the topics of disclosure and intimacy, other "ideological streams" had emerged. Particularly, Parks critiqued what he called the feminization of intimacy, the "cult of the universal victim," and some excesses that have resulted from an unquestioning emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism.

As an antidote to these trends, Parks has worked to provide evidence that interpersonal communication processes do not exist in what he calls a social vacuum. "Much of my later work on the development and deterioration of friendships and romantic relationships was intended to explicate this perspective," he said. "We have now demonstrated, for example, how the interior development of personal relationships is linked with the dynamics of the participants' surrounding social networks."

A member of the speech communication faculty at the University of Washington, Parks indicated that his 1982 piece was "one of the first to express a dialectic approach to interpersonal communication and to place it within a social context. In later work, we have pursued this concern-for example, Daena Goldsmith and I examined how people made choices about discussing problems inside a given personal relationship with the other members of their communication network."

At one point as this story was being prepared, Parks expressed concern that his Hammer award didn't fit very well with the Woolbert. He needn't have worried-give him a hammer and let him pound away at the discipline's foibles with admirable effect.