The Dirty Little Secret

James Arnt Aune

Donald G. Ellis. Crafting Society: Ethnicity, Class, and Communication Theory. Mahway, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. xvi + 229. $49.95.

"Social class," Donald G. Ellis tells us, "is America’s dirty little secret" (175). In pursuing this theme through his provocative book, he not only opens up the topic of class for American communication researchers, but also provides a highly readable synthesis of recent work in media studies, discourse analysis, and organizational communication. According to Ellis, while Communication researchers have neglected the topic of class, they nonetheless have something important to add to the human sciences: the recognition that "[p]ower, conflict, and social problems are never a simple reflex of structure. They are always worked at, ground out, negotiated, and produced in the micro moments of human experience" (207).

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 reviews trends in communication theory and criticizes strong social constructionism. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 discuss media theory, discourse analysis, and organizational communication, the three "central tenets in a workable scientific theory of communication" (xiii). Chapters 5 and 6 illustrate the "structuring processes for ethnicity [and class] associated with media, language use, ritualized encounters, and discourse forms" (xiv).

In chapter 1 Ellis establishes the primary criterion for a workable theory as coherence, in terms of evidence, intersubjective acceptance, and relations among propositions (xvi; see also his "Fixing meaning: a coherentist theory," Communication Research 22 [1995]: 515-44). He criticizes the strong social constructionist position for: (a) being unable to escape tautology, (b) removing agency from communication (thus replacing God with conversation [7]), and (c) neglecting the "gritty role of political, economic, ethnic, and moral assumptions in real communication" (7). This chapter would have been stronger with a more thorough survey of recent developments in rhetorical and argumentation theory.

Chapter 2 provides a particularly useful synthesis of the principles underlying the work of McLuhan, Ong, and Innis, as well as Meyrowitz and Habermas. Weirdly, given the emphasis on class in the book, Ellis provides a very cursory and distorted view of Marxism: "The Marxist theory of development is heavily ideological and inadequate as any sort of explanatory framework for media. It simply states that the media are ideological tools of elites or a ruling corporate class" (61). It is unclear from Ellis’s discussion exactly which Marxist theory he is referring to. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hans Magnus Enzsensberger, Armand Mattelart, Dallas Smythe, and Robert McChesney all could be labeled Marxist theorists of the mass media, but they differ widely among themselves about the nature and function of the mass media in capitalist society. Karl Marx never presented a "conspiracy theory" of ideology, but rather a rich account of how cognitive distortions occur when one’s social position and/or economic interests affect one’s perceptions. In turn, Marx was interested in the contradictions of capitalist economic and communicative behavior, particularly in the relentless drive of capitalism towards technological innovation, something certainly relevant to Ellis’s project. Despite a brief nod to the work of Roderick P. Hart and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, this chapter illustrates the primary problem with Ellis’s project. Surely any "coherent" account of communication theory requires an account of political institutions and communication in addition to organizations, everyday discourse, and media.

Chapter 3 defends an intriguing view of "communicative realism" as locating social reality in the communicatively real structures of discourse rather than in the metaphors of external reality where language is simply a map between cognition and the supposed "external world" (71). Ellis’s account of conversational forms (coordinative talk, ritualistic talk, social talk, and professional talk) as the experiential basis of structure is the best refutation of rational choice theory I have seen (see also the discussion of Homans, 111).

Chapter 4 is a rich synthesis of Goffman, Giddens, Collins, and Poole and de Sanctis, contending that "the microworld of everyday communication is the site of meaning that both produces social structure and is produced by it" (110). Ellis gives the example of referring to a woman as a JAP (Jewish American Princess). The speaker manipulates the structure of ethnic stereotypes to perform a communicative action. The structure itself is "absent" until the utterance makes it present. In this chapter, Ellis gives a useful theory of genre as an analytic metaphor for the micro-macro dialectic: "Communication necessarily entails penetration into generic forms (structures) and in turn, these generic forms construct speech (or writing) and the relationship between communicative agents" (132). Genres, like social structures, "have analytical and explanatory traction, even when they are modified or violated. In other words, there is creativity or change when a genre is violated, but the irony is that the original genre remains necessary for the creativity" (133).

Chapter 5 asks the questions, What are the unique communicative aspects of ethnicity? How are ethnic groups communicatively constructed? Verbal interaction is the most important reality-maintenance vehicle, analyzable as the way conceptual reality is organized for an ethnic group (148-50). Four characteristics give rise to systems of discourse: (a) ideas of how things should be (ideology), (b) one’s identity (how an individual learns to use a discourse system), (c) structures and forms of discourse that mark membership and establish identity, and (d) the nature of relationships among users of the system (161). For example the dominant middle-class system of discourse values language use that is hypotactic, internally consistent, integrated, planned, and detached rather than personal (161). "Ethnicity" in this chapter basically means "African-American." Ellis provides a concise and useful summary of recent research in African-American communication. Here again, however, Ellis’s neglect of political communication prevents him from examining the most important site of ethnic and class contestation in recent U.S. politics: the dramatic shift of blue-collar white ethnic voters away from the Democratic Party between 1968 and the present.

The final chapter, with its intriguing title, "Class: The Presence That Dare Not Speak Its Name," begins by asking the question, "Why don’t Americans like talking about class differences?" On the surface, Americans have a strong ideological tradition of equality, while class-based stratification remains very strong. The "value-added" by communication scholars to the study of class is to examine the nature of social stratification ("how and why people are parceled into various groups") and the "intersection between these macrostructures and the moment-by-moment processes of communication" (177). Ellis first gives three "biographies" (of a poor African-American male, a lower-middle-class white woman, and an upper-middle-class white man) illustrating the way in which the communicative realities of these lives "modify and maintain the macrostructures of the culture" (177). He then reframes traditional sociological concerns about social stratification and legitimation of class differences in communicative terms. He draws our attention to the way speakers are socialized into communication codes that reflect class distinctions, giving a useful reformulation of Bernstein’s work on elaborated and restricted codes (190-192). In this section Ellis briefly cites the foremost Marxist sociologist of class, Erik Olin Wright, and his notion of a "relational" model of classes, but he neglects the opportunity to situate the micro-analysis of class within larger political and economic structures. Ellis only briefly discusses the role of technology in changing class structure; it would seem that the macro- (rhetorical?) and micro- (workplace?) discussions of downsizing and globalization would be a logical addition to his analysis. Wright’s work, for example, compares class inequality and consciousness in the U.S. and Sweden, with their very different class politics and workplace relationships. Here again, Ellis’s allergy to things Marxian seems to prevent him from opportunities for productive scholarly dialogue. Wright’s account of the social totality as analyzable at three different levels of abstraction: the mode of production, social formation, and political conjuncture, seems like a useful way of integrating the historical and political concerns absent from Ellis’s work. Also unclarified in this chapter is the ongoing tension between Weberian notions of class and status (but see 202) versus the competing Marxian ones, a tension fruitfully explored in John R. Hall’s important anthology, Reworking Class (Cornell University Press, 1997).

Ellis finally compares "class cultures," using French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural and social capital, comparing working-class, underclass, middle-class, and upper-class culture. As with Bourdieu, differing educational experiences seem essential to class reproduction and maintenance. I could not help thinking, as the book drew to its (highly abrupt--there is no conclusion) end, that some reflexivity about "Communication" itself within the American educational system might be a useful next step. Communication departments notoriously are located within land-grant universities rather than elite private universities, and within the less wealthy private and religious liberal arts colleges rather than the most prestigious. Communication departments are distributed according to a kind of spatial logic: they are stronger in the Midwest and South than in the East and West, and increasingly tilting even more toward the Sunbelt. I might even hypothesize that there are a disproportionate number of first-generation college or working-class faculty in Communication departments than in traditional Humanities departments. The class dimension of "Communication" itself perhaps remains the dirtiest little secret of all.

In sum, Ellis opens up uncharted territory for American Communication researchers by introducing the notion of "class." This book deserves a wide readership, however, not only because of its discussion of class, but also because it provides the best synthesis I have seen of current social-scientific work in Communication.