Guest Editors' Introduction: Making the Cultural Turn

摘要

In their influential essay "The Social Perspective and Professional Communication," Nancy Roundy Blyler and Charlotte Thralls (1993) mapped the then-well-underway social turn of the field, in the process clarifying distinctions among the major strands of social approaches. Although they accounted for the heterogeneity of these approaches, Blyler and Thralls also acknowledged the dominance of the social constructionist approach, which seeks to better understand social contexts and dynamics that specific communities deploy "in order to facilitate encul-turation" (Thralls, 2004, p. 125) through communicative, knowledge-building practices. In the years since the publication of "The Social Perspective," the field has continued to be dominated by this version of social constructionism, prompting us and other scholars to critique its sometimes narrow contextual focus on discrete organizational discourse communities, its mostly explanatory and pragmatic stance, and its elision of the politics of knowledge legitimation common to scholarship taking this approach (see Blyler, 1998; Herndl, 1993; Longo, 1998; Scott, Longo, & Wills, in press; Sullivan, 1990).