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

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*.

Peter Lang: https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/28453

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

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