The authors explore the parallels to be found by comparing descriptions of the technical communicator with differing views of the communication process—the transmission, translation, and articulation views of communication. In each of these views, the place of the technical communicator and of technical discourse shifts with respect to the production of meaning and relations of power. The authors argue from the standpoint of the articulation view for a new conception of the technical communicator as author and of technical communication as a discourse that produces an author.
What distinguishes critical approaches from other communication research is their redefinition of the question of causality and their concern with the ways in which "the control of knowledge.. .is fundamental to the exercise of social power." Critical mass communication research is not a single entity, but rather a range of developing alternative approaches to the study of communication. Within such diverse research areas as international communication, the social implications of new communication technologies, the political economy of communication, the sociology of mass communicators, and cultural studies, researchers have attempted to articulate and implement approaches that address the role of' communication in the exercise of social power. Implicitly, if not in most cases explicitly, these approaches have developed in opposition to liberal/pluralist social theory. Recent attempts to define just exactly what it means to do critical research (14, 17, 23, 24) oversimplify the differences between critical research approaches and other research. These oversimplifications have led to the characterization of the diEerences in terms ofa series of simple dichotomies: empirical versus critical; administrative versus critical;repressive science versus emancipatory science. These dichotomies are insensitive to the diverse range of critical approaches, while at the same time mystifying the complex political and epistemological commitments that underlie and link that diversity.
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