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Language and communication in international students’ adaptation: a bibliometric and content analysis review

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• Published: 12 July 2022
• Volume 85 , pages 1235–1256, ( 2023 )

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• Michał Wilczewski   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7650-5759 1 &
• Ilan Alon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6927-593X 2 , 3  

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This article systematically reviews the literature (313 articles) on language and communication in international students’ cross-cultural adaptation in institutions of higher education for 1994–2021. We used bibliometric analysis to identify the most impactful journals and articles, and the intellectual structure of the field. We used content analysis to synthesize the results within each research stream and suggest future research directions. We established two major research streams: second-language proficiency and interactions in the host country. We found inconclusive results about the role of communication with co-nationals in students’ adaptation, which contradicts the major adaptation theories. New contextualized research and the use of other theories could help explain the contradictory results and develop the existing theories. Our review suggests the need to theoretically refine the interrelationships between the interactional variables and different adaptation domains. Moreover, to create a better fit between the empirical data and the adaptation models, research should test the mediating effects of second-language proficiency and the willingness to communicate with locals. Finally, research should focus on students in non-Anglophone countries and explore the effects of remote communication in online learning on students’ adaptation. We document the intellectual structure of the research on the role of language and communication in international students’ adaptation and suggest a future research agenda.

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Introduction

One of the consequences of globalization is the changing landscape of international higher education. Over the past two decades, there has been a major increase in the number of international students, that is, those who have crossed borders for the purpose of study (OECD, 2021a ), from 1.9 million in 1997 to over 6.1 million in 2019 (UIS Statistics, 2021 ). Even students who are motivated to develop intercultural competence by studying abroad (Jackson, 2015 ) face several challenges that prevent them from benefitting fully from that experience. Examples of these challenges include language and communication difficulties, cultural and educational obstacles affecting their adaptation, socialization, and learning experiences (Andrade, 2006 ), psychological distress (Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ), or social isolation and immigration and visa extension issues caused by Covid-19 travel restrictions (Hope, 2020 ).

Cross-cultural adaptation theories and empirical research (for reviews, see Andrade, 2006 ; Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ) confirm the critical importance of foreign-language and communication skills and transitioning to the host culture for a successful academic and social life. Improving our understanding of the role of foreign-language proficiency and communication in students’ adaptation is important as the number of international students in higher education worldwide is on the rise. This increase has been accompanied by a growing number of publications on this topic over the last decade (see Fig.  1 ). Previous reviews of the literature have identified foreign-language proficiency and communication as predictors of students’ adaptation and well-being in various countries (Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ). The most recent reviews (Jing et al., 2020 ) list second-language acquisition and cross-cultural adaptation as among the most commonly studied topics in international student research. However, to date, there are no studies specifically examining the role of language and communication in international students’ adaptation (henceforth “language and communication in student adaptation”). This gap is especially important given recent research promoting students’ self-formation (Marginson, 2014 ) and reciprocity between international and domestic students (Volet & Jones, 2012 ). The results challenge the traditional “adjustment to the host culture” paradigm whereby international students are treated as being out of sync with the host country’s norms (Marginson, 2014 ). Thus, this article differs from prior research by offering a systematic and in-depth review of the literature on language and communication in student adaptation using bibliometric co-citation analysis and qualitative content analysis. Our research has a methodological advantage in using various bibliometric tools, which should improve the validity of the results.

Source: HistCite). Note . TLC, total local citations received; TGC, total global citations received; Articles, number of articles published in the field; International Students, number (in millions) of international students worldwide (UIS Statistics, 2021 )

Yearly publication of articles on language and communication in student adaptation (

We focus on several questions:

What are the most impactful journals and articles about the role of language and communication in student adaptation?

What is the thematic structure of the research in the field?

What are the leading research streams investigating language and communication in student adaptation?

What are the effects of language and communication on student adaptation?

What are the future research directions?

After introducing the major concepts related to language and communication in student adaptation and the theoretical underpinnings of the field, we present our methodology. Using bibliometric and content analysis, we track the development of the field and identify the major themes, research streams, and studies that have shaped the state-of-the art and our current knowledge about the role of language and communication in student adaptation. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research.

Defining the concepts and theories related to language and communication in student adaptation

Concepts related to language and communication.

Culture is a socially constructed reality in which language and social practices interact to construct meanings (Burr, 2006 ). In this social constructionist perspective, language is viewed as a form of social action. Intertwined with culture, it allows individuals to communicate their knowledge about the world, as well as the assumptions, opinions, and viewpoints they share with other people (Kramsch, 1998 ). In this sense, people identify themselves and others through the use of language, which allows them to communicate their social and cultural identity (Kramsch, 1998 ).

Intercultural communication refers to the process of constructing shared meaning among individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds (Piller, 2007 ). Based on the research traditions in the language and communication in student adaptation research, we view foreign or second-language proficiency , that is, the skill allowing an individual to manage communication interactions in a second language successfully (Gallagher, 2013 ), as complementary to communication (Benzie, 2010 ).

Cross-cultural adaptation

The term adaptation is used in the literature interchangeably with acculturation , adjustment , assimilation , or integration . Understood as a state, cultural adaptation refers to the degree to which people fit into a new cultural environment (Gudykunst and Hammer, 1988 ), which is reflected in their psychological and emotional response to that environment (Black, 1990 ). In processual terms, adaptation is the process of responding to the new environment and developing the ability to function in it (Kim, 2001 ).

The literature on language and communication in student adaptation distinguishes between psychological, sociocultural, and academic adaptation. Psychological adaptation refers to people’s psychological well-being, reflected in their satisfaction with relationships with host nationals and their functioning in the new environment. Sociocultural adaptation is the individual’s ability to fit into the interactive aspects of the new cultural environment (Searle and Ward, 1990 ). Finally, academic adaptation refers to the ability to function in the new academic environment (Anderson, 1994 ). We will discuss the results of the research on language and communication in student adaptation with reference to these adaptation domains.

Theoretical underpinnings of language and communication in student adaptation

We will outline the major theories used in the research on international students and other sojourners, which has recognized foreign-language skills and interactions in the host country as critical for an individual’s adaptation and successful international experience.

The sojourner adjustment framework (Church, 1982 ) states that host-language proficiency allows one to establish and maintain interactions with host nationals, which contributes to one’s adaptation to the host country. In turn, social connectedness with host nationals protects one from psychological distress and facilitates cultural learning.

The cultural learning approach to acculturation (Ward et al., 2001 ) states that learning culture-specific skills allows people to handle sociocultural problems. The theory identifies foreign-language proficiency (including nonverbal communication), communication competence, and awareness of cultural differences as prerequisites for successful intercultural interactions and sociocultural adaptation (Ward et al., 2001 ). According to this approach, greater intercultural contact results in fewer sociocultural difficulties (Ward and Kennedy, 1993 ).

Acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 , 2005 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) identifies four acculturation practices when interacting with host nationals: assimilation (seeking interactions with hosts and not maintaining one’s cultural identity), integration (maintaining one’s home culture and seeking interactions with hosts), separation (maintaining one’s home culture and avoiding interactions with hosts), and marginalization (showing little interest in both maintaining one’s culture and interactions with others) (Berry, 1997 ). Acculturation theory postulates that host-language skills help establish supportive social and interpersonal relationships with host nationals and, thus, improve intercultural communication and sociocultural adjustment (Ward and Kennedy, 1993 ).

The anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory (Gudykunst, 2005 ; Gudykunst and Hammer, 1988 ) states that intercultural adjustment is a function of one’s ability to cope with anxiety and uncertainty caused by interactions with hosts and situational processes. People’s ability to communicate effectively depends on their cognitive resources (e.g., cultural knowledge), which helps them respond to environmental demands and ease their anxiety.

The integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 2001 ) posits that people’s cultural adaptation is reflected in their functional fitness, meaning, the degree to which they have internalized the host culture’s meanings and communication symbols, their psychological well-being, and the development of a cultural identity (Kim, 2001 ). Communication with host nationals improves cultural adaptation by providing opportunities to learn about the host country’s society and culture, and developing intercultural communication competence that includes the ability to receive and interpret comprehensible messages in the host environment.

The intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ) states that contact between two distinct groups reduces mutual prejudice under certain conditions: when groups have common goals and equal status in the social interaction, exhibit intergroup cooperation, and have opportunities to become friends. Intercultural contact reduces prejudice toward and stereotypical views of the cultural other and provides opportunities for cultural learning (Allport, 1954 ).

These theories provide the theoretical framework guiding the discussion of the results synthesized through the content analysis of the most impactful articles in the field.

Methodology

Bibliometric and content analysis methods.

We used a mixed-method approach to review the research on language and communication in student adaptation for all of 1994–2021. This timeframe was informed by the data extraction process described in the next section. Specifically, we conducted quantitative bibliometric analyses such as co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and conceptual thematic mapping, as well as qualitative content analysis to explore the research questions (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ).

Bibliometric methods use bibliographic data to identify the structures of scientific fields (Zupic and Čater, 2015 ). Using these methods, we can create an objective view of the literature by making the search and review process transparent and reproducible (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ). First, we measured the impact of the journals and articles by retrieving data from HistCite concerning the number of articles per journal and citations per article. We analyzed the number of total local citations (TLC) per year, that is, the number of times an article has been cited by other articles in the same literature (313 articles in our sample). We then analyzed the total global citations (TGC) each article received in the entire Web of Science (WoS) database. We also identified the trending articles in HistCite by calculating the total citation score (TLCe) at the end of the year covered in the study (mid-2021). This score rewards articles that received more citations within the last three years (i.e., up to the beginning of 2018). Using this technique, we can determine the emerging topics in the field because it considers not only articles with the highest number of citations received over a fixed period of time, but also those that have been cited most frequently in recent times (Alon et al., 2018 ).

Second, to establish a general conceptual structure of the field, we analyzed the co-occurrence of authors’ keywords using VOS software. Next, based on the authors’ keywords, we plotted a conceptual map using Biblioshiny (a tool for scientific mapping analysis that is part of the R bibliometrix-package) to identify motor, basic, niche, and emerging/declining themes in the field (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ).

Third, to determine specific research streams and map patterns within the field (Alon et al., 2018 ), we used the co-citation mapping techniques in HistCite that analyze and visualize citation linkages between articles (Garfield et al., 2006 ) over time.

Next, we used content analysis to synthesize the results from the 31 most impactful articles in the field. We analyzed the results within each research stream and discussed them in light of the major adaptation theories to suggest future research directions and trends within each research stream (Alon et al., 2018 ). Content analysis allows the researcher to identify the relatively objective characteristics of messages (Neuendorf, 2002 ). Thus, this technique enabled us to verify and refine the results produced by the bibliometric analysis, with the goal of improving their validity.

Data extraction

We extracted the bibliographic data from Clarivate Analytics’ WoS database that includes over 21,000 high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly journals (as of July 2020 from clarivate.libguides.com). We adopted a two-stage data extraction approach (Alon et al., 2018 ; Bretas and Alon, 2021 ). Table 1 describes the data search and extraction processes.

First, in June 2021, we used keywords that would best cover the researched topic by searching for the following combinations of terms: (a) “international student*” OR “foreign student*” OR “overseas student*” OR “study* abroad” OR “international education”—to cover international students as a specific sojourner group; (b) “language*” and “communicat*”—to cover research on foreign-language proficiency as well as communication issues; and (c) “adapt*” OR “adjust*” OR “integrat*” OR “acculturat*”—to cover the adaptation aspects of the international students’ experience. However, given that cross-cultural adaptation is reflected in an individual’s functional fitness, psychological well-being, and development of a cultural identity (Kim, 2001 ), we included two additional terms in the search: “identit*” OR “satisf*”—to cover the literature on the students’ identity issues and satisfaction in the host country. Finally, based on a frequency analysis of our data extracted in step 2, we added “cultur* shock” in step 3 to cover important studies on culture shock as one of critical aspects of cross-cultural adaptation (Gudykunst, 2005 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ; Ward et al., 2001 ). After refining the search by limiting the data to articles published in English, the extraction process yielded 921 sources in WoS.

In the second stage, we refined the extraction further through a detailed examination of all 921 sources. We carefully read the articles’ abstracts to identify those suitable for further analysis. If the abstracts did not contain one or more of the three major aspects specified in the keyword search (i.e., international student, language and communication, adaptation), we studied the whole article to either include or exclude it. We did not identify any duplicates, but we removed book chapters and reviews of prior literature that were not filtered out by the search in WoS. Moreover, we excluded articles that (a) reported on students’ experiences outside of higher education contexts; (b) dealt with teaching portfolios, authors’ reflective inquiries, or anecdotal studies lacking a method section; (c) focused on the students’ experience outside the host country or on the experience of other stakeholders (e.g., students’ spouses, expatriate academics); (d) used the terms “adaptation,” “integration,” or “identity” in a sense different from cultural adaptation (e.g., adaptation of a syllabus/method/language instruction; integration of research/teaching methods/technology; “professional” but not “cultural” identity); or (e) used language/communication as a dependent rather than an independent variable. This process yielded 313 articles relevant to the topic. From them, we extracted the article’s title, author(s) names and affiliations, journal name, number, volume, page range, date of publication, abstract, and cited references for bibliometric analysis.

In a bibliometric analysis, the article is the unit of analysis. The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate interconnections among articles and research areas by measuring how many times the article is (co)cited by other articles (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ).

• Bibliometric analysis

Most relevant journals and articles

We addressed research question 1 regarding the most impactful journals and articles about the role of language and communication in student adaptation by identifying the most relevant journals and articles. Figure  2 lists the top 20 journals publishing in the field. The five most influential journals in terms of the number of local and global citations are as follows: International Journal of Intercultural Relations (79 and 695 citations, respectively), Journal of Studies in International Education (28 and 343 citations, respectively), Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (14 and 105 citations, respectively), Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (13 and 302 citations, respectively), and Higher Education (11 and 114 citations, respectively),

Source: HistCite). Note . TLC, total local citations received; TLC/t, total local citations received per year; TGC, total global citations received; Articles, number of articles published in the field

Top 20 journals publishing on language and communication in student adaptation (

Table 2  lists the 20 most influential and trending articles as measured by, respectively, local citations (TLC) and trending local citations at the end of the period covered (TLCe), that is, mid-2021. The most locally cited article was a qualitative study of Asian students’ experiences in New Zealand by Campbell and Li ( 2008 ) (TLC = 12). That study, which linked host-language proficiency with student satisfaction and effective communication in academic contexts, also received the highest number of global citations per year (TGC/t = 7.86). The most influential article in terms of total local citations per year was a quantitative study by Akhtar and Kröner-Herwig ( 2015 ) (TLC/t = 1.00) who linked students’ host-language proficiency, prior international experience, and age with acculturative stress among students in Germany. Finally, Sam’s ( 2001 ) quantitative study, which found no relationship between host-language and English proficiency and having a local friend on students’ satisfaction with life in Norway, received the most global citations (TGC = 115).

The most trending article (TLCe = 7) was a quantitative study by Duru and Poyrazli ( 2011 ) who considered the role of social connectedness, perceived discrimination, and communication with locals and co-nationals in the sociocultural adaptation of Turkish students in the USA. The second article with the most trending local citations (TLCe = 5) was a qualitative study by Sawir et al. ( 2012 ) who focused on host-language proficiency as a barrier to sociocultural adaptation and communication in the experience of students in Anglophone countries.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

We addressed research question 2 regarding the thematic structure of the research in the field by analyzing the authors’ keyword co-occurrences to establish the thematic structure of the field (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ; Donthu et al., 2020 ). Figure  3 depicts the network of keywords that occurred together in at least five articles between 1994 and 2021. The nodes represent keywords, the edges represent linkages among the keywords, and the proximity of the nodes and the thickness of the edges represent how frequently the keywords co-occurred (Donthu et al., 2020 ). The analysis yielded two even clusters with 17 keywords each. Cluster 1 represents the primary focus on the role of language proficiency in student adaptation. It includes keywords such as “language proficiency,” “adaptation,” “acculturative stress,” “culture shock,” and “challenges.” Cluster 2 represents the focus on the role of intercultural communication and competence in student adaptation. It includes keywords such as “intercultural communication,” “intercultural competence,” “academic/psychological/sociocultural adaptation,” and “transition.”

Source: VOS)

Authors’ keyword co-occurrence analysis (

Conceptual thematic map

Based on the authors’ keywords, we plotted a conceptual map (see Fig.  4 ) using two dimensions. The first is density , which indicates the degree of development of the themes as measured by the internal associations among the keywords. The second is centrality , which indicates the relevance of the themes as measured by the external associations among the keywords. The map shows four quadrants: (a) motor themes (high density and centrality), (b) basic themes (low density and high centrality), (c) niche themes (high density and low centrality), and (d) emerging/declining themes (low density and centrality) (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ). The analysis revealed that motor themes in the field are studies of Chinese students’ experiences and student integration. Unsurprisingly, the basic themes encompass most topics related to language in student adaptation. Research examining the perspective of the students’ parents with regard to their children’s overseas experience exemplifies a niche theme. Finally, “international medical students” and “learning environment” unfold as emerging/declining themes. To determine if the theme is emerging or declining, we analyzed bibliometric data on articles relating to medical students’ adaptation and students’ learning environment. We found that out of 19 articles on medical students published in 13 journals (10 medicine/public health-related), 15 (79%) articles were published over the last five years (2016–2021), which clearly suggests an emerging trend. The analysis of authors’ keywords yielded only three occurrences of the keyword “learning environment” in articles published in 2012, 2016, and 2020, which may suggest an emerging trend. To further validate this result, we searched for this keyword in titles and abstracts and identified eight relevant articles published between 2016 and 2020, which supports the emerging trend.

Source: Biblioshiny)

Conceptual thematic map (

Citation mapping: research streams

We addressed research question 3 regarding the leading research streams investigating language and communication in student adaptation by using co-citation mapping techniques to reveal how the articles in our dataset are co-cited over time. To produce meaningful results that would not trade depth for breadth in our large dataset (313 articles), we limited the search to articles with TGC ≥ 10 and TLC ≥ 3. These thresholds yielded the 31 articles (10% of the dataset) that are most frequently cited within and outside the dataset, indicating their driving force in the field. We analyzed these 31 articles further because their number corresponds with the suggested range of the most-cited core articles for mapping in HistCite (Garfield et al., 2006 ).

Figure  5 presents the citation mapping of these 31 articles. The vertical axis shows how the articles have been co-cited over time. Each node represents an article, the number in the box represents the location of the article in the entire dataset, and the size of the box indicates the article’s impact in terms of TLCs. The arrows indicate the citing direction between two articles. A closer distance between two nodes/articles indicates their similarity. Ten isolated articles in Fig.  5 have not been co-cited by other articles in the subsample of 31 articles.

Source: HistCite)

Citation mapping of articles on language and communication in student adaptation (

A content analysis of these 31 articles points to two major and quite even streams in the field: (a) “ second-language proficiency ” (16 articles) and (b) “ interactions in the host country ” involving second-language proficiency, communication competence, intercultural communication, and other factors (15 articles). We clustered the articles based on similar conceptualizations of language and communication and their role in student adaptation. As Fig.  5 illustrates, the articles formed distinct but interrelated clusters. The vertical axis indicates that while studies focusing solely on second-language proficiency and host-country interactions have developed relatively concurrently throughout the entire timespan, a particular interest in host-country interactions occurred in the second decade of research within the field (between 2009 and 2013). The ensuing sections present the results of the content analysis of the studies in each research stream, discussing the results in light of the major theories outlined before.

Content analysis

We sought to answer research question 4 regarding the effects of language and communication on student adaptation by synthesizing the literature within the previously established two research streams. The concept map in Fig.  6 illustrates the predictive effects of second-language proficiency and host-country interactions on various adaptation domains. Table 4 in the Appendix presents a detailed description of the synthesis and lists studies reporting these effects, underscoring inconclusive results.

A concept map synthesizing research on language and communication in student adaptation

Second-language proficiency

This research stream focuses on language barriers and the role of foreign-language proficiency in student adaptation. Having host-language proficiency predicts less acculturative stress (Akhtar and Kröner-Herwig, 2015 ), while limited host-language proficiency inhibits communication with locals and academic integration (Cao et al., 2016 ). These results are in line with the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 , 2005 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) and the communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim, 2001 ). Cross ( 1995 ) suggested that social skills predict sociocultural rather than psychological (perceived stress, well-being) adaptation (Searle and Ward, 1990 ). Indeed, several qualitative studies have explained that the language barrier affects sociocultural adaptation by preventing students from establishing contacts with host nationals (Wang and Hannes, 2014 ), developing meaningful relationships (Sawir et al., 2012 ), and limiting occasions for cultural learning (Trentman, 2013 ), supporting the acculturation theory (Anderson, 1994 ; Church, 1982 ; Searle and Ward, 1990 ).

Moreover, insufficient host-language proficiency reduces students’ satisfaction by hampering their communication, socialization, and understanding of lectures in academic contexts (Campbell and Li, 2008 ). Similarly, language affects academic adaptation in students who have difficulty communicating with domestic students (Young and Schartner, 2014 ) or when used as a tool in power struggles, limiting students’ opportunities to speak up in class and participate in discussions or decision-making (Shi, 2011 ). Students who have limited host-language proficiency tend to interact with other international students, which exacerbates their separation from domestic students (Sawir et al., 2012 ). These findings again confirm the theories of acculturation (Berry, 1997 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) and communication and cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 2001 ).

With regard to the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 ; Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ), we found inconclusive results concerning the impact of foreign-language skills on students’ satisfaction and adaptation. Specifically, some studies (e.g., Sam, 2001 ; Ying and Liese, 1994 ) found this effect to be non-significant when tested in regression models. One explanation for this result might be the indirect effect of language on adaptation. For instance, Yang et al. ( 2006 ) established that host-language proficiency mediated the relationship between contact with host nationals and the psychological and sociocultural adjustment of students in Canada. Swami et al. ( 2010 ) reported that better host-language skills among Asian students in Britain predicted their adaptation partly because they had more contacts with host nationals. In turn, Meng et al. ( 2018 ) found that the relationship between foreign-language proficiency and social and academic adaptation was fully mediated by global competence (understood as “intercultural competence” or “global mindset”) in Chinese students in Belgium.

Interactions in the host country

The second research stream comprises studies taking a broader look at language and communication in student adaptation by considering both individual and social interaction contexts: second-language (host-language and English) proficiency; willingness to communicate in the second language; communication interactions with domestic and international students, host nationals, and co-nationals; social connectedness (i.e., a subjective awareness of being in a close relationship with the social world; Lee and Robbins, 1998 ; and integrative motivation (i.e., a positive affective disposition towards the host community; Yu, 2013 .

Host-language proficiency predicts academic (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Yu, 2013 ), psychological (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ), and sociocultural adaptation (Brown, 2009 ; Duru and Poyrazli, 2011 ), confirming the acculturation theory (Ward et al., 2001 ). However, although some studies (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Yu, 2013 ) confirmed the impact of host-language proficiency on academic adaptation, they found no such impact on sociocultural adaptation. Yu’s ( 2013 ) study reported that sociocultural adaptation depends on academic adaptation rather than on host-language proficiency. Moreover, host-language proficiency increases the students’ knowledge of the host culture, reduces their uncertainty, and promotes intercultural communication (Gallagher, 2013 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ), supporting the central aspects of the AUM theory (Gudykunst, 2005 ).

In turn, by enabling communication with academics and peers, second-language proficiency promotes academic (Yu and Shen, 2012 ) and sociocultural adaptation, as well as social satisfaction (Perrucci and Hu, 1995 ). It also increases the students’ willingness to communicate in non-academic contexts. This willingness mediates the relationship between second-language proficiency and cross-cultural difficulties among Asian students in England (Gallagher, 2013 ). This finding may explain inconclusive results concerning the relationship between second-language proficiency and cultural adaptation. It appears that second-language proficiency alone is insufficient for successful adaptation. This proficiency should be coupled with the students’ willingness to initiate intercultural communication to cope with communication and cultural difficulties, which is compatible with both the AUM theory and Kim’s ( 2001 ) communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory.

As mentioned before, host-language proficiency facilitates adaptation through social interactions. Research demonstrates that communication with domestic students predicts academic satisfaction (Perrucci and Hu, 1995 ) and academic adaptation (Yu and Shen, 2012 ), confirming Kim’s ( 2001 ) theory. Moreover, the frequency of interaction (Zimmermann, 1995 ) and direct communication with host nationals (Rui and Wang, 2015 ) predict adaptation and reduce uncertainty, supporting the AUM theory. Zhang and Goodson ( 2011 ) found that social interactions with host nationals mediate the relationship between adherence to the host culture and sociocultural adaptation difficulties, confirming the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 ), the intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ), and the culture learning approach in acculturation theory (Ward et al., 2001 ).

In line with the intergroup contact theory, social connectedness with host nationals predicts psychological and sociocultural adaptation (e.g., Hirai et al., 2015 ; Zhang and Goodson, 2011 ), confirming the sojourner adjustment framework (Church, 1982 ) and extending the acculturation framework (Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ) that recognizes the relevance of social connectedness for sociocultural adaptation only.

Research on interactions with co-nationals has produced inconclusive results. Some qualitative studies (Pitts, 2009 ) revealed that communication with co-nationals enhances students’ sociocultural adaptation and psychological and functional fitness for interacting with host nationals. Consistent with Kim’s ( 2001 ) theory, such communication may be a source of instrumental and emotional support for students when locals are not interested in contacts with them (Brown, 2009 ). Nonetheless, Pedersen et al. ( 2011 ) found that social interactions with co-nationals may cause psychological adjustment problems (e.g., homesickness), contradicting the acculturation theory (Ward and Kennedy, 1994 ), or increase their uncertainty (Rui and Wang, 2015 ), supporting the AUM theory.

Avenues for future research

We addressed research question 5 regarding future research directions through a content analysis of the 31 most impactful articles in the field. Importantly, all 20 trending articles listed in Table 1 were contained in the set of 31 articles. This outcome confirms the relevance of the results of the content analysis. We used these results as the basis for formulating the research questions we believe should be addressed within each of the two research streams. These questions are listed in Table 3 .

Research has focused primarily on the experience of Asian students in Anglophone countries (16 out of 31 most impactful articles), with Chinese students’ integration being the motor theme. This is not surprising given that Asian students account for 58% of all international students worldwide (OECD, 2021b ). In addition, Anglophone countries have been the top host destinations for the last two decades. The USA, the UK, and Australia hosted 49% of international students in 2000, while the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia hosted 47% of international students in 2020 (Project Atlas, 2020 ). This fact raises the question of the generalizability of the research results across cultural contexts, especially given the previously identified cultural variation in student adaptation (Fritz et al., 2008 ). Thus, it is important to study the experiences of students in underexplored non-Anglophone host destinations that are currently gaining in popularity, such as China, hosting 9% of international students worldwide in 2019, France, Japan, or Spain (Project Atlas, 2020 ). Furthermore, future research in various non-Anglophone countries could precisely define the role of English as a lingua franca vs. host-language proficiency in international students’ experience.

The inconsistent results concerning the effects of communication with co-nationals on student adaptation (e.g., Pedersen et al., 2011 ; Pitts, 2009 ) indicate that more contextualized research is needed to determine if such communication is a product of or a precursor to adaptation difficulties (Pedersen et al., 2011 ). Given the lack of confirmation of the acculturation theory (Ward and Kennedy, 1994 ) or the communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim, 2001 ) in this regard, future research could cross-check the formation of students’ social networks with their adaptation trajectories, potentially using other theories such as social network theory to explain the contradictory results of empirical research.

Zhang and Goodson ( 2011 ) showed that social connectedness and social interaction with host nationals predict both psychological and sociocultural adaptation. In contrast, the sojourner adjustment framework (Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ) considered their impact on sociocultural adaptation only. Thus, future research should conceptualize the interrelationships among social interactions in the host country and various adaptation domains (psychological, sociocultural, and academic) more precisely.

Some studies (Brown, 2009 ; Gallagher, 2013 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ) confirm all of the major adaptation theories in that host-language proficiency increases cultural knowledge and the acquisition of social skills, reduces uncertainty and facilitates intercultural communication. Nevertheless, the impact of language on sociocultural adaptation appears to be a complex issue. Our content analysis indicated that sociocultural adaptation may be impacted by academic adaptation (Yu, 2013 ) or does not occur when students do not engage in meaningful interactions with host nationals (Ortaçtepe, 2013 ). To better capture the positive sociocultural adaptation outcomes, researchers should take into account students’ communication motivations, together with other types of adaptation that may determine sociocultural adaptation.

Next, in view of some research suggesting the mediating role of second-language proficiency (Yang et al., 2006 ), contacts with host nationals (Swami et al., 2010 ), and students’ global competence (Meng et al., 2018 ) in their adaptation, future research should consider other non-language-related factors such as demographic, sociocultural, and personality characteristics in student adaptation models.

Finally, the conceptual map of the field established the experiences of medical students and the learning environment as an emerging research agenda. We expect that future research will focus on the experience of other types of students such as management or tourism students who combine studies with gaining professional experience in their fields. In terms of the learning environment and given the development and growing importance of online learning as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, future research should explore the effects of remote communication, both synchronous and asynchronous, in online learning on students’ adaptation and well-being.

This article offers an objective approach to reviewing the current state of the literature on language and communication in student adaptation by conducting a bibliometric analysis of 313 articles and a content analysis of 31 articles identified as the driving force in the field. Only articles in English were included due to the authors’ inability to read the identified articles in Russian, Spanish, or Chinese. Future research could extend the data search to other languages.

This review found support for the effects of language of communication on student adaptation, confirming major adaptation theories. Nevertheless, it also identified inconsistent results concerning communication with co-nationals and the complex effects of communication with host nationals. Thus, we suggested that future research better captures the adaptation outcomes by conducting contextualized research in various cultural contexts, tracking the formation of students’ social networks, and precisely conceptualizing interrelations among social interactions in the host country and different adaptation domains. Researchers should also consider students’ communication motivations and the mediating role of non-language-related factors in student adaptation models.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

This research is supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange grant “Exploring international students’ experiences across European and non-European contexts” [grant number PPN/BEK/2019/1/00448/U/00001] to Michał Wilczewski.

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Wilczewski, M., Alon, I. Language and communication in international students’ adaptation: a bibliometric and content analysis review. High Educ 85 , 1235–1256 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00888-8

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Internationalizing “International Communication”

Reviewed publication:.

Book Review on Internationalizing “International Communication ”, edited by Chin-Chuan Lee The University of Michigan Press, 2015, vi+332 pp.

The term international and global are interchangeably used in international communication. International often refers to the exchange of information and ideas between and among nations, regardless of economic standing, whereas global is intrinsically hegemonic, implying a one-way flow of power from the powerful to the powerless. The book Internationalizing “International Communication ” is believed to have opened up a different approach to studying communication in a cosmopolitan ecology across countries. Chin-Chuan Lee, the book’s editor, reflects critically on the field’s history and thoughtfully proposes, “scholars of international communication need the cultural confidence and epistemological autonomy to make their mark on global or cosmopolitan theory, which necessarily will entail borrowing, recasting, or reconceptualizing Western theories—the more the better, whatever help us elucidate and analyze rich local experiences and connect them to broader processes, whatever broaden our horizons and expand our repertoire, as long as we are not beholden to any purported final arbiter of universal truth” (p. 16).

In Chapter One, Lee challenges the implied universality of Americentric concepts and methodologies in communication research. Even in an increasingly globalized world where information moves freely across borders, these ideas retain the international designation as a method to signal that nation-states remain powerful actors in the production and distribution of media content. While Lee is careful not to dismiss any theory purely because of its origins, he does allow a broader range of intellectual traditions to participate in the discussion. This book is a bold step in that direction.

The subsequent fourteen chapters accept Lee’s invitation, resulting in a chorus of voices rarely heard in academic settings. Elihu Katz, for example, spends most of Chapter Two debating what it means to internationalize intercultural communication. He talks about his role in the launch of broadcast television in Israel, as well as the lessons he gained from the experience which he labelled as international communication research. He thinks that the international communication preceded national communication, rather than vice versa.

In Chapter Three, Tsan-Kuo Chang examines the theoretical implications of cultural imperialism, concluding that it “no longer fits the world of interconnected and interdependent nations in a global network society” (p. 61). According to the author, at a time when the field of international communication studies has expanded significantly in recent decades, the production and accumulation of knowledge have been less impressive. In fact, without keeping up with the times, the field has been regurgitating old ideas and obsolete perspectives.

In Chapter Four, Jan Servaes presents Thailand as a counterexample of a democratic nation with a non-Western media system, offering historical context for Western bias in previous four theories of the press. He talks about the importance of “internationalization” in journalism and media education, mentioning that professional journalism education is based on local or national parameters. According to him, apart from creating appropriate political and economic environments for an independent media system, it is crucial to educate journalists to the highest ethical and professional standards.

In Chapter Five, Paolo Mancini revisits research he co-authored in 2004 to assess how professional journalism has altered in the wake of polarized politics and social media activism. Even though journalists perceive there is a dominant model of journalism whose practices and principles are spreading over the world, and even if they claim to adopt and apply this normative framework, they behave in a completely different way in their daily activities. At the very least, there is a mismatch between journalism theory and practice.

Michael Curtin in Chapter Six argues that film studies have become sufficiently internationalized, with media capitals such as Mumbai competing with Hollywood for a slice of global markets while their products are consumed locally in unexpected ways, noting the Chinese film industry’s recent move from Hong Kong to Beijing as an inward turn. In Chapter Seven, Jaap van Ginneken takes a somewhat different approach, utilizing data from IMDb (an online database of information related to films) to illustrate that major Hollywood studios continue to dominate the film industry, owing in part to their commercial character. Even with blockbuster films like Avatar, he agrees with Curtin that audiences can discover their meaning.

Colin Sparks returns to the concept of cultural imperialism in Chapter Eight. Before proposing a narrower scope that captures how modern nation-states exploit media in fights over intellectual property, airwave regulation, and internet control, he points out the challenges with presuming a united national culture or single reading of literature. Silvio Waisbord warns against adopting an area studies approach and separating dialogues along narrow geopolitical lines, as media studies shift away from their Western concentration (e.g., East Asian media studies). Instead, he promotes a cosmopolitan viewpoint that places “local research in the context of global debates and trends, and engaging in conversations that transcend local interests and phenomena” (p. 187).

In Chapter Ten, Chin-Chuan Lee revisits Lerner’s (1958) and Rogers’ (2003) seminal views that encouraged him to pursue a career in international communication. Lee evaluates their strengths and flaws and proposes a Weberian approach ( Weber, 1930 , 1951 , 1978a , 1978b ) as an alternative to imposing Western-based theories on the rest of the world, with the specific/local dialectical interaction with the general/global. He also mentions that international communication is a creative fusion of local perspectives and global visions and that applying theories to explain our experiences should gain over appropriating our experiences to fit the theories.

The final four chapters provide insights into how Weber’s strategy would work in reality. Judy Polumbaum revisits her research in modern China in Chapter Eleven, looking at it through the lenses of Bourdieu and Johnson’s (1993) “fields of cultural production” and Giddens’ (1984) “theory of structuration”. In what appears to be a tightly regulated media environment, she reveals increasing tensions between the state and capital. She offered two additional guiding concepts for international communication research: circumstances and serendipity and proposed a third optional but highly recommended principle: whimsy.

Longxi Zhang investigates the historic and complicated relationship between East and West in Chapter Twelve, going to Marco Polo. He concludes that translation can still be applicable to challenge ethnocentrism and bridge cultural divides. He opines that translation across languages can provide a model because it most clearly poses communication questions.

Rodney Benson emphasizes the limitations and biases of significant ideas in current media studies, such as Habermas’ “public sphere” (1992) , Bourdieu and Johnson’s “fields” ( 1993 ), Castells’ “network society” (1996) , and Latour’s “actor-network theory” (2005) in Chapter Thirteen. They do not exhaust the possibilities for internationalizing media studies, but simply propose a spectrum of possible solutions, on which or against which future theorizing—both Western and non-Western—might build fruitfully. Therefore, in the digital age, he also highlights their potential to create greater understanding and collaboration between Western and non-Western researchers.

In Chapter Fourteen, Peter Dahlgren criticizes media studies as an excessively complacent and self-absorbed field. He sees cosmopolitanism as the most promising road ahead, yet one that necessitates civic engagement and acceptance of various research techniques. For international communication research, Dahlgren highlights the importance of the normative and cultural frameworks of civic international communication actors and comments that these can be refracted at least in part through the prism of cosmopolitanism.

The book ends with Arvind Rajagopal’s critical account of the meteoric rise of communication technology in India. He looks at how technology has exacerbated societal divisions and made violence more obvious, casting doubt on the Cold War-era premise that more access to visual media will inevitably lead to a transparent, rational society.

I found “Local Experiences, Cosmopolitan Theories”, by Chin-Chuan Lee, as the most informative and provocative chapter in the book. In this wonderful chapter, Lee concisely reviews the attempts in recent decades to internationalize media studies, exposing the inadequacy of those models, with an appropriate critique of uber-enthusiastic unipolarists like Francis Fukuyama. He also argues for a new way not just to examine the works of media, but to understand how communication and media impact the lives of media consumers across countries characterized by evolving digital ecology: cosmopolitanism. Lee states that “If international communication scholars are truly serious about achieving the goals of mutual understanding through cultural dialogue, it is imperative that we listen humbly to symphonic music whose harmonious unity has themes and variations and is made of a cacophony of instrumental sounds” (p.218).

International communication can transcend national and cultural boundaries in the acquisition of knowledge about cultural values, behavioral patterns, and interaction rules that enable effective transcultural interaction. As a result, transcultural communication must take the context into account. Transcultural perspectives add a significant new dimension to research by transcending, transgressing, and transforming borders across languages, communities, and cultures, which reflects the spirit of international communication. As a result, I believe that transcultural communication is a step in the right direction toward strengthening international communication.

Overall, this volume covers a diverse spectrum of viewpoints on what it takes to internationalize media and communication studies. At the same time, each author emphasizes the critical significance of controlling information overload, encouraging visual literacy, and engaging in fruitful debates over global, national, and local issues. Unfortunately, after fifteen chapters, the messages start to sound the same. In addition, several chapters of the book focus on Asia, for the book grew out of a conference held in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, I would have loved to see additional research from the world’s other underrepresented regions.

Ultimately, Internationalizing “International Communication” is a good starting point for a long-overdue discourse in media studies and other social science and humanities departments. I strongly recommend this volume for graduate or advanced undergraduate international communication courses, genuinely hoping that future academics adopt the suggested modifications in how such research is performed and received.

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Article contents

A history of international communication studies.

• Elizabeth C. Hanson Elizabeth C. Hanson Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.63
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017
• This version: 28 February 2020
• Previous version

The intellectual impetus for international communication research has come from a variety of disciplines, notably political science, sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and, of course, communication science and international relations. Although highly diverse in content, international communication scholarship, past and current, falls into distinct research traditions or areas of inquiry. The content and focus of these have changed over time in response to innovations in communication technologies and to the political environment.

The development and spread of radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There was a heavy emphasis on the micro level effects, the process of persuasion. Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced this emphasis.

World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations.

During the Cold War, U.S foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication, notably “winning hearts and minds” of strategically important populations in the context of the East-West conflict. As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. “Development research” emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. This paradigm shaped both national and international development programs throughout the 1960’s. It resurfaced in the 1980s with a focus on telecommunication, and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development.” Development communication met serious criticism in the 1970s as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged.

The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s inspired a vast literature on their impact on the global economy, foreign policy, the nation state and, more broadly, on their impact on power structures and social change. The beginning of the 21st century marks a transition point as the scholarship begins to respond to multiple new forms of communication and to new directions taken by the technologies that developed and spread in the latter part of the previous century

• international communication
• globalization
• communication studies
• development communication
• cultural imperialism
• foreign policy
• digital technology
• Internet governance
• strategic narratives
• cyberconflict

Updated in this version

New references; additions to framing and media-foreign policy nexus sections; conclusions altered, and a final section outlining some new directions added.

Communication is at the heart of all international interaction and, indeed, all human interaction. Boundaries for the subject matter of international communication are difficult to establish, and the substantive content consists of multiple streams of diverse research. It is appropriate, therefore, to refer to international communication studies in the plural form. A “loose topical confederation” may be a more accurate description than a field or subfield of study. The intellectual impetus for international communication research has come from a variety of disciplines, notably political science, sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and, of course, communication science and international relations. Many scholars who study topics that might well be included have not identified themselves as scholars of international communication. The basic questions that fuel this diverse research concern the intersection of communication and international relations, but how to define and how broadly to construe these two areas of inquiry?

Harold Lasswell ( 1948 , p. 37) widely acknowledged as a founding father of international communication, described the communication process in terms of the questions: “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?” This famous formulation excludes nonverbal forms of communication, as well as other kinds of transactions that have been considered under the rubric of international communication. It does not include the question “Why?”, the purposive element, or the impact of technology, an important topic in recent research. International relations as a discipline has its own definitional and boundary controversies, particularly regarding the role of nonstate actors and the primacy of the nation state. The term global communication has often been used as a more inclusive term, as the processes of globalization have accelerated and the significance of nonstate actors has increased. Nevertheless, international communication persists as the conventional term to include all types of communication that occur across national boundaries or affect international outcomes.

Although highly diverse in content, international communication scholarship, past and current, falls into distinct research traditions or areas of inquiry. The content and focus of these have changed over time in response to innovations in communication technologies and to the political environment. In retrospect, threads can be discerned, but they are overlapping. Certain threads disappear, only to resurface later under a different label. To convey this complexity, this article moves chronologically, identifying the major foci of scholarly interest as they emerge in response to technological and political change. How the various topics evolved and became areas of inquiry will be indicated along the way.

This article covers the emergence of international communication as a field of study in the 1930s until 2009 . The beginning of the 21st century marks a transition point as the scholarship begins to respond to multiple new forms of communication and to new directions taken by the technologies that developed and spread in the latter part of the previous century. The final section of this article provides a very brief description of some research trends since 2009 .

The Persuasion Paradigm

The development and spread of radio and film increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion in the 1920s and 1930s. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There is some variation in the early histories of systematic communication research, but the three scholars who are generally cited and who are also most relevant to international communication are Harold Dwight Lasswell, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, and Wilbur Lang Schramm (Lerner & Nelson, 1977 ; Rogers, 1994 ).

Lasswell’s ( 1948 , p. 37) five-question encapsulation of the communication process—“Who says what to whom, through what channels, with what effects?”—provided a framework for much future communication research. His scholarship on communication began with his dissertation at the University of Chicago, Propaganda Technique in the World War , which was published in 1927 . His advisor, Charles E. Merriam, had worked for the Creel Committee on Public Information, which had designed, organized, and conducted extensive domestic and international propaganda activities during World War I. Lasswell’s dissertation/book analyzed the various propaganda techniques and strategies used by the Germans, British, French, and Americans and indicated factors that affected their impact. He defined propaganda here as “the control of opinion by significant symbols [. . .] by stories, rumors, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication” (Lasswell, 1927 , p. 9). His focus on the symbols and themes used in the messages foreshadowed his later development of content analysis as a research tool (Lerner & Nelson, 1977 ). His research and teaching on propaganda and public opinion helped to launch the teaching of university courses on this subject and contributed to the growth of scholarly interest during the 1930s. By 1935 , there were already 4,500 publications listed in an annotated bibliography on the subject by Lasswell and colleagues (Lasswell, Casey, & Smith, 1935 ), which was compiled under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council. Meanwhile, as the decade progressed, the rise of Fascism in Italy and the National Socialist Movement in Germany intensified scholarly interest in the subject.

Lasswell’s book World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study (Lasswell & Blumenstock, 1939 ) was another empirical investigation of symbol manipulation. The book was a case study of communist propaganda among Chicago’s unemployed during the Great Depression. The findings indicated that, despite some favorable circumstances, communist propaganda was blocked by American nationalism and individualism. Lasswell’s interest in the factors that facilitated and inhibited the communist world’s revolutionary appeal to a particularly vulnerable population demonstrated the interaction of macro and micro factors in politics at the local, national, and international levels (Almond, 1996 ).

The intellectual environment of the University of Chicago played a vital role in the development of Lasswell’s scholarship and in the origins of communication research. Significant funding for social science research in the 1920s and 1930s from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund and Rockefeller Foundation (which merged in 1932 ) attracted a highly competent group of scholars from various disciplines and encouraged exchange and collaboration among them. It was at the University of Chicago during those two decades that empirical social science research began to flourish and where cross-disciplinary collaboration established a pattern for future political communication research (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981 ).

The Rockefeller Foundation took a particular interest in communication research and helped to shape its direction in even more direct ways. From 1937 to 1944 , it supported the Radio Research Project, directed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld. The impetus for this project came from several directions (Czitrom, 1982 ). Analysis of propaganda and its effects led logically to investigations of public opinions and attitudes: how to explain their origins, persistence, and shifts. George Gallup’s founding of the American Institute of Public Opinion, in 1935 , and his statistical method of survey sampling held out the promise of a new scientific approach to these questions. There was a growing sense that increased literacy and the spread of newspapers, periodicals, motion pictures, and especially the radio had created a new situation that needed investigation. As described in the foreword to the first issue of Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937 , “Always the opinions of relatively small publics have been a prime force in political life, but now, for the first time in history we are confronted nearly everywhere by mass opinion as the final determinant of political and economic action” (Czitrom, 1982 , p.124). Sociologists and social psychologists had begun to look at the individual and social effects of what came to be known later (1940s) as the mass media. For example, the sociologist Robert Park ( 1922 ), at the University of Chicago, had studied the immigrant press in the United States, and the Payne Fund Project (Charters, 1933 ) had conducted an extensive quantitative study on the role of motion pictures in American society, particularly their effect on children. Finally, the rapid diffusion of radio was spurring advances in market research, a measurement challenge for a medium without subscriptions or circulation figures (Czitrom, 1982 ).

The rather vague purpose of the Rockefeller grant for the Radio Research Project, initially located at Princeton, was to study the psychological and social effects of radio. The associate directors were Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton and a founder of Public Opinion Quarterly , and Frank Stanton, a CBS researcher (later president of the network). Under Lazarsfeld’s direction, the project conducted dozens of studies that analyzed radio content and the demographics of the radio audience, correlating preferences with social stratification (Czitrom, 1982 ). In addition to several project summary publications, Lazarsfeld incorporated some of this research in his book Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and its Role in the Communication of Ideas (Lazarsfeld, 1940 ), which Czitrom ( 1982 ) claims was a key step in the consolidation of the field of communication.

In 1939 , Lazarsfeld moved to Columbia University with the Radio Research Project. The project, which had been renamed the Office of Radio Research, became in 1944 the Bureau of Applied Social Research, with a much broader focus. The emphasis here, as in the project’s earlier stages, was on the social psychology of short-term effects of the mass media. In the early years, commercially sponsored research made up about half of the budget (Rogers, 1994 ). Later, during World War II and for the decade that followed, more than half of the budget came from funding for government projects (Rogers, 1994 ).

Lazarsfeld used a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, including survey research, laboratory experiments, community studies, content analysis, and a few innovations. He advanced survey research methodology by combining the survey interview with multivariate data analysis. His focused interview was designed to access the individual’s perception of a media message. Focus group interviews and a method for measuring the emotional responses of the audience to radio programming were two of his most important methodological contributions (Rogers, 1994 ). He conducted the first comprehensive studies of radio in the United States and was the most important single individual in launching mass communication research (Rogers, 1994 ). Lazarsfeld, even more than Lasswell, helped to shape the early direction of communication research to emphasize mass communication effects (Rogers, 1994 ). Their heavy emphasis on micro-level effects narrowed the focus of communication study to “essentially a process of persuasion” (Czitrom, 1982 , p. 132) and steered communication scholars away from other topics, notably macro-level issues (Rogers, 1994 ). Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced the emphasis on this genre of research.

One response to the approaching involvement of the United States in World War II was the Rockefeller Foundation’s convening and funding of a communication seminar, which met monthly at its headquarters in New York between 1939 and 1940 . The initial purpose of bringing together this diverse group of leading scholars interested in communication (including both Lasswell and Lazarsfeld) was to provide theoretical guidance regarding future communication research (Rogers, 1994 ). Lasswell’s five-question formulation became the basic framework for discussion. Communication was conceptualized as “one-way, and intentional, oriented toward achieving a desired effect” (Rogers, 1994 , p. 223). As the crises mounted in Europe, the discussions began to direct the application of communication research to government policy. When the United States entered the war at the end of 1941 , the network of scholars who had participated in the seminar moved almost en masse to Washington, DC, to play an important role in conducting applied communication research (Rogers, 1994 ).

World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication, increasing its legitimacy and visibility and guaranteeing funding and support, as well as bringing together scholars from around the country interested in studying media and public opinion. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations (Simpson, 1994 ).

As these tasks required an interdisciplinary approach, a network of relationships developed among the social scientists who were located in numerous agencies and involved in various aspects of the war effort. In the War-Time Communications project for the Library of Congress and the Department of Justice, Lasswell developed a systematic, quantitative content analysis method for monitoring the foreign language press. Along with other social scientists, including Nathan Leites and Edward Shils, Lasswell analyzed the content of Nazi communications for information on internal political and morale conditions in Germany and occupied Europe for the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service of the Federal Communications Commission (Almond, 1996 ). Lazarsfeld and other specialists in survey research and social psychology were also employed by the military services. Survey research and various interviewing methods were used by the military services to address personnel issues such as recruitment and morale, by the Department of Agriculture in its effort to increase food production, by the Treasury Department in its efforts to sell bonds, and by the various intelligence services (Almond, 1996 ).

The Cold War Impact

World War II generated intense scholarly interest in the potential of the mass media for influencing opinions, attitudes, and behavior to meet U.S. strategic needs (Czitrom, 1982 ). As the hot war segued into a cold war, U.S. foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication. Besides the East–West conflict, two other international developments influenced scholarship: the integration and disintegration of Europe and the rise of new nationalisms in countries that were former European colonies. In this new international context, efforts to conceptualize international communication as a field of study accelerated. A major impetus to the development of the subject as a field was a Ford Foundation four-year grant in 1952 to the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a research program in international communication, which became an influential center for research in the field in the 1950s and 1960s.

The approach of the scholars associated with this center was to view international communication as a more complex process than a simple one-way reaction to mass media. The basic orientation of the work emanating from the center was articulated in the report that the Planning Committee, which the center had appointed to advise on the use of the grant, published in condensed form in the journal World Politics (MIT, 1954 ). It defined international communication in very broad terms as “the interchange of words, impressions and ideas which affect the attitudes and behavior of different peoples toward each other” (Mowlana, 1996 , p. 9). In even more sweeping terms, the report declared: “The study of communication is but one way to study man, and the study of international communication is but another way to study international relations” (MIT, 1954 , p. 359).

The MIT Planning Committee report referred to the large body of cumulative research and indicated two recurring problem areas: (a) “To what extent do changes in the structure of world politics interact with changes in the structure of world communication?” and (b) “What are the strategy and tactics of communication in achieving the aims of national policy in world affairs?” (MIT, 1954 , pp. 374–375). Although the criteria for selecting areas for future research were both “scientific merit and political significance,” the latter dominated the discussion. Indeed, the report asserted that “there was every reason why a program in communication research should select the great problems of our time.” These were stated in almost apocalyptic terms: (a) “The conflict between the Communist and the free worlds is of decisive importance to the balance of power and the future character of our civilization”; (b) “The future course of Western civilization is dependent upon the result of efforts to find new and stronger forms of economic, political, and military organization in Western Europe”; and (c) “The rise of new nationalisms in Asia and Africa [. . .] may profoundly affect balance of power and the status of Western civilization in the years to come” (MIT, 1954 , pp. 365–366).

The report suggested various research approaches that would be appropriate for addressing these problems and that also had scientific merit. Stressing the importance of studying the structure of a society in order to understand the communication processes within it, the report identified “elite communication” as an important direction for future research. For example, who are the opinion leaders in a society, what are their characteristics, how are their images formed, what is the relationship between elite and mass opinion, what is the process of mediation between the mass media and the audience, and how do attitudes and behavior change under the impact of communication? The report (MIT, 1954 , p. 366) identified “historical studies, field research, and laboratory experiments” as important types of research and expressed the need for improved methodologies for field research abroad, especially in nonwestern and communist societies. It outlined a sample field study in India as an area in which to study the rise of new nationalisms and the impact of international communication on political decision making in the Third World. Suggested sample projects for studying the East–West conflict were diplomatic negotiations between Soviet and Western powers and non-Western interpretations of news from communist versus Western sources.

Two special issues of Public Opinion Quarterly , Winter 1952–1953 and Spring 1956 , were devoted entirely to research in international and political communication respectively, to demonstrate the large volume of research that was accumulating in the field and to serve as a forum for discussion on the subject. These special issues were a product of a committee for the development of research in the field of communication that was appointed by the parent organization of the journal, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Both issues grappled with the difficulties encountered in defining the field, establishing boundaries, and conducting the necessary interdisciplinary research. A section on problem areas focused on such methodological issues as how to modify research methods, notably survey research, to populations abroad, especially non-Western and those not accessible for political reasons. The need to develop better concepts, better methods, and more pertinent and far-reaching data was noted repeatedly.

The MIT Planning Committee report and the two issues of Public Opinion Quarterly exemplified scholarly pursuits in international communication that were already under way and that foreshadowed much of the research to be conducted in the late 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. A sample of articles from the journal issues illustrates how the three problem areas outlined in the MIT report provided direction for future research.

The first might be summarized by the title of an article by Peter H. Rossi and Raymond A. Bauer ( 1952–1953 ), “Some Patterns of Soviet Communications Behavior.” This particular article was concerned with the patterns of exposure to the media among the population in the Soviet Union (radio, foreign radio, newspapers, magazines, books, movies, theater, and lectures) and how that exposure was related to involvement in the system. A variety of indirect approaches were employed by researchers on communication within the Soviet system, and there was considerable discussion within the two Public Opinion Quarterly issues about the validity of these methods. The Bauer and Rossi study involved interviews with Soviet displaced persons in the United States and Europe, and the data pertained to 1940 . It was part of a larger study on Soviet communications behavior, which in turn was part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (Bauer, Inkeles, & Kluckhohn, 1956 ). Another study, by Ivor Wayne ( 1956 ), explored Soviet and American themes and values through a content analysis of popular magazines in both countries.

To assess the impact of the Voice of America on the Soviet system, Alex Inkeles ( 1952 – 1953 ) analyzed references to the VOA in the Soviet media, because access to the Soviet population as an audience was not possible. This approach represented only the “official reaction” to U.S. broadcasts, but he claimed that it offered some clues about the impact on the system. The study also provided a case study of “the exchange of propaganda between two vast, competing mass communication systems” (Inkeles, 1952–1953 , p. 612). This strain of research obviously represented a further development of the earlier propaganda studies, concerned with the effects of mass media on strategically important populations. This article was part of his work on Soviet society, published in Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion (Inkeles, 1958 ).

The assumption, that international broadcasting was playing an increasingly important role in the worldwide tug of war for the minds of men, encouraged considerable research that compared the characteristics of international communications from Soviet and non-Soviet sources. Paul Kecskemeti ( 1956 ) looked at the “operating principles of Soviet foreign mass propaganda,” Harold Mendelsohn and Werner Cahnman ( 1952–1953 ) examined communist broadcasts to Italy, and Daniel Lerner ( 1952–1953 , p. 681) discussed the theory of international coalitions and suggested how international communication research could help to identify common interests that would draw “neutralists” into the “American-centered coalition.”

Winning hearts and minds in the “non-industrial countries” —the second problem area—was deemed particularly important among these scholars in the early 1950s. Bruce Smith ( 1952–1953 ) analyzed the predispositions and “value constellations” of “non-industrial audiences” and suggested lines of communication research in this area. He indicated some significant advantages of Soviet communications and problems that hampered Western efforts, including past behavior that belittled and insulted the cultures of these countries.

Communism’s appeal and the challenge it posed to the West received considerable attention during the 1950s; see, for example, Gabriel Almond’s The Appeals of Communism ( 1954 ). Although this theme did not disappear, a different approach, as well as terminology, came to dominate both scholarship and policy making regarding so-called less developed countries or the Third World in the 1960s. The word propaganda appeared less often because, as Ralph K. White ( 1952–53 , p. 539) pointed out, “The world is more and more tired of propaganda.” A more indirect approach to the Cold War goals of containing the Soviet Union and gaining the allegiance of developing countries would use international communication research as a tool of development and modernization. That development paradigm is discussed later.

The third problem area considered in the international communication research of the 1950s and 1960s was Europe. Some of this research was oriented toward the effectiveness of international broadcasting, as illustrated in Mendelsohn and Cahnman ( 1952–1953 ) and in Lerner ( 1952–1953 ), but other research went beyond this dominant persuasion paradigm to develop new, less Cold War-oriented topics and substantive areas. Karl Deutsch’s work on nationalism and international integration, which also contributed to the study of international communication, was motivated less by the East–West conflict than by the desire to study the conditions that made peaceful change and collaboration possible (Puchala, 1981 ). His wide-ranging research was particularly concerned with patterns of social communication and their relationship to political organization and integration.

Deutsch’s dissertation, Nationalism and Social Communication ( 1953 ), developed a new model of nationalism based on the idea of “a people bound together by habits of, and facilities for, communication” (Merritt & Russett, 1981 , p. 6). “Membership in a people,” Deutsch argued, “consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders” (Deutsch, 1953 , p. 71). His developmental model of political unification posited first the development of functional linkages and increased flows of transactions between communities that “enmesh people in transcommunity communications networks” (Puchala, 1981 , p. 156). A high volume of reward-producing transactions generates social-psychological processes that lead to assimilation and integration into larger communities. This model was intended to explain the formation of large-scale political communities, hence integration at the international as well as the national level. At both levels mutual responsiveness and “two-way channels of communications between elites and mass and among non-elites are central to his conception of successful integration” (Merritt & Russett, 1981 , p. 8). The empirical focus for Deutsch’s investigations into political integration was in Western Europe (Deutsch, Burrell, & Kann, 1957 ).

Deutsch was also interested in conditions that lead to political disintegration or dysfunctional integration. Drawing on his study of what he called the work of “communication engineers,” and foreshadowing his later work that more explicitly theorized from the field of cybernetics (Deutsch , 1963 ), he postulated conditions that were likely to destabilize an amalgamated political community. One was an imbalance in the loads on the system from increased transactions and the capabilities to accommodate the increased loads. Inequities in the distribution of burdens and rewards were also a source of hostility that could make integration efforts self-defeating (Deutsch, 1954 ; Merritt & Russett, 1981 ).

Deutsch was convinced not only that measuring the balance of communication flows was both feasible and valuable, but also that “statistics of communications flows constitute essential background data for almost any effective analysis of international communication” (Deutsch, 1956 , p. 145). He was particularly interested in measuring the balance of communication flows within a system, such as a country, and the flow of messages across its boundaries. “Inside–outside ratios of communication or transaction flows can [also] suggest something about the extent to which some particular human activity, such as science, is ‘international’ or ‘national’ and in what direction it may be changing” (Deutsch, 1956 , p. 159). His interest in cybernetics and in communication and transaction flows convinced him of the need for quantitative, replicable data, a conviction that contributed to his development as a pioneer in quantitative international relations. The balance of communication flows became a matter of controversy and concern in the 1970s.

Deutsch’s research investigated empirically idealistic assumptions about the relationship between communication flows and international understanding that were prominent in the euphoria of the immediate post–World War II period. When the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established in 1945 , the constitution expressed the belief of the parties to the constitution in the “free exchange of ideas and knowledge” and their determination “to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives.” Soon afterwards, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press ( 1946 ) published a report that advocated the free flow of information across borders as means to a better world (Rogers & Hart, 2003 ). The report argued (Hutchins Commission, 1946 , p. 14) that what was needed in the field of international communication was “the linking of all the habitable parts of the globe with abundant, cheap, significant, true information about the world from day to day, so that all men increasingly may have the opportunity to learn, know, and understand each other.”

In the decade that followed World War II, UNESCO sponsored the collection and publication of data on the world’s network of mass communication facilities, studies on international news agencies (UNESCO, 1953 ), and the handling of world news in various countries (Kayser, 1953 ). It published or sponsored social scientific studies on the roots of intergroup tension and on nations’ images of one another (e.g., Buchanan & Cantril, 1953 ; Klineberg, 1950 ). UNESCO also sponsored and assisted with the development of several international professional organizations, such as the International Political Science Association, which were designed to facilitate scientific exchange and communication as well as cross-cultural research.

In the context of the Cold War, however, the ideas of a free flow of information and freedom of information became another tool of U.S. foreign policy to penetrate closed communist societies and to demonstrate the superiority of the U.S. way of life. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm ( 1956 ), Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do provided a conceptual framework for categorizing media systems that “served primarily to celebrate the Anglo-American models” (Downing, 1996 , p. xiii, 191; McDowell, 2003 ). Davison ( 1965 ) similarly compared the role of communication in various societies with a view to using communications to advance U.S. foreign policy.

By the middle of the 1950s, a bibliography on International Communication and Political Opinion (Smith & Smith, 1956 ) was published that contained almost 2,600 entries on relevant research since 1945 . The categories included political persuasion and propaganda activities, channels of international communication, audience characteristics, and methods of research and intelligence. An article by one of these authors (Smith, 1956 ), for a special issue of Public Opinion Quarterly , that analyzed trends in international communication research over the decade following World War II, indicated that the bulk of attention had been devoted to propaganda and political warfare.

As in the hot war of World War II, government support in the Cold War was a powerful stimulus for research in international communication within the persuasion paradigm. Federal funds sponsored evaluations of various informational and educational programs, such as efforts to measure audiences of the Voice of America, the United States Information Libraries, and even exhibits traveling abroad. Also sponsored were surveys of mass and leadership opinions, which formed the basis for studies of images that audiences had of the United States, the USSR, and other countries.

Modernization and the Development Communication Paradigm

As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. Indeed, development communication (or communication and development) was recognized as a distinct field of research and policy (Stevenson, 1994 ). Two books were particularly important in establishing what remained the dominant paradigm of development for the 1950s and 1960s: Daniel Lerner’s ( 1958 ) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East and Wilbur Schramm’s ( 1964 ) Mass Media and National Development . Both emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. For Lerner, the mass media provided a vicarious contact with the world for those constrained by traditional ways of thinking, enabling them to imagine different ways of doing things and to aspire to a better life. Thus wider exposure to the media in a traditional society helped the process of transition to a modernized state; that is, one that followed the Western model of development.

Wilbur Schramm ( 1964 ) buttressed Lerner’s view regarding the potential of the mass media to raise the aspirations of people in developing countries and saw the media as a “bridge to the wider world, as the vehicle for transferring new ideas and models from the North to the South and, within the South, from urban to rural areas” (Thussu, 2000 , p. 57). The mass media were “the great multiplier,” amplifying, spreading, and accelerating the efforts of all the agents of change. Schramm’s ( 1964 ) book appeared early in the UN’s designated “Decade of Development,” when its agencies, the U.S. government, universities, and private companies were beginning to provide significant funding for research on how to modernize the newly independent countries (Thussu, 2000 ). Schramm’s book, published in conjunction with UNESCO, became “both a technical manual for communication development and a bully pulpit for advocating the use of mass media as a key component of development programs” (Stevenson, 1994 , p. 234). This paradigm guided both national and international development programs throughout the 1960s. It resurfaced in the 1980s, with a focus on telecommunication (Hudson, 1984 ) and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development” (See Hanson, 2008 , pp. 171–173).

Critical Perspectives in the 1970s

Development communication began to meet stiff criticism in the 1970s, as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged by an array of scholars, researchers, and Third World political leaders. The optimism of the modernization theorists confronted the reality of many failed projects and a general lack of significant progress toward development. A wave of scholars criticized the focus on the internal causation of underdevelopment and emphasized external constraints, the structural biases in the international economy that put developing countries at a disadvantage, and the vulnerability of dependence. Multiple variations of dependency theory, world systems theory, and an assortment of other related approaches agreed that the modernization model of development served merely to strengthen the dominance of the wealthy, developed countries and maintain the dependence of the countries at the periphery of the global system. They viewed the modernization paradigm as an instrument of neo-imperialism.

One set of variations focused specifically on the role of communication in maintaining structures of economic and political power (Thussu, 2000 ). Galtung ( 1971 ), for example, cited communication imperialism as one of the five types of imperialism in his now classic article on structural imperialism . A critical perspective that is often labeled cultural imperialism (Schiller, 1976 ) or media imperialism (Mattelart, 1979 ) was concerned about the detrimental effects on developing countries of Western, and particularly American, domination and control of global communications industries. According to this view, Western media hegemony inhibited indigenous industries in Third World countries, reinforced patterns of dependency, and imposed Western cultural values.

These critical perspectives also challenged another paradigm that had reigned since the end of World War II; that is, the free flow of communications, which Schiller ( 1976 ) argued actually leads to an asymmetrical flow. UNESCO modified its position from free flow of information to free and balanced flow. Structural inequalities in international communication became a high priority concern among newly assertive developing countries, which called for a New World International and Communication Order (NWICO) linked to their demands for a New International Economic Order. In response, UNESCO appointed the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, chaired by Sean MacBride. The final report (MacBride, 1980 ) concluded with 82 recommendations all aimed at “eliminating imbalances and disparities in communication and its structures, and particularly information flows” (MacBride, 1980 , p. 253). Among the specific infrastructural changes recommended was “more equitable sharing of the electro-magnetic spectrum and geostationary orbit.” The discussions of the commission and the final report generated significant political debate, with some Western countries, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom, concerned that efforts to balance the flow of communication and information across national borders could amount to impeding that flow.

International News Flow/Coverage and International Transactions

During the decade of the 1970s and somewhat beyond, voluminous research was conducted more specifically on patterns of international news flow and coverage. Mowlana ( 1983 ) estimated in an annotated bibliography that, between 1973 and 1983 , there were 441 papers, books, articles, reports, and book chapters published on this subject. These included studies that dealt with the volume and direction of news flows among countries and those that analyzed not only the amount but also the type of news disseminated (Hur, 1984 ).

In a summary and critique of 80 major studies of international news flows and coverage, Hur ( 1984 ) discussed research trends, categorized the different methodological approaches, and identified their shortcomings. Geographical approaches looked at the international news flow into a specific country, coverage of international news by the media of a specific country, or news flows or coverage across two or more countries. He found that the generality of theories proposed was seriously limited by unevenness and lack of inclusiveness in the geographical focus. Similarly, there was a lack of comparable data in the various media approaches and unevenness in the media selected for study. Most attention was devoted to newspapers, than television. There was a lack of cross-media research to explain variations in international news flow and coverage. Hur also found a general lack of longitudinal studies. Another category included studies focused on specific events or specific periods of time. In these studies Hur ( 1984 ) found problems of typology that limited their cumulative effect. He also noted the lack of studies looking at long-term patterns of international news flows and coverage, which was significant because these patterns are subject to change. Hur ( 1984 , p. 374) concluded that because of these shortcomings in the research, “there are relatively few research findings that can form ‘theories’ of international news flow or coverage” and, although there were well-formulated theoretical propositions in some studies, adequate empirical support was lacking.

Hur ( 1984 ) also noted a lack of multivariate research up to that point. This was an important deficiency because so many different independent variables (many never operationalized) were proposed in this literature to explain variations in international news flows and coverage, for example the power hierarchy of nations, cultural affinity, and economic variables such as export and import values. A cross-national study of 29 countries sponsored by UNESCO (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1984 ; Stevenson & Shaw, 1984 ) found geographical proximity to be a major determinant of news coverage for most countries. In sum, few reliable generalizations resulted from this research because of the difficulty in operationalizing some variables; because findings were divergent; and because comparability in the data across countries, time, and media was lacking.

A cursory examination of the Mowlana ( 1983 ) bibliography and the Hur ( 1984 ) critique indicates that research on international news flows and coverage during the 1970s was conducted for the most part by scholars in mass communication, with little input from or connection to scholars in international relations or political science. The 1960s and 1970s marked the rise, spread, and institutionalization of communication studies in American universities. Hundreds of university departments were established, some as completely new entities and others arising out of such existing departments as speech and journalism. Communication research as a field gained coherence and other advantages with its separate institutionalized structure; but it “lost some of its strong academic connections to the other social sciences,” which had characterized this research in its beginnings (Rogers & Balle, 1985 , p. 6). A strong emphasis among the new stream of scholars was on media studies, and, even among those interested in international communication, most became more professionally integrated into communication studies than international relations. From the 1970s until the end of the 20th century , only a small number of scholars had a foot in both communication studies and international relations.

One major edited volume, Communication in International Politics (Merritt, 1972 ), attempted to revive the study of international communication in political science and to give it more rigor. The book, which was dedicated to Harold Lasswell, was a product of a set of panels organized at the American Political Science Association under the presidency of Karl Deutsch. It considered international political communication in broad Deutschian terms of transaction flows across national borders, which included student exchanges, tourism, trade, diplomacy, and especially the exchange of ideas. Merritt ( 1972 ) delineated three types of communicators relevant for international politics—governmental actors, nongovernmental actors, and cultures—which yielded nine types of communication flows. Merritt defined the communication process as a transmission of values, while Bobrow ( 1972 ), in another chapter, saw it as the transfer of meaning, and both deplored the lack of conceptual development in international political communication. The book’s stated purpose was to synthesize and integrate existing research beyond isolated empirical findings and to encourage the building of theory. However, most research in international communication for the next two decades took place within communication sciences and journalism. Meanwhile, during those two decades technological and political changes were occurring that would transform the communication environment and inspire a wave of research on new topics.

The Globalization of Communication

Two mutually reinforcing trends in the 1980s and 1990s shifted the discourse on international communication to global communication. The progressive development and diffusion of fiberoptic cables, satellites, and the Internet were eroding the barriers of space and time, increasing the speed, and reducing the cost of transferring all kinds of information. At the same time, a widespread political shift was occurring toward liberalization in international trade, as well as domestic policies regarding telecommunications and broadcasting. These developments spurred the growth of a privatized global media structure and new global networks for communication and information access. They also mobilized scholars from multiple disciplines to study the implications of these developments.

One response was to think more broadly about the impact of new information and communication technologies on power structures and social change. The terms information revolution and information society were invoked to convey the profound impact these new technologies were having on all aspects of society and the international system (Castells, 2000 ) Some saw a significant break from the past; others stressed continuities and pointed to a historical tendency to focus on the novelty of new technologies (Webster, 1995 ).

While not espousing a version of technological determinism, some scholars emphasized the ways in which the specific properties of technologies can shape new ways of thinking and hence social and political structures (Deibert, 1997 ; Pool, 1990 ). Deibert ( 1997 , 2000 ) drew on a tradition of scholarship known as medium theory , while most work that considered the relationship between changing communications technology and society did not make an explicit link to that approach. As with earlier technologies, optimists and pessimists debated the potential for positive versus negative effects. The international dimensions of these debates tended to focus on the impact of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) on three major issue areas: the global economy, the nation state, and foreign policy. Multiple issues received attention within each of these categories.

The Global Economy

There has been general agreement that the new ICTs not only provide the infrastructure for a global economy, but also facilitate new forms of transnational and global economic organization (McGrew, 2005 ; see the entry on “ Economics of International Communication ”). Considerable attention was given to the ways in which these technologies have improved the capacity of firms to organize at a distance, and have provided the flexibility to disperse aspects of the production and distribution processes across different national locations (Deibert, 2000 ).

These developments stimulated new directions of research from political economy (Comor, 1994 ; Mosco, 1996 ) and other critical perspectives. Major concerns of this literature are the economic, political, cultural, and ideological effects of corporate consolidation in the communication and media industries. As the media are commercialized and centralized, they increase their command over information flows, their political influence, and their ability to set the media-political agenda (Herman & McChesney, 1997 ). Information and cultural products “are commodified and are designed to serve market ends, not citizenship needs” (Herman & McChesney, 1997 , p. 9). The central question for critical perspectives is “who owns and controls the distribution of communication, and for what purpose and intent” (Mowlana, 1993 , p. 72). This question is deemed important because control of the communication process and how that control is exercised condition how and what human beings think and therefore how they act (Comor, 1994 ; McPhail, 2006 ).

Other analysts have viewed the new communications environment with a pluralist perspective, emphasizing its complexity and paradoxical tendencies. They acknowledge that the combination of the new expansive technologies and the widespread political shifts toward liberalization facilitate the concentration of economic power in enormous Western, especially American, communications conglomerates. But they emphasize how these same developments have generated new possibilities at the regional, national, local, and individual levels. New channels of communication, production centers, regional networks, and news exchange agencies have multiplied (Gurevitch, 1996 ; Sinclair, Jacka, & Cunningham, 1996 ; Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1996 ; Thussu, 2000 ).

Scholarly interest in the distributional effects of the new international and communication technologies (ICTs) generated a whole new genre of research under the rubric of the “digital divide” (Norris, 2001 ). The term has come to refer to great disparities in access, both within and across countries, to information and communication technologies more generally, not merely the Internet. It served as a focal point of debate about the political, social, and particularly the economic impact of ICTs, especially for developing countries. The research revived some earlier themes in international communication.

The development communication paradigm was given a big boost, updated, and broadened to ICT for development , often stated as the acronym ICT4D. This perspective saw the digital revolution as a historic opportunity for developing countries to take a quantum leap forward to develop their productive capacities and to become integrated in the global economy. It assumed that access to ICTs opens the doors to wider economic and social development opportunities and has the potential to address poverty, inequality, and just about every other problem. Most scholars writing from this perspective, while enthusiastic about the possibilities, clearly acknowledged the structural, institutional, and cultural constraints (Wilson, 2006 ) and were more restrained than some of the materials issuing from international and nongovernmental organizations, especially from ICT-related corporations.

The literature on ICTs and development raised broader issues regarding the relationship between technology and inequality. Some questioned whether the digital divide is bridgeable at all (Van Dijk, 2005 ), while others emphasized social variables in determining the benefits of ICTs (Warschauer, 2003 ) and the importance of projects and applications that are relevant to the particular social and cultural context (Keniston & Kumar, 2004 ). Still others applied a critical perspective to the push to bridge the digital divide, arguing that these efforts “will have the effect of locking developing countries into a new form of dependency on the West, trapping them in an increasing complexity of hardware and software that is designed by developed country entities for developed country conditions” (Wade, 2002 , p. 443). One angle of this argument reflected a view—echoes of earlier critiques of development communication—that digital technologies are simply one more instrument for the powerful to maintain control over the powerless, while misallocating funds that could be used to meet more basic needs of underprivileged populations.

The Nation State

The expansive character of the new ICTs focused attention on their impact on the nation state: its centrality in the international system, its sovereignty, and its relationship to its citizens. Although there was little sign of the state withering away in the international communication literature, there was widespread agreement that much has changed regarding the basis of state power, the context in which states operate, and the ways in which they exercise power. Information technology is now one of the most important power resources; and control over information creation, processing, flows, and use has become the most effective form of power (Braman, 2007 ). States are adopting and must adopt new information and media policies to maintain their sovereignty and to exercise their power effectively (Braman, 2007 ; Price, 2002 ). Controlling the flow of information has become more difficult and costly, however, leading some scholars to consider the potential of the new ICTs to open and undermine closed regimes, even to democratize them (Kalathil & Boas, 2003 ).

From certain critical perspectives, the power of nation states is now subordinate to the power of the transnational corporations in a globalized economy (Tehranian, 1999 ). From a pluralist perspective, an array of nonstate actors has proliferated and gained influence, challenging the exclusive prerogative of the state to act on the world stage (Brown, 2004 ; Livingston, 2001 ). Much attention was given to the new political environment that ICTs have helped to create by empowering nonstate actors to connect, communicate, and mobilize more effectively across national boundaries. One strand of the literature focused on transnational advocacy groups as a manifestation of an emerging civil society, a more inclusive political process (Warkentin, 2001 ). A second strand of this literature pointed to the darker side of these technologies that can be used by anyone for any purpose, including criminal syndicates, drug cartels, and terrorists (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2001 ).

The impact of ICTs on the relationship between the state and its citizens was considered in a variety of ways. The ability of governments to provide more direct and efficient services over the Internet and to engage in two-way communication with their citizens (e-government) has the potential both to strengthen the bonds and to enhance their capacity to monitor their citizens. On the other hand, ICTs enable subnational and transnational ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that are geographically dispersed to connect and to consolidate a sense of common identity, challenging that of the territorially based state. In any case, the Internet changes the way we do and think about politics (Chadwick, 2006 ).

The increased volume, speed, and scope of cultural products across national boundaries from satellite and Internet technologies intensified concerns about threats to the cultural integrity of states that have persisted since the first exports of Hollywood films. Critics stressed the dominant role of Western, especially U.S., industries in the flow of products and worried not only about the economic impact on indigenous cultural industries, but also about the effect on the society’s cultural values (McPhail, 2006 ). Others pointed to an increasingly complex media environment with the bourgeoning of new production centers, networks, and export markets in some developing countries (Sinclair et al., 1996 ). To expand market share, the global conglomerates had to collaborate and make some adjustments to local cultures. These local and global collaborations have often resulted in a form of cultural hybridization, as well as the firm establishment of commercial models (Thussu, 2000 ).

Foreign and Security Policy

The pioneers of communication research, grounded in social psychology, were interested in the effects of the media on mass audiences or individuals: their attitudes, opinions, and beliefs. Although their research generally found only limited effectiveness in changing attitudes, two mass communication researchers (McCombs & Shaw, 1972 ) later concluded that the mass media did have significant indirect effects by influencing what people think about and thus the public agenda. This agenda-setting concept generated a whole genre of research in the study of mass communication and in political communication focusing on the U.S. political process. Much research on foreign policymaking emphasized the inherent advantages of political power, which, combined with journalistic norms, ensured that news content was shaped more by the preferences of political officials than by news media priorities (Bennett, 1990 ; Sigal, 1973 ).

Other scholars, notably those who focused on the concept of framing , argued that the influence of the media was the outcome of a contest between leaders and challengers (Wolfsfeld, 1997 ; also Entman, 2004 ; Iyengar, 1991 ). According to Robert Entman ( 2004 ), framing involves highlighting some facets of events or issues and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, or solution. Framing shapes the way publics understand the issues, their causes, and solutions. At least four variables affect the ability of leaders to maintain control over the framing of an event or issue in the media: cultural resonance of the frame (Entman, 2004 ), the degree of consensus among the relevant policymakers (Entman, 2004 ), the amount of control a leader has over the flow of information (Wolfsfeld, 1997 ), and the nature of the situation with some being more ambiguous than others (Wolfsfeld, 1997 ).

The advent of live satellite television news coverage in the 1980s generated an upsurge of scholarly interest regarding the media-foreign policy nexus and the possibility that the new technology might be shifting with more influence from the media over the policy agenda. (See the related entries “ The Information and Communication Revolution and International Relations ; “ Foreign Policy and Communication .”) Much attention was given to the ways in which satellite television affected the decision-making process, for example speeding it up and making the actions of leaders more transparent. The issue generating the most interest concerned the emotional impact of live television images and their ability to create pressures to alter government priorities. Prompted in part by a widespread public perception that the television images of starving children in Somalia had pushed the United States to intervene in 1992 , while subsequent images of a dead soldier being dragged through the streets had forced the United States to withdraw, a body of research developed to study the “CNN effect.” However, empirical studies of the CNN effect generally failed to find evidence that the news media were seizing the policy initiative away from political officials (Livingston & Eachus, 1995 ; Merman, 1999 ). Gilboa ( 2005 ) analyzed this body of work and concluded that there had been a lack of evidence that global television networks are decisive actors affecting foreign policy decision making and international outcomes. Bennett and Paletz’s ( 1994 ) edited volume examined the complex issues of the media, public opinion, and foreign policy in the context of the Gulf War.

New technological developments brought more changes, in the latter part of the 1990s, that created an even more challenging media environment for leaders seeking to mobilize support for their policies. The proliferation of news satellite channels, especially Arab language channels, challenged the hegemony of the Western news media and provided alternative, widely distributed interpretations of events (Seib, 2005 ). The spread of the Internet provided even more abundant sources of information and alternative interpretations. These developments stimulated interest in the consequences for diplomacy and foreign policy making of this new competitive environment, where politics has increasingly become a contest for attention and credibility (see entry on “ Diplomacy and People ”). Considerable attention was given to the need for public diplomacy geared to a new political environment where nonstate actors are empowered by the new ICTs to participate more assertively in world politics (Brown, 2004 ; Livingston, 2001 ).

Public diplomacy and the management of information were considered particularly important in international conflicts. Some of the literature on the impact of ICTs on the conduct of war echoed themes of the earliest international communication research on propaganda, about shaping the perceptions of allies and neutrals while demoralizing the enemy. An array of security threats posed by the new ICTs and the various forms of conflict that may emerge in cyberspace were analyzed (Libicki, 2007 ). Information warfare was discussed from both offensive and defensive perspectives, demonstrating how information systems can serve as both weapons and targets (Rattray, 2001 ). Another strand of literature focused on the use of ICTs by nonconventional combatants, especially terrorists, and how the Internet, cell phones, and other technologies empower these groups (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2001 ; Weimann, 2006 ). There was widespread agreement that the new ICTs both enhance the military advantage of great powers and make them more vulnerable, significantly changing the conduct of warfare. The effects of the mass media on terrorism were also explored (Norris, Kern, & Just, 2003 ).

Managing the New Information and Communication Environment

Traditionally, telecommunication services were territorially organized, and radio and television systems developed everywhere as a collection of national systems serving primarily domestic audiences (except for shortwave broadcasting and trade in taped television programs). Policies and most regulation came from national governments, apart from where international agreement was required for optimum operability (as with the telegraph and to prevent interference in radio waves). The emergence of border-crossing communication technologies, particularly satellites and the Internet, raised a host of issues regarding national sovereignty, jurisdiction, surveillance, and personal privacy that directed attention to questions of policy, law, and regulation (see entry on “ International Communication Regimes ”).

Most controversy focused on the control of the Internet or, as generally expressed, Internet governance (see entry on “ Internet Governance ”). In the early days of the Internet, there was a widespread assumption that the basic architecture of the Internet ensured that it could not be controlled. Research in the second decade of the Internet has challenged that assumption. One line of argument claimed that national governments retain the power to shape the architecture of the Internet in various ways and to enforce national laws within their territory (Goldsmith & Wu, 2006 ). Part of the explanation is coercion and another part is economic; that is, the need of e-business for government support. Other research deplored a trend toward greater control and less openness to communicate and to innovate (Lessig, 1999 ; Mueller, 2004 ; Zittrain, 2008 ). A model of multistakeholder governance was put into practice in the Internet Governance Forum, first convened in 2006 . This approach to Internet policy, which is just beginning to receive attention in the literature, involves bringing together governments, the private sector, and civil society in partnership.

Looking Backward: 1930s to 2009

There are many other areas of research that might have been included in this historical narrative of a subject with a broad scope and no clear boundaries. Although the subject of international communication encompasses diverse and disparate topics and involves multiple disciplines, certain overlapping themes, strands, or threads can be discerned in the scholarship to 2009 .

Much of the research on international communication from the beginning has focused in various ways on the impact of communication media. Early propaganda and mass communication researchers were interested in the direct effects of the media on attitudes and opinions and tended to focus on the strategic uses of communication by governments. In the context of the Cold War and an emerging Third World, communication scholars became interested in the capacity of the mass media to change societal attitudes as the essential step to development. Toward the end of the 20th century , interest in the new information and communication technologies revived this development communication strand of research. As a global communication infrastructure began to emerge, research proliferated regarding other effects of the new technologies, especially satellite television and the Internet, on the global economy, foreign policy decision making, international outcomes, and national sovereignty.

A second strand of research focused on communication flows. In the brief euphoric period after World War II, many assumed that the increased flow of messages across national borders could enhance international understanding. Karl Deutsch was also interested in the relationship between communication flows and political community, but his work investigated the conditions that affected this relationship. In the 1970s, an enormous literature, primarily in the communication sciences, examined patterns in the coverage of international news flows. Structural inequalities in communication flows between developed and developing countries also became a focus of attention in the same decade.

A third theme that runs through the literature concerns the relationship between communication and power. There is a long tradition of critical theorists who see the media and communication structures as a force to maintain the hegemony of entrenched economic and political power interests. The cultural imperialism perspective, a critical response to the development communication paradigm, has continued to focus on the deleterious effects of Western media hegemony on developing countries. As Western, especially the United States, communication industries have become global conglomerates, the issue of corporate ownership and control of the media has gained even more attention. Other strands of the power and communication theme have focused on government controls and the use of the media to advance government policies. The issue of who should control the media and for what purpose, which has long interested scholars, has generated a new line of research, namely Internet governance. Also fitting into this category are the controversies over the impact of the new information and communication technologies on state power and sovereignty and on international hierarchies of power.

The themes indicated above are simply suggestive of ways in which the diverse topics in international communication might be tied together to form coherent research traditions. There are many other areas of research beyond those covered in this essay that might have been included in this historical narrative of a subject with such a broad scope and no clear boundaries. There are also areas of inquiry that could be considered in the category of international communication, although they are not generally identified as such. Signaling, diplomacy, bargaining, threats, coercion, credibility, commitment, image, conflict management, and cognitive processes that structure the way that messages are understood are some of the obvious examples. These topics are covered in many articles in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. See in particular the entries on “ Deterrence and Crisis Bargaining ,” “ Foreign Policy and Communication ,” and “ International Negotiation in a Foreign Policy Context .”

New Directions

An important institutional development in the study of international communication was the establishment of a section with that focus in the International Studies Association in 2000 . Gradually, scholars with diverse interests in this broad topic came together at the annual conference to discuss their own research interests and to take stock of the scholarly response to the rapidly changing international communication environment. Meanwhile, multiple innovations were developing, and the evolution of the Internet was raising new issues, moving research in new directions. This final section identifies a few of these new directions.

Interest in the evolving structure of the Internet and Internet governance intensified as challenges mounted to earlier visions of a global, unfettered Internet. Increasing state and corporate controls generated a debate on an impending “fragmentation of the Internet.” (Kohl, 2017 ; Mueller, 2017 ; and see Lambach, 2019 for discussion of this literature). Hofmann, Katzenbach, and Gollatz ( 2017 ) also provide an overview of Internet governance research. Much of this literature emphasizes the multiplicity of actors and forces shaping the current and future direction of the Internet, most significantly, nation states attempting to establish cyberborders based on domestic law, and corporate restrictive practices. This concern about territorialization of control is the basis for the concerns about fragmentation. Mueller ( 2017 ) sees new forms of governance organized around transnational networks as the best way to preserve the integrity of the Internet. (Lambach, 2019 , p. 6) takes a critical perspective on the Internet fragmentation thesis, claiming that those concerns are based on outdated “container” notions of the territorial state. To focus on the tension between the sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction of the state and non-territorial cyberspace obscures the complexity of territories in cyberspace as “nonexclusive, overlapping, and intersecting constructs, whose shapes are constantly being renegotiated” (Lambach, 2019 , p. 8).

DeNardis ( 2012 ) directed attention to the “hidden levers of Internet control” in the technical architecture, the infrastructure of the Internet, where battles to control information online are often fought. She joined with other experts to produce an edited volume (Musiani, Cogburn, DeNardis, & Levinson, 2016 ) that further developed this idea. Case studies illustrate how political and private entities use Internet infrastructure and systems of governance, such as the Internet’s Domain Name System, for political and economic purposes. Deibert and Crete-Nishihata ( 2012 ) examined the mechanisms and dynamics that explain the growth and spread of cyberspace controls.

Attention to the use of infrastructure tools for geopolitical and security purposes has contributed to the development of a broader research area in cyber conflict. See Whyte ( 2018 ) for a review of this literature. Whyte ( 2018 ) and much of this literature examines the relevance of traditional IR concepts for the cyber realm and the utility of analogies. Nye ( 2016/2017 , p. 44) considers the applicability of deterrence, asking “Can countries deter or dissuade others from doing them harm in cyberspace?” He identified four mechanisms for reducing the likelihood but suggests that the ambiguity of attribution and the diversity of threats diminishes the role that punishment can play. The question—how likely is a cyberwar and what shape would one take?—has been extensively debated (Whyte, 2018 ). Rid ( 2017 ) challenged arguments that cyberwar is inevitable. Gartzke and Lindsay ( 2015 ) questioned the widespread assumption that offense has advantages over defense in cyberspace. Some scholars have viewed the subject of cyber conflict more broadly, while others have focused more specifically on cyberwar, although it is not clear where the line for the latter is drawn. Even more problematic for categorization is information warfare. Bjola and Pammet ‘s edited volume ( 2018 ) provided an interdisciplinary discussion of the scope of threats posed by the “weaponization of digital technology” with such methods as propaganda, disinformation, fake news, trolling and conspiracy theories. Merrin ( 2019 ) surveys what he sees as an emerging field of “Digital War,” which covers an entire spectrum of wars impacted by digital technologies.

The use of digital technology in diplomacy has also become a new research area. In their edited volume, Bjola and Holmes ( 2015 ) identified and brought together different strands of research on digital diplomacy, which they defined as the use of social media for diplomatic purposes. They investigated how social media might reset the practice of diplomacy, for example, the way diplomats communicate with each other and foreign publics, the decision-making within their own bureaucracies, and their relationships with non-state actors.

Digital technology has a significant impact on both the practice and the study of public diplomacy (Bjola, Cassidy, & Manor, 2019 ). In the first decade of the 21st century , a literature developed on what was called the new public diplomacy (Melissen, 2005 ). The term was variously defined but essentially provided a more expansive view of public diplomacy to include more actors than government officials and a greater variety of objectives. The preface to a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which was devoted to “Public Diplomacy in a Changing World” noted that this important subject had only recently attracted serious academic attention (Cowan & Cull, 2008 ). Research advanced during the second decade with new concepts, perspectives, and directions. There was also a new emphasis on more interactive communication, building relationships and networks, and collaboration among multiple actors as a supplement to the one-way dissemination of information that characterized the traditional state-centric model (see especially Zaharna, Arsenault, & Fisher, 2013 ). A special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy (Wang & Melissen, 2019 ) conveys some of the current directions and issues in public diplomacy scholarship.

At the intersection of communication and foreign policy there are multiple new directions, most evolving from earlier areas of research (see the entry “ Foreign Policy and Communication ”). Two are identified here. First, the growth of digital media technologies encouraged scholarly reconsideration of media effects on foreign policymaking process, a genre known by its shorthand term, the CNN effect (Lusk, 2019 ; Gilboa, Jumbert, Miklian, & Robinson, 2016 ; and see the entire April issue of Media, Conflict, and War 2011 ). A common theme among these articles was the idea that, even though the concept of CNN effect exaggerated media influence, we did learn from the CNN debate; but we need to go beyond that debate with new research in the context of a “fragmented and pluralized media environment” (Robinson, 2011 , p. 6). As a result of the debate and its exaggerated claims regarding media influence, research has focused on the circumstances under which the media are likely to become more or less influential (Robinson, 2011 ).

Another new direction is the expansion of the research on framing to include narrative analysis. Both analytical devices emphasize the role of language and ideas in politics (Livingston, 2001 ). A narrative is a broader concept that ties events together in some meaningful and systematic way. The concept of strategic narrative, first developed in the context of IR literature by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle ( 2013 ), is producing a new genre of research (see entry Foreign Policy and Communication ) and the following examples: Bentley, 2014 ; de Graff, Dimitriu, and Ringsmose, 2015 ; Hollihan, 2014 ; Krebs, 2015 ; Roselle, Miskimmon, and O’Loughlin, 2014 ; Subotić, 2015 ; Szostek, 2017 ; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle, 2017 . Miskimmon et al. ( 2013 , p. 2) defined strategic narratives as “a means for political actors to construct a shared meaning of the past, present and future of international politics to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors.” They are frameworks for understanding events, issues, and interactions, used by a political actors to promote their interests, values and aspirations for the international order. Understanding how narratives are formed, projected and received is key to understanding the complexity of influence in international politics (Miskimmon et al., 2017 ).

As the Internet spread in the beginning of the century, scholarly interest developed in the potential of the new technology to mobilize ideas and people (see entry on “ International Communication in Social Movements and Interest Groups ”). The emergence of social media moved this literature in several new directions. One direction was encouraged by the extensive use of social media in the series of anti-government protests and uprisings, known as the Arab Spring, that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 (e.g., Allagui & Kuebler, 2011 ; Howard & Hussain, 2013 ; Wolfsfeld, Segev, & Sheafer, 2013 ). A major issue in this literature was the role of the social media relative to other causal factors in spreading dissent and protest leading to collective action for democratic change. Wolfsfeld et al. ( 2013 , p. 132) cautioned overemphasizing the social media in protest and concluded from cross-national research on the subject that the important question is not “whether this or that type of media plays a major role but how that role varies over time and circumstances.” As the success of these uprisings waned, a literature on digital authoritarianism developed, expanding on the earlier work on mechanisms used by authoritarian regimes to control the Internet. Diamond and Plattner ( 2012 ) demonstrated how the social media, which can be a liberation technology can be used just as effectively by authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent and target dissenters to maintain their grip on power. This literature continues to expand and to include case studies of various authoritarian regimes, especially China.

Moving forward, more interaction with scholars in communication science, political communication, and other relevant disciplines would suggest new approaches, concepts, and areas of inquiry. It was, in fact, interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration that gave rise to the earliest work in international communication, when the Chicago School and World War II physically brought together scholars from multiple disciplines. After the institutionalization of communication studies as a separate discipline, subfields relevant to the study of international communication developed, but they rarely connected with international relations scholarship. Mass communication and intercultural communication are two examples. Political communication managed to connect with both communication science and political science, but the tendency of all three to focus on the individual level (opinions, attitudes, beliefs) may have discouraged more interest on the part of international relations scholars. The micro level may have gained importance in the new media and political environments. If nonstate actors are playing more assertive roles in world politics, then the impact of new communication technologies on individual attitudes has consequences for foreign policy and diplomacy. The systematic analysis of media effects, as well as cultural exchange, may warrant renewed attention.

There are also areas of inquiry in international relations that could be studied more directly as international communication topics, although they are not generally identified as such. Deterrence, negotiation, bargaining, and conflict resolution are a few examples. Cognitively oriented approaches and concepts from the social sciences more generally that relate language, culture, and policy could also be applied to international communication.

Future research must continue to investigate the myriad ways in which new communication technologies are affecting world politics. This task has been a major focus of recent work, but it is a formidable one because of the pace of change and the scope of its impact. The task will require both macro and micro approaches, case studies, and aggregate data analysis; all the research methods that have been used thus far plus new ones. The field is vibrant, dynamic, and wide open for future research.

Links to Digital Materials

Communication History Group . A section of the International Communication Association, one of whose three major areas of focus is history of the field of communication.

Centers for research on international/global communication include the following:

Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC). Mass communication documentation, research, training, and publishing. Its library contains one of Asia’s largest collections of documents and audiovisual materials in the Asia Pacific region.

Oxford Internet Institute , a department of the University of Oxford. An academic center for the study of the societal implications of the Internet. Current research is organized around broad themes: areas of everyday life, governance and democracy, science and learning, and shaping the Internet.

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International communication.

The definition of “international communication” is constantly in flux. Whether we have in view sociologist Émile Durkheim’s suggestion in his classic work Elementary forms of religious life (1917) that relations between different Aboriginal tribes constituted international communication, or historians’ and political scientists’ studies of diplomacy among modern nation-states, or the rush of contemporary theorizing on globalization processes and the roles of communication media within them, it is wise to be cautious before consecrating our assumptions as to how this field of study should be framed. In order to try to avoid that trap, this article begins with a brief history of this research area. It will mainly focus on more recent research, which arguably has been conducted within ten categories. At the end, brief pointers will be thrown up to suggest some ongoing problems.

The ten proposed categories are: (1) theories of international communication; (2) core international communication processes; (3) global media firms; (4) global media policies; (5) global news flows; (6) world cinema; (7) development communication; (8) the Internet; (9) intellectual property law; and (10) nonhegemonic communication flows. Items 6 – 9 in this list have been organized under separate editorial categories, so will receive only passing attention here. Analysis of intercultural interpersonal communication is also highly relevant, but to date mostly takes place under the heading of nonmediated communication, so is reserved for entries under that aegis.

These categories are of course permeable. For example, Arab satellite TV news, the emergence of China’s Central Television Channel 9 (CCTV-9) global English-language TV news services, and the attempt to create a regional Latin American satellite service have implications both for the study of global news flows and processes, and for analyses that argue American cultural influence is saturating the globe. The global advertising industry has profound implications for the future of most media, over and above its intrinsic cultural influences (themselves almost infinitely disputable).

A critical issue requires flagging immediately, namely the distinction between “international” in the comparative sense (e.g., different national media systems), and in the rigorously global sense (e.g., global media firms such as Disney, or diasporic media that serve migrant communities). The distinction is useful, but may dissolve somewhat in the process of analyzing actual cases (Downing 1996). Do the global music industry, global public relations firms, and global tourism firms operate homogeneously because they are global, or is it essential for their success to have their operations molded by specific regional and local cultural realities? Comparative research might productively be conducted not only between nation-states or among minority-ethnic media projects in different places, but also within a single global media corporation.

A Brief History of International Communication Research

In terms of a concerted wave of interest in international communication, it would be fair to say that the propaganda operations of the great powers in the twentieth century’s two world wars were mostly responsible for generating sustained interest in this field.

Earlier Research Decades in The USA

Some of the best-known US founding names in communication research, such as political scientist Harold Lasswell, first addressed the propaganda issue early in the 1920s. The rise of dictatorships after World War I, their successful deployment of thennew media, and the emergence of the long Cold War after World War II entrenched this issue in government-funded research priorities. At that juncture, the research term of choice was “psychological warfare” rather than “propaganda,” because of its seemingly scientific and less biased connotation. Wilbur Schramm, another major US figure in the earlier history of communication research, was one of a number of individuals, including Daniel Lerner and Lucian Pye, who contributed many studies to this area, most of them government-classified at the time (Simpson 199).

Comparative media systems analysis received its first major book-length study in the USA in the shape of Four theories of the press (Siebert et al. 1956). The theories in question were normative, representing the supposedly official views of what media should strive to achieve in four contrasting polities: authoritarian, libertarian, Soviet, and “social responsibility.” “Authoritarian” and “Soviet” were distinguished from each other in terms of the readiness of sovietized dictatorships to harness media for political goals, rather than simply keep them from disturbing the political order, alleged to be their typical role in nonSoviet dictatorships. “Libertarian” meant a parallel free market in goods and ideas (not the rigorously free market philosophy of contemporary Libertarians). “Social responsibility” signified media, rather than simply being commercial enterprises or a state monopoly, as a public trust. Much critiqued in later decades for its Cold War and other assumptions, the book nonetheless provided a beginning for further comparative media research.

Given the competitive dynamic of the Cold War for global leadership, and perhaps especially the long furor within the political class in the west following China’s 1949 adhesion to the Soviet bloc, a third major stimulus to international communication research was “third world” development, often framed at the time, as Escobar has vitally demonstrated, by the “modernization” schema (Escobar 1994). Unless the west could assure “modernization,” the presumption went, more and more nations might fall under the Soviet–Chinese spell and risk being lost to the west. The most influential international media study proceeding from this assumption was Daniel Lerner’s 1958 analysis of Turkey and five Arab states, The passing of traditional society (Lerner 1958). Lerner defined media as pivotal to successful “modernization.” In 1962 his book was followed by Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of innovations, currently in its 5th edition (Rogers 1962/ 2003), which became virtually the “bible” of American foreign aid projects involving development communication on how to propagate “modernization” in practice in so-called underdeveloped societies.

Established Paradigms Attacked

Challenges to these international communication paradigms began to emerge at the close of the 1960s. The first was Herbert Schiller’s Mass communications and American empire (1969/1992), the first in a series of publications presenting a radically different perspective that culminated in his much-cited essay “Not yet a post-imperialist order” (Schiller 1991). In the 1980s Schiller’s work turned to the newly developing international circuits enabled by information technologies, adding to his earlier mass-oriented research. As opposed to the authors already cited, who saw US global involvement as fundamentally benign, Schiller argued that mass-exported US culture and new information technologies were part and parcel of US – later, transnational – global corporate hegemony and military interventionism.

A second challenge to the then-dominant paradigm came from research by Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. Living in Chile since 1962 as representative of a Vatican project for development, he co-authored with his wife Michèle Mattelart an analysis of US-funded mainstream and local oppositional media during the 1970 – 1973 experiment in Marxist social democracy undertaken by Chile’s Popular Unity government. It was published first in Spanish (1973), then in French (1974), and finally in English (Mattelart & Mattelart 1980). It raised very basic issues, regarding the international politics of media communication in a situation of extreme crisis, which were far removed from the assumptions of political stability and economic affluence implicitly underpinning mainstream media research in the USA and western Europe.

Armand Mattelart’s and Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman’s Como leer al Pato Donald (“How to read Donald Duck”; 1971), an analysis of underlying conservative ideologies in Disney comic books published in Latin America, was another notable intervention from outside the globally dominant US communication research establishment. This book, despite the difficulty of its conceptual language, aroused deep passions. While the Chilean dictator who overthrew the Popular Unity government had all Spanish-language copies burned, the Disney Corporation nearly succeeded in getting the US Customs to ban the import of the English-language version, arguing it infringed their copyright. It was, nonetheless, translated into a dozen languages.

Schiller’s work was frequently dismissed by leading US communication researchers as either conspiratorial or implicitly pro-Soviet or both, but his analyses penetrated far and wide internationally, even among those who disagreed with them. Mattelart’s work, either singly or in combination with Michèle Mattelart, and heir to a Catholic social justice tradition, took longer to penetrate the Anglophone research community because of translation issues, but much of it is now translated into English. It is substantial, including studies of international advertising, Nicaraguan media during the Sandinista period (1979 –1989), the history of international communication, and communication and multicultural policies. His work pays much more attention to cultural dimensions than Schiller’s, which restricted itself to political economy. In many countries outside the USA at present, Schiller and Mattelart are at least as well-known as, and often more highly regarded than, Lerner, Siebert et al., Schramm, or Rogers.

Results and Newer Trends

Whatever position may be taken on the respective merits of these competing paradigms, there can be little doubt that the clash opened up the field of international communication to a much wider set of perspectives and arguments. Since then, and as an additional result of scholarly reflection and research on the momentous international potential of satellite communications and computer networks, the field has continued to grow apace.

Global communication policy initiatives, often targeted in some fashion on the ongoing crises of development around the planet, have further underscored the importance of international communication to the contemporary world. The rise of the global Internet and the spectacular global explosion of intellectual property issues in the digital communication era have equally pushed international communication issues increasingly to the top of the research agenda.

World Cinema

A paradox remains: world cinema, although perhaps the aspect of international communication to be studied earliest along with foreign diplomacy, was analyzed within a very singular framework in the west, at least until quite recently – one dominated by specialists trained in literary method. Thus, textual analysis of national cinemas or of individual film directors’ works was the primary focus. The political economy of global distribution and empirical studies of reception have only recently come to get the attention they equally deserved.

Indeed, the field long followed a certain global pecking order, with Hollywood center frame, along with the art cinemas of Europe, the Soviet bloc in its heyday, and Japan, whereas Indian, Latin American, Chinese, Arab, and African cinemas were barely recognized (some Iranian cinema work has recently been admitted to the canon). Cinema was frequently studied out of relationship to television, befitting its western-university definition as an art, in contradistinction to television, which was defined as a mass commercial product. For all these reasons, it is only with the emergence of cultural studies approaches, and the more recent revival of interest in cultural economy and the political economy of culture, that global cinema is coming to be integrated within the general flow of international communication research (e.g., Miller et al. 2005; Badley et al. 2006).

Recent International Communication Scholarship

Theories of international communication.

The three major “lenses” through which recent scholarship has sought to analyze international communication processes are cultural imperialism, cultural hybridization, and globalization.

The first of these three was central to the rather binary debates between mainstream US communication researchers summarized above. It came in different forms, with “media imperialism” being a perhaps more cautious subset of the larger term “cultural imperialism.” The latter could cover education, religion, business practice, consumerism, law, governmentality, dress, marriage customs, and still other cultural dimensions as well as media. The fundamental argument was that cultural transmission was an integral component of colonialism along with military conquest and economic exploitation, so that even after the demise of formal colonial rule in the post-World War II decades, the cultural impact established during colonial days was both intact and continually refreshed. The argument also incorporated the rise of the US as a global superpower, and proposed that it had followed in the footsteps of Britain and France in pursuing cultural domination. The roles of media for the US imperial project were argued to be all the more paramount as the twentieth century proceeded, and a media-saturated environment began to emerge. Nonetheless, it was possible, by using the term “media imperialism” as a metaphor for US global media influence, to acknowledge that reality without necessarily linking it to the larger claim that the USA is an empire.

The approach began to come under serious fire with John Tomlinson’s Cultural imperialism (1991). Tomlinson argued that the concept of cultural imperialism required two assumptions, the first being a directing center, a cultural imperialism planning agency so to speak, and the second that “third world” audiences and readers were peculiarly malleable and gullible, incapable of interpreting western media fare in their own ways in the light of their own cultural formations. Since these two assumptions were very far from proven, he proposed instead that discourses of cultural imperialism were a form of expressing discontent at the juggernaut of modernity and the widespread sense of impotence in its path. A detailed case study of a two-decade-long US cultural propaganda endeavor in western Europe provides a nuanced and highly illuminating counterpoint to both cultural imperialism theories and to Tomlinson’s critique (Saunders 1999).

The hybridization metaphor represented a different approach to critiquing the notion that western or US cultural imperialism was busy flattening all in its path, homogenizing everything, so-called McDonaldization. Instead, it insisted on a degree of agency among global audiences, not simply in Tomlinson’s sense of disputing global passivity in principle, but much more in researching just how global audiences massaged foreign cultural products and perspectives and hybridized them (Kraidy 2005). Argentinean sociologist Néstor García Canclini (1989/1995) is only one of a number of Latin American scholars to emphasize the forms of hybridization and cultural challenge evident in everyday life, derived from Latin America’s own long cultural history of Aboriginal, European, and African exchange, as well as more recent US cultural penetration. This is one of many instances that could be cited of how immersion in a non-western culture helps to frame scholarly research on international communication in important ways.

At the same time, both Kraidy and García Canclini stress how cultural hybridization does not evacuate asymmetrical power in a happy balance. Straubhaar (1991), in a muchcited article, argued fairly similarly that “cultural proximity” often counterbalanced the weight of US cultural exports in determining audience TV rankings, and defined Latin American media culture as one of asymmetrical interdependence with the USA. Sinclair, likewise, has developed arguments based upon the success or failure of television exports in particular geolinguistic regions, which may or may not be contiguous, as in the case of the Anglophone countries (Sinclair 1999). Overall, analysis of global television flows tends strongly to confirm these perspectives.

“Globalization” became a tremendous “buzzword” in the later 1990s and into the next decade, a sure sign that it meant different things to different scholars. For some it was virtually a synonym for cultural imperialism, for others for the spread of modernity or “postmodernity,” and for others its primary referent was economic, the spread either of free markets, or of fundamentalist free-market economic doctrine. However the term was defined, the roles of computer networks, satellites, and global media firms were plainly central to the processes under review, as was the growth of major cities as global communication nodes, “technopoles” (Castells 1996 –1998). At this point, too, contemporary urban geography and international communication scholarship frequently found themselves face to face. At the same time, some critics continued vigorously to dispute the utility of the term, especially as applied to the media and information sectors (Sparks 2007).

Core International Communication Processes

The overall fabric that recent international communication research has focused upon involves its historical antecedents, the growth of communication satellite uses, the advertising industry, public relations, the music industry, the tourism industry, international radio and television, global surveillance, and the thesis of Americanization. War propaganda closes the list.

The first entry noted is significant in relation to “globalization” theories, in the sense that rather too many discussions of the term presume it is self-evidently a very recent phenomenon. Its analysis of the initial phase in the latter nineteenth century of laying submarine oceanic cables for telegraphy, and later for telephony, is an important corrective to ahistorical analyses. Optical fiber oceanic cables continue to serve crucial roles alongside satellites. The entry also references recent historical scholarship that calls into question the notion of competitive colonialism as the driving force in the ocean cable-laying process.

The next four entries listed above – advertising, public relations, music, and tourism – are important correctives to conventional discussions of international communication in a different way. While considerable attention is almost always paid to television, then radio, and then satellites and cable, and more recently to the Internet, it is curious that advertising, in particular, with its centrality to media finance in most countries, is so often omitted. Public relations firms, commercial and political, are also crucial sources of global news as well as of the technology of winning elections (or attempting to) that is spreading across the planet.

The global music industry is often marginalized by older scholars as a youth culture phenomenon, which in significant part it is, but the question of precisely who is marginalizing whom in this process is worth considering carefully. The global tourism industry is on one level the point at which individuals and groups from different nations meet physically and in certain senses communicate with each other, though generally the communication is narrowly structured in terms of specific services, and often the construction of tourist enclaves is sharply different from life in general for local inhabitants. In all four cases, however, the concepts of cultural imperialism, hybridization, and globalization raise interesting questions about the international communication processes involved.

International radio broadcasting may look to some eyes rather passé in the twenty-first century, but that would likely signify the usual geographical location of the reader. Radio continued to be, at the latter end of the 2000s, the communication medium par excellence in most parts of the world and for much of the world’s public. Its relative cheapness, portability, and lack of literacy requirement would continue to keep it a very live option for many. Only in commercially advanced nations is radio basically an adjunct of the recorded music industry. Furthermore, in order to understand the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first, omitting the international radio broadcasters, whether the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Radio France Internationale. or still others, would seriously distort our grasp of global communication processes.

On a more somber note, international communication also involves mass surveillance, which digital technologies have made ever more sophisticated. Voice recognition and filtering software for telephony has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent decades, and email is very hard to protect against the really advanced decrypting devices available to security services (Bamford 2001). Closed circuit TV in public places has become routine in commercially advanced nations. The legitimation for this dramatic expansion has rested upon crime, undocumented immigration, and terrorism, all of them real, but policy debates continue to reverberate, with claims and counterclaims about the dividing line between protection and privacy (Lyon 2007).

War propaganda is hardly a new phenomenon (Knightley 2004), but most would concur that it developed newly exigent requirements during the two twentieth-century world wars and the Cold War. It took two forms, one the projection of external propaganda to the enemy nation, both to its general public and to its troops in combat, the other domestic propaganda, typically representing the enemy as subhuman and unnervingly aggressive. Dower’s remarkable study of the domestic propaganda processes in both the USA and Japan in the Pacific war confirms this (Dower 1986). The US propaganda apparatus represented the Japanese as rats, apes, and insects, and the Japanese apparatus portrayed the Americans as both vicious and effete.

Global Media Firms

The leading global players operate in multiple countries, even if they maintain head offices in one, and usually have a considerable variety of media interests (e.g., cinema, publishing, music, video games, theme parks), not only one. Contrasted with firms outside the media and information sector such as General Motors or ExxonMobil, these companies, though very large, are considerably smaller in financial terms. Nonetheless, although media products are tradable commodities, it would be conceptually sloppy even to try to establish a ratio of cultural impact to the quantity of money spent on producing, distributing, or using them.

These are not the only major global media firms, a number of which are discussed in other entries. Some Internet firms, notably Google at the time of writing, and computer firms (Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems) play huge and seemingly ever-growing roles as well. Taken together, these corporations represent the leading players in the cultural and information industries sector worldwide. This marks a sea change from some decades earlier, when in many nations cultural and media policies were the province of Ministries of Information, Culture, and/or Communication.

The crucial question, almost certainly due to be debated for a considerable time to come, is how far this shift of communication power toward very large corporate enterprises on the international as well as national scale represents an expansion of citizenship options, or their decline. An effective answer to this question will require a careful disaggregation of the issues involved. From arguments summarized already, it is clear that many would dispute the argument that planetary cultural homogenization, whether commercial, consumerist, or Americanized, is overwhelmingly in process. The Korean cultural wave phenomenon is testimony to this, as are the dynamics of cultural exchange among Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (Iwabuchi 2002). That, however, is not likely to be the end of the debate, since there are multiple other dimensions to citizenship and media than cultural flattening. In the end, the debate is likely to revolve around some version of the “social responsibility” thesis, namely are media suitably defined purely as commercial entities, or does the “public goods” argument rightly complicate their standing for democratic polities?

Global Media Policies

In the years before and since World War II, the US government worked in a sustained manner to promote the “free flow of information” policy. This was an attempt to challenge British domination of ocean cable traffic in particular, but also the ascendancy of Britain’s Reuters news agency. Then, over the 1970s, and again over the early 2000s, attempts were made to forge partly noncommercial global communication policies in the form of the New World Information and Communication Order proposals, and the 2003 and 2005 World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS).

There are also now a number of trade regimes and international agencies that have some influence, or the potential for it, over international and national communication policies, such as the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, UNESCO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Of these, a number have historically served as forums for negotiating national economic priorities, and thus have been substantially influenced by major corporate lobbies. Others, such as UNESCO, ITU, WIPO, and ICANN, have a more mixed history, representing to a certain degree the concerns of transnational publics and social movements.

Within this context, the European Union is a uniquely ambitious experiment in multinational integration. The question of media and collective identity, whether “European,” national, or sub-national (e.g., Scotland, Catalunya), has continued to exercise EU communication policy discourses. Within Europe, France has provided a militant lead in favor of exempting cultural products from routine trade criteria (the so-called “cultural exception”), while the UK has actively supported the contrary position, in line with the US government. The results to date have been mixed and mostly tentative, often confused through being based upon political shibboleths rather than clear-headed analysis, and inevitably complicated by the continuing expansion of membership (Schlesinger 1997, 1999). NAFTA represents a very different case.

Francophonie consists of a cluster of sustained attempts over nearly 50 years by France, as a former colonial power, to combine defense of the French language and culture against the dominance of US culture. At the same time, the project was energetically supported in its earlier years by certain postcolonial leaders of newly independent states, notably by Léopold Senghor, first President of Senegal in 1960. Some have argued Francophonie to be Janus-faced, insistently resisting the tidal wave of US cultural products while content to oil the wheels of France’s neo-colonialist African policy. However, the organization’s recent overtures to Arabophone, Hispanophone, and Lusophone nations to encourage their involvement in projects to defend their own linguistic and cultural heritages may yet prove to be a significant vector in the global politics of culture and communication.

Thus, global media and information policy, like public policies of all types, has been marked by clashing agendas (Raboy 2002). Up through the early 1970s, it would be fair to say that the clashes were primarily those of national economic interest among those states with financial muscle, or the Cold War, or sometimes a combination of the two. In that decade, however, prompted by calls for a New International Economic Order to address the vast disparities between commercially advanced nations and the rest, pressure began to be voiced in international assemblies for a comparable restructuring of global media communications of all kinds. The digital technology era was at the doors, and the potential of new information and communication technologies for the global south’s development was already being debated. The chasm between the profusion of all forms of communication technology in the global north and their feeble distribution in the global south was, and remains, a major development issue.

After some time, a package of proposed communication policy shifts in favor of the global south was assembled by an international task force convened by UNESCO. They were presented in the 1980 MacBride Report, Many voices, one world (MacBride Commission 1980). The policy proposals came to be entitled the New World Information and Communication Order. They fell hostage, however, to a concerted hostile press campaign in the USA and the UK, whose governments withdrew from UNESCO in the mid-1980s, publicly citing the Report as a primary reason for doing so. There were internal weaknesses in the Report, notably its assumption that communication policy was exclusively a matter for national governments. Paradoxically, however, there was no proposal whatsoever in it for government licensing of journalists (a serious risk for press freedom), even though the hostile news media campaign in the USA assiduously asserted this to be one of its main planks. Nonetheless, the UNESCO process was a first step toward global public discussion of citizens’ communication needs and entitlements.

In the World Summits on the Information Society in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005), initiated by the United Nations and convened this time by the ITU, issues of global communication inequities resurfaced in the first fully international forums addressing them since the UNESCO debacle. This time, there emerged a very slight change, albeit resisted by a number of governments and corporations. The ITU at that point had but recently opened its doors to communication corporations as official participants, rather than only to states, for the first time in its over 100-year history. But the UN charge to the ITU had also signaled that “civil society” organizations should also have a voice in the WSIS deliberations. In a very small and often grudging way, this was conceded at the Summits.

All this could, no doubt, be read as simply an obscure exercise in acronym juggling. Notwithstanding, however, the impracticalities of global representation of the public interest outside of the conventional system of states (a process itself marked by considerable deficiencies), this could also be read as a first tentative step toward inclusive global policymaking for international communication. It remained to be seen what might be the next moves.

Global News Flows

These were one of the many global communication disparities articulated in the MacBride Report. The pattern was rather clear: most international news coverage emanated within the global north and reported on its doings. International news about the global south, when available at all, strongly tended to focus on disasters, natural or political. This made for an under-informed citizenry across the planet, paradoxically at a point in history when the world was becoming ever more economically and politically interconnected (Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen 1998).

However, the turn of the millennium witnessed new international broadcasting interventions. Established stalwarts, such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America, CNN International, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, and Vatican Radio, were joined by Arab satellite news, China’s English-language global TV channel CCTV-9, and Latin America’s fledgling experiment, TeleSur.

These varied international projects raised challenging questions for conventional professional journalistic claims to objectivity, especially when the mission of a given broadcasting project was officially defined as “public diplomacy” on behalf of a nation-state. The differences in their news agendas were significant. Sometimes they were even visible within one and the same organization: following a basic editorial decision some months previously, CNN International broadcast pictures of wounded and dead Iraqi civilians following the US invasion in 2003, while CNN Domestic avoided doing so. On the face of it, however, the international sources of supply of broadcast news were expanding. It remained to be seen whether the public would take the trouble on a regular basis to compare more than one such source.

Nonhegemonic International Communication Flows

So far the focus has been on mainstream channels of international communication. The picture would be seriously incomplete without reviewing other media projects outside these conventional channels. In the twenty-first century mediascape, and given the increasing activity of global social movements of many kinds, it appeared likely that smaller media would not only continue to operate, but would become a growing force.

Already there was evidence of the intensification of women’s participation in these nonhegemonic projects, a vector that sharply distinguished this zone of the mediascape from mainstream media. The tremendous increase in global labor migration across borders over recent decades, and the widespread emergence of settled diasporic communities, had as one effect the creation of many media projects linking them with their countries of origin as well as engaging with their new locations. The Kurds, mostly settled in eastern Turkey, but with significant enclaves in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, had a conflicted history of trying to use satellite broadcasting to connect with their migrant communities in western Europe as well as to combat the Turkish state’s long ban on the use of Kurdish in broadcasting inside Turkey.

The emergence of the Qatar-based news broadcaster Al-Jazeera was a further example of nonhegemonic international communication, in two senses: it challenged the conventional and deferential state broadcast news services of the Arabic-speaking world, and it also challenged official US government definitions of Middle Eastern affairs. The TeleSur project, originating in Venezuela, sought to fulfill a somewhat analogous role in the Latin American region.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the latter now defunct, served a distinct role during the postwar decades up to the end of the Cold War. In both cases, the commitment was absent to a neutral and bland style of news reporting that largely characterized the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle. Both stations set themselves the particular task of functioning, not as the Voice of America – even though they were largely CIA-funded – but as though they were domestic news services inside the Soviet bloc nations, yet operating without Soviet censorship. They quite often broadcast underground texts from the clandestine opposition. Thus, their style often was highly confrontational, and sometimes appreciated more inside the Soviet bloc than the careful cadences of the BBC World Service.

Two more examples will suffice of the nonhegemonic international media sector. First, Le Monde Diplomatique is a French monthly world affairs magazine some 50 years old, which today appears in 26 languages, has a global readership of some 2 million, and appears in some countries on paper, in others digitally. Its contents are in-depth feature articles on countries and issues around the world, written partly by its very highly educated editorial staff, and partly by university specialists in a variety of countries. Over the past 30 years, “Diplo” has provided a consistent location in which the inequalities and inequities between global north and south are at center stage and exhaustively analyzed. It has served over the past decade and more as the global social justice movement’s foreign affairs or foreign policy magazine.

The second example is the Independent Media Centers movement. Emerging at the 1999 WTO confrontations in Seattle, by 2007 it had grown to number toward 200 hyperlinked nodes of social justice activists around the world, though mostly concentrated in North America and western Europe. Sites varied in productivity, but normally ran frequently updated and interlinked news stories on challenges to global and national capitalist institutions, and very often on the repression these met. Photo, audio, and video files were routinely used. English was the predominant language, but national and in some cases sub-national languages were also visible on a number of sites. Each site was independent, and only if taken over by a group radically hostile to its global social justice mission, or engaging in campaigning on behalf of a particular political organization, would the site be de-linked from the others.

International communication research continues to be hampered by the monolingualism of many researchers, especially in Anglophone universities. This means that research achievements and insights from many countries do not enrich multinational scholarly dialogue to the degree they should. It is also a field poorly represented or not at all, to the time of writing, in most standard undergraduate communication textbooks used in the USA, which discourages the flow of future US researchers to this area in a field the USA has not ceased to dominate. Its importance in our shrinking planet, for good or for ill, remains unabated.

References:

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International Journal of Communication

Founding Editor

• Larry Gross

Founding Managing Editor

• Arlene Luck
• Silvio Waisbord

Managing Editor

• Kady Bell-Garcia

Managing Editor, Special Sections

• Mark Mangoba-Agustin

Editorial Board

• Sean Aday George Washington University
• Omar Al-Ghazzi London School of Economics and Political Science
• Ilhem Allagui Northwestern University-Qatar
• Abeer Al-Najjar American University Of Sharjah
• Meryl Alper Northeastern University
• Adriana Amaral Universidade Paulista
• Hector Amaya University of Southern California
• Melissa Miriam Aronczyk Rutgers University
• Jonathan David Aronson University of Southern California
• Karen Arriaza Ibarra Universidad Complutense de Madrid Spain
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The No. 1 way for introverts to gain influence at work, says Stanford expert: It’s the ‘only way’ to stay relevant

The workplace can feel like a communication minefield — especially if you're introverted .

But there's good news: You can get noticed without attending every social event, says Stanford University lecturer and communication expert Matt Abrahams .

The key is intentionally engaging specific people around you — your "audience," as Abrahams calls them. In the office, for example, your audience may be your peers, bosses or even clients.

"The biggest mistake people make in their communication is they don't focus on the needs of the audience," Abrahams tells CNBC Make It. "Attention is the most precious commodity we have in the world today. If I'm not tailoring my message to you, you're not going to pay attention to it."

You have three basic methods at your disposal for figuring out what's important to your audience, he notes: reconnaissance, reflection and research.

"That's the only way to make [your work] relevant," says Abrahams. "You need to know your audience. You have to talk to them, listen to them, observe them ... You have to learn what's important to people, then tailor your message to them."

Reconnaissance

You might also refer to "reconnaissance" as exploration or observation: Think critically about the way your colleagues interact with each other. Then, mirror their communication styles back to them, both in content and delivery, Abrahams recommends.

If someone's water-cooler conversations center around work, approach them with clear, concise and formal language. If they often chat about books, television shows or pets, lead with a common interest.

Don't force it, he adds — you still have to sound like yourself. "You have to understand their goals, their KPIs," says Abrahams.

You can buy yourself more opportunities for reconnaissance by asking to take on simple tasks that place you in rooms with decision-makers at your company. You could find a "leverage point" by volunteering to take notes in a meeting you wouldn't otherwise have access to, for example.

"All of a sudden the role you have — a mundane role that many people don't like — gives you access and influence," Abrahams told Make It last month.

You can learn about influence outside the workplace too, Abrahams says. Notice how your favorite podcaster keeps you entertained. Think about why your favorite TED Talk interests you.

You might spot some patterns. Using "inclusive language," like the words "us," "we" and the other person's first name helps your audience stay focused, research shows. When you're making recommendations, present tense — "I like this book" or "that restaurant has delicious food" — is more persuasive than past tense, other studies find.

You can even ask your favorite artificial intelligence chatbot for inspiration, as long as you take its answers with a grain of salt. Try a prompt like: "'I'm running a meeting on this topic ... What are some questions I could ask [my audience] to keep them engaged?'" Abrahams suggests.

"Questions, by their very nature, get people involved," he adds.

Abrahams says his recommendations don't need to go in a particular order — but it's useful to reflect on your interactions, and how effective they are, as often as possible. 

"Reflection can help you focus and prioritize where you should start," he says. "At the end, you should also take a moment to think, 'What was most helpful?'"

Reflection can help you learn from mistakes: If your audience didn't respond well to your approach, take some time to figure out why and try again. Most introverts don't need prompting on this front, notes Abrahams.

"Extroverts tend to speak before they think. Introverts are the opposite," he says. " Introverts tend to have higher EQ in that they observe more and ... are prone to reflect."

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• Science and Technology Directorate

Interoperability is Key to Effective Emergency Communications

During National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, we’re sharing updates on S&T efforts focused on getting first responders the information they need quickly.

When it comes to communicating emergency information to and among first responders, interoperability is a problem. In some cases, emergency responders cannot talk to some parts of their own agencies—let alone communicate with agencies in neighboring cities, counties, or states. And when time is of the essence, the results can be catastrophic. But there are other factors that can impede response, and we are keenly focused on addressing each of these with technological solutions.

The 9/11 Commission Report speaks at great length about the issues the lack of interoperability caused. As a result of the Commission Report, there was a significant reorganization of response capabilities, which included the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, soon after, the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T). We've been on the case ever since, working for and with responders to better understand and deliver on their technology needs.

While all these organizations are working to find a solution, we have multiple efforts underway to support new technologies to help correct for these gaps. For instance, our First Responder Capability portfolio and Technology Centers work with responders across the country on communications solutions. But the challenges are formidable, as jurisdictions manage their own technology across 6,000 911 call centers nationwide.

Wireless: The Wave of the Future

Let’s face it. The future of communications is going to be wireless, and that extends to emergency communications, too.

S&T has been sponsoring research across a number of areas, based on findings in the S&T “Study on Mobile Device Security” Report, which concluded that targeted research and development (R&D) could inform standards to improve security and resilience of critical mobile communications networks. As a result, S&T’s Mobile Security R&D Program established the Secure and Resilient Mobile Network Infrastructure (SRMNI) project and has efforts underway to establish standards for secure voice and video capability for communications across the 3G, 4G, and 5G networks.

Last year, interagency discussions were held that included S&T, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, and the U.S. Department of Defense, among others, to identify lab testing requirements for 5G Emergency Communications interoperability. Then, in early spring of 2024, S&T and MITRE demoed new features in the new 5G ecosystem critical to DHS components and first responder use cases and continued to conduct engineering analysis and lab-based research to identify potential gaps. Research will be ongoing.

So, we are trending forward but are still working on helping aid improvements across traditional networks.

Connectivity is Key

As it stands, CAD-to-CAD (computer-aided dispatch) communications are the key to interoperability and resilience between government agencies responding to emergencies. Once the 911 call or text is answered, the information is sent to CAD, which is used to send the right resource to the right location. Public safety agencies have different CAD systems that don’t always efficiently share information. The result is ineffective and costly interoperable issues across communications systems.

In 2021, S&T funded a successful CAD-to-CAD interoperability pilot project run by the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute to apply a single standard across municipalities to achieve interoperability. This pilot was successful in testing this theory by applying specifications across three localities – two in New Hampshire and one in Vermont, all three reliant on an InfoCAD™ environment hosted in the Amazon GovCloud. Through testing of two use cases – a three- or four-alarm fire and a medical emergency – IJIS demonstrated a viable solution in a live environment.  

Our Office of Mission and Capability Support will be conducting market research within the next few months on CAD-to-CAD Interoperability Compliance / Conformance testing. This upcoming effort is part of a five-year research & development portfolio under S&T’s Critical Infrastructure Security & Resilience Research (CISRR) Program, which is funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021. The objective is to build upon the previous work done by the SRMNI project to establish interoperability functional specifications and develop a model for wide-scale implementation of these standards.

Location, Location, Location

Out-of-date Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone numbers, connected to the Internet by design, are another issue that can create emergence response delays. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires VoIP telephone service providers to maintain a subscriber’s verified street address as a dispatchable location to the 911 community. If a call is placed for emergency services and there is a lack of cellular coverage, the VoIP address should serve as backup. But these addresses aren’t being updated when moves are made.

The result is first responders routed to the wrong place during emergencies. Our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program released a solicitation in 2023 calling for a solution to help identify whether a call to 911 is coming from a different location than the registered location. We will have more information available on this later this spring, but the aim is to better enable VoIP service providers to provide a valid, dispatchable address.

By helping to advance CAD-to-CAD interoperability testing, seeking a solution to assist with address accuracy through VoIP, and planning for mobile interoperability solutions of the future, we at S&T are hopeful that we can help support first responders and the telecommunicators that assist them get services to the people that need them more efficiently.

Learn more about other S&T efforts to help provide technology solutions to improve emergency response communications .

• Science and Technology
• Emergency Communication
• Public Safety
• First Responders

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Developing key indicators for sustainable food system: a comprehensive application of stakeholder consultations and delphi method provisionally accepted.

• 1 Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The overall status of the food system in Thailand is currently unknown. Although several national and international reports describe Thailand food system, they are not accurate and relevant to inform policies. This study aims to develop indicators which measure Thailand's sustainable food system. We adopted seven-dimensional metrics proposed by Gustafson to facilitate a comparative analysis of food systems, namely (1) food nutrient adequacy; (2) ecosystem stability; (3) food availability and affordability; (4) sociocultural well-being; (5) food safety; (6) resilience; and (7) waste and loss reduction. Three rounds of the Delphi method were convened to assess the proposed indicators using the Item Objective Congruence (IOC) by 48 Thai stakeholders recruited from the government, NGOs, and academia. IOC is a procedure used in test development for evaluating content validity at the item development stage. In each round, the average IOC for each item was carefully considered, together with stakeholders' comments on whether to retain, remove, or recruit new indicators. The communication through mail and email was sent out so that stakeholders could assess independently. A total of 88 and 73 indicators went to the first and second round Delphi assessment; this resulted in 62 final indicators after the third round. In conclusion, these 62 indicators and 190 sub-indicators are too many for policy uses. As an ongoing indicator development, we plan that these 62 indicators will be further tested in different settings to assess data feasibility. After field tests, the final prioritized indicators will be submitted for policy decisions for regular national monitoring and informing policy towards sustainable food systems in Thailand.

Keywords: Sustainable food system, indicator, Food security, resilience, Agriculture, Delphi method

Received: 08 Jan 2024; Accepted: 17 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Rittirong, Chuenglertsiri, Nitnara and Phulkerd. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dr. Jongjit Rittirong, Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Salaya, Thailand

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Language and communication in international students’ adaptation: a bibliometric and content analysis review

Michał wilczewski.

1 Faculty of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Dobra 55, 00-312 Warsaw, Poland

2 Department of Economics and Business Administration, University of Ariel, 40700 Ariel, Israel

3 School of Business and Law, University of Agder, Gimlemoen 25, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway

This article systematically reviews the literature (313 articles) on language and communication in international students’ cross-cultural adaptation in institutions of higher education for 1994–2021. We used bibliometric analysis to identify the most impactful journals and articles, and the intellectual structure of the field. We used content analysis to synthesize the results within each research stream and suggest future research directions. We established two major research streams: second-language proficiency and interactions in the host country. We found inconclusive results about the role of communication with co-nationals in students’ adaptation, which contradicts the major adaptation theories. New contextualized research and the use of other theories could help explain the contradictory results and develop the existing theories. Our review suggests the need to theoretically refine the interrelationships between the interactional variables and different adaptation domains. Moreover, to create a better fit between the empirical data and the adaptation models, research should test the mediating effects of second-language proficiency and the willingness to communicate with locals. Finally, research should focus on students in non-Anglophone countries and explore the effects of remote communication in online learning on students’ adaptation. We document the intellectual structure of the research on the role of language and communication in international students’ adaptation and suggest a future research agenda.

Introduction

One of the consequences of globalization is the changing landscape of international higher education. Over the past two decades, there has been a major increase in the number of international students, that is, those who have crossed borders for the purpose of study (OECD, 2021a ), from 1.9 million in 1997 to over 6.1 million in 2019 (UIS Statistics, 2021 ). Even students who are motivated to develop intercultural competence by studying abroad (Jackson, 2015 ) face several challenges that prevent them from benefitting fully from that experience. Examples of these challenges include language and communication difficulties, cultural and educational obstacles affecting their adaptation, socialization, and learning experiences (Andrade, 2006 ), psychological distress (Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ), or social isolation and immigration and visa extension issues caused by Covid-19 travel restrictions (Hope, 2020 ).

Cross-cultural adaptation theories and empirical research (for reviews, see Andrade, 2006 ; Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ) confirm the critical importance of foreign-language and communication skills and transitioning to the host culture for a successful academic and social life. Improving our understanding of the role of foreign-language proficiency and communication in students’ adaptation is important as the number of international students in higher education worldwide is on the rise. This increase has been accompanied by a growing number of publications on this topic over the last decade (see Fig.  1 ). Previous reviews of the literature have identified foreign-language proficiency and communication as predictors of students’ adaptation and well-being in various countries (Smith & Khawaja, 2011 ). The most recent reviews (Jing et al., 2020 ) list second-language acquisition and cross-cultural adaptation as among the most commonly studied topics in international student research. However, to date, there are no studies specifically examining the role of language and communication in international students’ adaptation (henceforth “language and communication in student adaptation”). This gap is especially important given recent research promoting students’ self-formation (Marginson, 2014 ) and reciprocity between international and domestic students (Volet & Jones, 2012 ). The results challenge the traditional “adjustment to the host culture” paradigm whereby international students are treated as being out of sync with the host country’s norms (Marginson, 2014 ). Thus, this article differs from prior research by offering a systematic and in-depth review of the literature on language and communication in student adaptation using bibliometric co-citation analysis and qualitative content analysis. Our research has a methodological advantage in using various bibliometric tools, which should improve the validity of the results.

Yearly publication of articles on language and communication in student adaptation (

Source: HistCite). Note . TLC, total local citations received; TGC, total global citations received; Articles, number of articles published in the field; International Students, number (in millions) of international students worldwide (UIS Statistics, 2021 )

We focus on several questions:

• What are the most impactful journals and articles about the role of language and communication in student adaptation?
• What is the thematic structure of the research in the field?
• What are the leading research streams investigating language and communication in student adaptation?
• What are the effects of language and communication on student adaptation?
• What are the future research directions?

After introducing the major concepts related to language and communication in student adaptation and the theoretical underpinnings of the field, we present our methodology. Using bibliometric and content analysis, we track the development of the field and identify the major themes, research streams, and studies that have shaped the state-of-the art and our current knowledge about the role of language and communication in student adaptation. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research.

Defining the concepts and theories related to language and communication in student adaptation

Concepts related to language and communication.

Culture is a socially constructed reality in which language and social practices interact to construct meanings (Burr, 2006 ). In this social constructionist perspective, language is viewed as a form of social action. Intertwined with culture, it allows individuals to communicate their knowledge about the world, as well as the assumptions, opinions, and viewpoints they share with other people (Kramsch, 1998 ). In this sense, people identify themselves and others through the use of language, which allows them to communicate their social and cultural identity (Kramsch, 1998 ).

Intercultural communication refers to the process of constructing shared meaning among individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds (Piller, 2007 ). Based on the research traditions in the language and communication in student adaptation research, we view foreign or second-language proficiency , that is, the skill allowing an individual to manage communication interactions in a second language successfully (Gallagher, 2013 ), as complementary to communication (Benzie, 2010 ).

Cross-cultural adaptation

The term adaptation is used in the literature interchangeably with acculturation , adjustment , assimilation , or integration . Understood as a state, cultural adaptation refers to the degree to which people fit into a new cultural environment (Gudykunst and Hammer, 1988 ), which is reflected in their psychological and emotional response to that environment (Black, 1990 ). In processual terms, adaptation is the process of responding to the new environment and developing the ability to function in it (Kim, 2001 ).

The literature on language and communication in student adaptation distinguishes between psychological, sociocultural, and academic adaptation. Psychological adaptation refers to people’s psychological well-being, reflected in their satisfaction with relationships with host nationals and their functioning in the new environment. Sociocultural adaptation is the individual’s ability to fit into the interactive aspects of the new cultural environment (Searle and Ward, 1990 ). Finally, academic adaptation refers to the ability to function in the new academic environment (Anderson, 1994 ). We will discuss the results of the research on language and communication in student adaptation with reference to these adaptation domains.

Theoretical underpinnings of language and communication in student adaptation

We will outline the major theories used in the research on international students and other sojourners, which has recognized foreign-language skills and interactions in the host country as critical for an individual’s adaptation and successful international experience.

The sojourner adjustment framework (Church, 1982 ) states that host-language proficiency allows one to establish and maintain interactions with host nationals, which contributes to one’s adaptation to the host country. In turn, social connectedness with host nationals protects one from psychological distress and facilitates cultural learning.

The cultural learning approach to acculturation (Ward et al., 2001 ) states that learning culture-specific skills allows people to handle sociocultural problems. The theory identifies foreign-language proficiency (including nonverbal communication), communication competence, and awareness of cultural differences as prerequisites for successful intercultural interactions and sociocultural adaptation (Ward et al., 2001 ). According to this approach, greater intercultural contact results in fewer sociocultural difficulties (Ward and Kennedy, 1993 ).

Acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 , 2005 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) identifies four acculturation practices when interacting with host nationals: assimilation (seeking interactions with hosts and not maintaining one’s cultural identity), integration (maintaining one’s home culture and seeking interactions with hosts), separation (maintaining one’s home culture and avoiding interactions with hosts), and marginalization (showing little interest in both maintaining one’s culture and interactions with others) (Berry, 1997 ). Acculturation theory postulates that host-language skills help establish supportive social and interpersonal relationships with host nationals and, thus, improve intercultural communication and sociocultural adjustment (Ward and Kennedy, 1993 ).

The anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory (Gudykunst, 2005 ; Gudykunst and Hammer, 1988 ) states that intercultural adjustment is a function of one’s ability to cope with anxiety and uncertainty caused by interactions with hosts and situational processes. People’s ability to communicate effectively depends on their cognitive resources (e.g., cultural knowledge), which helps them respond to environmental demands and ease their anxiety.

The integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 2001 ) posits that people’s cultural adaptation is reflected in their functional fitness, meaning, the degree to which they have internalized the host culture’s meanings and communication symbols, their psychological well-being, and the development of a cultural identity (Kim, 2001 ). Communication with host nationals improves cultural adaptation by providing opportunities to learn about the host country’s society and culture, and developing intercultural communication competence that includes the ability to receive and interpret comprehensible messages in the host environment.

The intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ) states that contact between two distinct groups reduces mutual prejudice under certain conditions: when groups have common goals and equal status in the social interaction, exhibit intergroup cooperation, and have opportunities to become friends. Intercultural contact reduces prejudice toward and stereotypical views of the cultural other and provides opportunities for cultural learning (Allport, 1954 ).

These theories provide the theoretical framework guiding the discussion of the results synthesized through the content analysis of the most impactful articles in the field.

Methodology

Bibliometric and content analysis methods.

We used a mixed-method approach to review the research on language and communication in student adaptation for all of 1994–2021. This timeframe was informed by the data extraction process described in the next section. Specifically, we conducted quantitative bibliometric analyses such as co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and conceptual thematic mapping, as well as qualitative content analysis to explore the research questions (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ).

Bibliometric methods use bibliographic data to identify the structures of scientific fields (Zupic and Čater, 2015 ). Using these methods, we can create an objective view of the literature by making the search and review process transparent and reproducible (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ). First, we measured the impact of the journals and articles by retrieving data from HistCite concerning the number of articles per journal and citations per article. We analyzed the number of total local citations (TLC) per year, that is, the number of times an article has been cited by other articles in the same literature (313 articles in our sample). We then analyzed the total global citations (TGC) each article received in the entire Web of Science (WoS) database. We also identified the trending articles in HistCite by calculating the total citation score (TLCe) at the end of the year covered in the study (mid-2021). This score rewards articles that received more citations within the last three years (i.e., up to the beginning of 2018). Using this technique, we can determine the emerging topics in the field because it considers not only articles with the highest number of citations received over a fixed period of time, but also those that have been cited most frequently in recent times (Alon et al., 2018 ).

Second, to establish a general conceptual structure of the field, we analyzed the co-occurrence of authors’ keywords using VOS software. Next, based on the authors’ keywords, we plotted a conceptual map using Biblioshiny (a tool for scientific mapping analysis that is part of the R bibliometrix-package) to identify motor, basic, niche, and emerging/declining themes in the field (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ).

Third, to determine specific research streams and map patterns within the field (Alon et al., 2018 ), we used the co-citation mapping techniques in HistCite that analyze and visualize citation linkages between articles (Garfield et al., 2006 ) over time.

Next, we used content analysis to synthesize the results from the 31 most impactful articles in the field. We analyzed the results within each research stream and discussed them in light of the major adaptation theories to suggest future research directions and trends within each research stream (Alon et al., 2018 ). Content analysis allows the researcher to identify the relatively objective characteristics of messages (Neuendorf, 2002 ). Thus, this technique enabled us to verify and refine the results produced by the bibliometric analysis, with the goal of improving their validity.

Data extraction

We extracted the bibliographic data from Clarivate Analytics’ WoS database that includes over 21,000 high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly journals (as of July 2020 from clarivate.libguides.com). We adopted a two-stage data extraction approach (Alon et al., 2018 ; Bretas and Alon, 2021 ). Table ​ Table1 1 describes the data search and extraction processes.

Keyword search in WoS

First, in June 2021, we used keywords that would best cover the researched topic by searching for the following combinations of terms: (a) “international student*” OR “foreign student*” OR “overseas student*” OR “study* abroad” OR “international education”—to cover international students as a specific sojourner group; (b) “language*” and “communicat*”—to cover research on foreign-language proficiency as well as communication issues; and (c) “adapt*” OR “adjust*” OR “integrat*” OR “acculturat*”—to cover the adaptation aspects of the international students’ experience. However, given that cross-cultural adaptation is reflected in an individual’s functional fitness, psychological well-being, and development of a cultural identity (Kim, 2001 ), we included two additional terms in the search: “identit*” OR “satisf*”—to cover the literature on the students’ identity issues and satisfaction in the host country. Finally, based on a frequency analysis of our data extracted in step 2, we added “cultur* shock” in step 3 to cover important studies on culture shock as one of critical aspects of cross-cultural adaptation (Gudykunst, 2005 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ; Ward et al., 2001 ). After refining the search by limiting the data to articles published in English, the extraction process yielded 921 sources in WoS.

In the second stage, we refined the extraction further through a detailed examination of all 921 sources. We carefully read the articles’ abstracts to identify those suitable for further analysis. If the abstracts did not contain one or more of the three major aspects specified in the keyword search (i.e., international student, language and communication, adaptation), we studied the whole article to either include or exclude it. We did not identify any duplicates, but we removed book chapters and reviews of prior literature that were not filtered out by the search in WoS. Moreover, we excluded articles that (a) reported on students’ experiences outside of higher education contexts; (b) dealt with teaching portfolios, authors’ reflective inquiries, or anecdotal studies lacking a method section; (c) focused on the students’ experience outside the host country or on the experience of other stakeholders (e.g., students’ spouses, expatriate academics); (d) used the terms “adaptation,” “integration,” or “identity” in a sense different from cultural adaptation (e.g., adaptation of a syllabus/method/language instruction; integration of research/teaching methods/technology; “professional” but not “cultural” identity); or (e) used language/communication as a dependent rather than an independent variable. This process yielded 313 articles relevant to the topic. From them, we extracted the article’s title, author(s) names and affiliations, journal name, number, volume, page range, date of publication, abstract, and cited references for bibliometric analysis.

In a bibliometric analysis, the article is the unit of analysis. The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate interconnections among articles and research areas by measuring how many times the article is (co)cited by other articles (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ).

Bibliometric analysis

Most relevant journals and articles.

We addressed research question 1 regarding the most impactful journals and articles about the role of language and communication in student adaptation by identifying the most relevant journals and articles. Figure  2 lists the top 20 journals publishing in the field. The five most influential journals in terms of the number of local and global citations are as follows: International Journal of Intercultural Relations (79 and 695 citations, respectively), Journal of Studies in International Education (28 and 343 citations, respectively), Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (14 and 105 citations, respectively), Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (13 and 302 citations, respectively), and Higher Education (11 and 114 citations, respectively),

Top 20 journals publishing on language and communication in student adaptation (

Source: HistCite). Note . TLC, total local citations received; TLC/t, total local citations received per year; TGC, total global citations received; Articles, number of articles published in the field

Table ​ Table2 lists 2  lists the 20 most influential and trending articles as measured by, respectively, local citations (TLC) and trending local citations at the end of the period covered (TLCe), that is, mid-2021. The most locally cited article was a qualitative study of Asian students’ experiences in New Zealand by Campbell and Li ( 2008 ) (TLC = 12). That study, which linked host-language proficiency with student satisfaction and effective communication in academic contexts, also received the highest number of global citations per year (TGC/t = 7.86). The most influential article in terms of total local citations per year was a quantitative study by Akhtar and Kröner-Herwig ( 2015 ) (TLC/t = 1.00) who linked students’ host-language proficiency, prior international experience, and age with acculturative stress among students in Germany. Finally, Sam’s ( 2001 ) quantitative study, which found no relationship between host-language and English proficiency and having a local friend on students’ satisfaction with life in Norway, received the most global citations (TGC = 115).

Ranking of the 20 most impactful and trending articles (sorted by TLC)

All indices retrieved from HistCite: TLC , total local citations received; TLC/t , average local citations received per year; TGC , total global citations received; TGC/t , average global citations received per year; TLC/e , trending local citations at the end of the period covered

The most trending article (TLCe = 7) was a quantitative study by Duru and Poyrazli ( 2011 ) who considered the role of social connectedness, perceived discrimination, and communication with locals and co-nationals in the sociocultural adaptation of Turkish students in the USA. The second article with the most trending local citations (TLCe = 5) was a qualitative study by Sawir et al. ( 2012 ) who focused on host-language proficiency as a barrier to sociocultural adaptation and communication in the experience of students in Anglophone countries.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

We addressed research question 2 regarding the thematic structure of the research in the field by analyzing the authors’ keyword co-occurrences to establish the thematic structure of the field (Bretas and Alon, 2021 ; Donthu et al., 2020 ). Figure  3 depicts the network of keywords that occurred together in at least five articles between 1994 and 2021. The nodes represent keywords, the edges represent linkages among the keywords, and the proximity of the nodes and the thickness of the edges represent how frequently the keywords co-occurred (Donthu et al., 2020 ). The analysis yielded two even clusters with 17 keywords each. Cluster 1 represents the primary focus on the role of language proficiency in student adaptation. It includes keywords such as “language proficiency,” “adaptation,” “acculturative stress,” “culture shock,” and “challenges.” Cluster 2 represents the focus on the role of intercultural communication and competence in student adaptation. It includes keywords such as “intercultural communication,” “intercultural competence,” “academic/psychological/sociocultural adaptation,” and “transition.”

Authors’ keyword co-occurrence analysis (

Source: VOS)

Conceptual thematic map

Based on the authors’ keywords, we plotted a conceptual map (see Fig.  4 ) using two dimensions. The first is density , which indicates the degree of development of the themes as measured by the internal associations among the keywords. The second is centrality , which indicates the relevance of the themes as measured by the external associations among the keywords. The map shows four quadrants: (a) motor themes (high density and centrality), (b) basic themes (low density and high centrality), (c) niche themes (high density and low centrality), and (d) emerging/declining themes (low density and centrality) (Bretas & Alon, 2021 ). The analysis revealed that motor themes in the field are studies of Chinese students’ experiences and student integration. Unsurprisingly, the basic themes encompass most topics related to language in student adaptation. Research examining the perspective of the students’ parents with regard to their children’s overseas experience exemplifies a niche theme. Finally, “international medical students” and “learning environment” unfold as emerging/declining themes. To determine if the theme is emerging or declining, we analyzed bibliometric data on articles relating to medical students’ adaptation and students’ learning environment. We found that out of 19 articles on medical students published in 13 journals (10 medicine/public health-related), 15 (79%) articles were published over the last five years (2016–2021), which clearly suggests an emerging trend. The analysis of authors’ keywords yielded only three occurrences of the keyword “learning environment” in articles published in 2012, 2016, and 2020, which may suggest an emerging trend. To further validate this result, we searched for this keyword in titles and abstracts and identified eight relevant articles published between 2016 and 2020, which supports the emerging trend.

Conceptual thematic map (

Source: Biblioshiny)

Citation mapping: research streams

We addressed research question 3 regarding the leading research streams investigating language and communication in student adaptation by using co-citation mapping techniques to reveal how the articles in our dataset are co-cited over time. To produce meaningful results that would not trade depth for breadth in our large dataset (313 articles), we limited the search to articles with TGC ≥ 10 and TLC ≥ 3. These thresholds yielded the 31 articles (10% of the dataset) that are most frequently cited within and outside the dataset, indicating their driving force in the field. We analyzed these 31 articles further because their number corresponds with the suggested range of the most-cited core articles for mapping in HistCite (Garfield et al., 2006 ).

Figure  5 presents the citation mapping of these 31 articles. The vertical axis shows how the articles have been co-cited over time. Each node represents an article, the number in the box represents the location of the article in the entire dataset, and the size of the box indicates the article’s impact in terms of TLCs. The arrows indicate the citing direction between two articles. A closer distance between two nodes/articles indicates their similarity. Ten isolated articles in Fig.  5 have not been co-cited by other articles in the subsample of 31 articles.

Citation mapping of articles on language and communication in student adaptation (

Source: HistCite)

A content analysis of these 31 articles points to two major and quite even streams in the field: (a) “ second-language proficiency ” (16 articles) and (b) “ interactions in the host country ” involving second-language proficiency, communication competence, intercultural communication, and other factors (15 articles). We clustered the articles based on similar conceptualizations of language and communication and their role in student adaptation. As Fig.  5 illustrates, the articles formed distinct but interrelated clusters. The vertical axis indicates that while studies focusing solely on second-language proficiency and host-country interactions have developed relatively concurrently throughout the entire timespan, a particular interest in host-country interactions occurred in the second decade of research within the field (between 2009 and 2013). The ensuing sections present the results of the content analysis of the studies in each research stream, discussing the results in light of the major theories outlined before.

Content analysis

We sought to answer research question 4 regarding the effects of language and communication on student adaptation by synthesizing the literature within the previously established two research streams. The concept map in Fig.  6 illustrates the predictive effects of second-language proficiency and host-country interactions on various adaptation domains. Table ​ Table4 4 in the Appendix presents a detailed description of the synthesis and lists studies reporting these effects, underscoring inconclusive results.

A concept map synthesizing research on language and communication in student adaptation

A synthesis of the literature on language and communication in student adaptation

(+) and (-) signify the positive and negative direction of the effect, respectively.

Second-language proficiency

This research stream focuses on language barriers and the role of foreign-language proficiency in student adaptation. Having host-language proficiency predicts less acculturative stress (Akhtar and Kröner-Herwig, 2015 ), while limited host-language proficiency inhibits communication with locals and academic integration (Cao et al., 2016 ). These results are in line with the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 , 2005 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) and the communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim, 2001 ). Cross ( 1995 ) suggested that social skills predict sociocultural rather than psychological (perceived stress, well-being) adaptation (Searle and Ward, 1990 ). Indeed, several qualitative studies have explained that the language barrier affects sociocultural adaptation by preventing students from establishing contacts with host nationals (Wang and Hannes, 2014 ), developing meaningful relationships (Sawir et al., 2012 ), and limiting occasions for cultural learning (Trentman, 2013 ), supporting the acculturation theory (Anderson, 1994 ; Church, 1982 ; Searle and Ward, 1990 ).

Moreover, insufficient host-language proficiency reduces students’ satisfaction by hampering their communication, socialization, and understanding of lectures in academic contexts (Campbell and Li, 2008 ). Similarly, language affects academic adaptation in students who have difficulty communicating with domestic students (Young and Schartner, 2014 ) or when used as a tool in power struggles, limiting students’ opportunities to speak up in class and participate in discussions or decision-making (Shi, 2011 ). Students who have limited host-language proficiency tend to interact with other international students, which exacerbates their separation from domestic students (Sawir et al., 2012 ). These findings again confirm the theories of acculturation (Berry, 1997 ; Ward et al., 2001 ) and communication and cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 2001 ).

With regard to the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 ; Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ), we found inconclusive results concerning the impact of foreign-language skills on students’ satisfaction and adaptation. Specifically, some studies (e.g., Sam, 2001 ; Ying and Liese, 1994 ) found this effect to be non-significant when tested in regression models. One explanation for this result might be the indirect effect of language on adaptation. For instance, Yang et al. ( 2006 ) established that host-language proficiency mediated the relationship between contact with host nationals and the psychological and sociocultural adjustment of students in Canada. Swami et al. ( 2010 ) reported that better host-language skills among Asian students in Britain predicted their adaptation partly because they had more contacts with host nationals. In turn, Meng et al. ( 2018 ) found that the relationship between foreign-language proficiency and social and academic adaptation was fully mediated by global competence (understood as “intercultural competence” or “global mindset”) in Chinese students in Belgium.

Interactions in the host country

The second research stream comprises studies taking a broader look at language and communication in student adaptation by considering both individual and social interaction contexts: second-language (host-language and English) proficiency; willingness to communicate in the second language; communication interactions with domestic and international students, host nationals, and co-nationals; social connectedness (i.e., a subjective awareness of being in a close relationship with the social world; Lee and Robbins, 1998 ; and integrative motivation (i.e., a positive affective disposition towards the host community; Yu, 2013 .

Host-language proficiency predicts academic (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Yu, 2013 ), psychological (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ), and sociocultural adaptation (Brown, 2009 ; Duru and Poyrazli, 2011 ), confirming the acculturation theory (Ward et al., 2001 ). However, although some studies (Hirai et al., 2015 ; Yu, 2013 ) confirmed the impact of host-language proficiency on academic adaptation, they found no such impact on sociocultural adaptation. Yu’s ( 2013 ) study reported that sociocultural adaptation depends on academic adaptation rather than on host-language proficiency. Moreover, host-language proficiency increases the students’ knowledge of the host culture, reduces their uncertainty, and promotes intercultural communication (Gallagher, 2013 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ), supporting the central aspects of the AUM theory (Gudykunst, 2005 ).

In turn, by enabling communication with academics and peers, second-language proficiency promotes academic (Yu and Shen, 2012 ) and sociocultural adaptation, as well as social satisfaction (Perrucci and Hu, 1995 ). It also increases the students’ willingness to communicate in non-academic contexts. This willingness mediates the relationship between second-language proficiency and cross-cultural difficulties among Asian students in England (Gallagher, 2013 ). This finding may explain inconclusive results concerning the relationship between second-language proficiency and cultural adaptation. It appears that second-language proficiency alone is insufficient for successful adaptation. This proficiency should be coupled with the students’ willingness to initiate intercultural communication to cope with communication and cultural difficulties, which is compatible with both the AUM theory and Kim’s ( 2001 ) communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory.

As mentioned before, host-language proficiency facilitates adaptation through social interactions. Research demonstrates that communication with domestic students predicts academic satisfaction (Perrucci and Hu, 1995 ) and academic adaptation (Yu and Shen, 2012 ), confirming Kim’s ( 2001 ) theory. Moreover, the frequency of interaction (Zimmermann, 1995 ) and direct communication with host nationals (Rui and Wang, 2015 ) predict adaptation and reduce uncertainty, supporting the AUM theory. Zhang and Goodson ( 2011 ) found that social interactions with host nationals mediate the relationship between adherence to the host culture and sociocultural adaptation difficulties, confirming the acculturation theory (Berry, 1997 ), the intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954 ; Pettigrew, 2008 ), and the culture learning approach in acculturation theory (Ward et al., 2001 ).

In line with the intergroup contact theory, social connectedness with host nationals predicts psychological and sociocultural adaptation (e.g., Hirai et al., 2015 ; Zhang and Goodson, 2011 ), confirming the sojourner adjustment framework (Church, 1982 ) and extending the acculturation framework (Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ) that recognizes the relevance of social connectedness for sociocultural adaptation only.

Research on interactions with co-nationals has produced inconclusive results. Some qualitative studies (Pitts, 2009 ) revealed that communication with co-nationals enhances students’ sociocultural adaptation and psychological and functional fitness for interacting with host nationals. Consistent with Kim’s ( 2001 ) theory, such communication may be a source of instrumental and emotional support for students when locals are not interested in contacts with them (Brown, 2009 ). Nonetheless, Pedersen et al. ( 2011 ) found that social interactions with co-nationals may cause psychological adjustment problems (e.g., homesickness), contradicting the acculturation theory (Ward and Kennedy, 1994 ), or increase their uncertainty (Rui and Wang, 2015 ), supporting the AUM theory.

Avenues for future research

We addressed research question 5 regarding future research directions through a content analysis of the 31 most impactful articles in the field. Importantly, all 20 trending articles listed in Table ​ Table1 1 were contained in the set of 31 articles. This outcome confirms the relevance of the results of the content analysis. We used these results as the basis for formulating the research questions we believe should be addressed within each of the two research streams. These questions are listed in Table ​ Table3 3 .

Future research questions

Research has focused primarily on the experience of Asian students in Anglophone countries (16 out of 31 most impactful articles), with Chinese students’ integration being the motor theme. This is not surprising given that Asian students account for 58% of all international students worldwide (OECD, 2021b ). In addition, Anglophone countries have been the top host destinations for the last two decades. The USA, the UK, and Australia hosted 49% of international students in 2000, while the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia hosted 47% of international students in 2020 (Project Atlas, 2020 ). This fact raises the question of the generalizability of the research results across cultural contexts, especially given the previously identified cultural variation in student adaptation (Fritz et al., 2008 ). Thus, it is important to study the experiences of students in underexplored non-Anglophone host destinations that are currently gaining in popularity, such as China, hosting 9% of international students worldwide in 2019, France, Japan, or Spain (Project Atlas, 2020 ). Furthermore, future research in various non-Anglophone countries could precisely define the role of English as a lingua franca vs. host-language proficiency in international students’ experience.

The inconsistent results concerning the effects of communication with co-nationals on student adaptation (e.g., Pedersen et al., 2011 ; Pitts, 2009 ) indicate that more contextualized research is needed to determine if such communication is a product of or a precursor to adaptation difficulties (Pedersen et al., 2011 ). Given the lack of confirmation of the acculturation theory (Ward and Kennedy, 1994 ) or the communication and cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim, 2001 ) in this regard, future research could cross-check the formation of students’ social networks with their adaptation trajectories, potentially using other theories such as social network theory to explain the contradictory results of empirical research.

Zhang and Goodson ( 2011 ) showed that social connectedness and social interaction with host nationals predict both psychological and sociocultural adaptation. In contrast, the sojourner adjustment framework (Ward and Kennedy, 1999 ) considered their impact on sociocultural adaptation only. Thus, future research should conceptualize the interrelationships among social interactions in the host country and various adaptation domains (psychological, sociocultural, and academic) more precisely.

Some studies (Brown, 2009 ; Gallagher, 2013 ; Rui and Wang, 2015 ) confirm all of the major adaptation theories in that host-language proficiency increases cultural knowledge and the acquisition of social skills, reduces uncertainty and facilitates intercultural communication. Nevertheless, the impact of language on sociocultural adaptation appears to be a complex issue. Our content analysis indicated that sociocultural adaptation may be impacted by academic adaptation (Yu, 2013 ) or does not occur when students do not engage in meaningful interactions with host nationals (Ortaçtepe, 2013 ). To better capture the positive sociocultural adaptation outcomes, researchers should take into account students’ communication motivations, together with other types of adaptation that may determine sociocultural adaptation.

Next, in view of some research suggesting the mediating role of second-language proficiency (Yang et al., 2006 ), contacts with host nationals (Swami et al., 2010 ), and students’ global competence (Meng et al., 2018 ) in their adaptation, future research should consider other non-language-related factors such as demographic, sociocultural, and personality characteristics in student adaptation models.

Finally, the conceptual map of the field established the experiences of medical students and the learning environment as an emerging research agenda. We expect that future research will focus on the experience of other types of students such as management or tourism students who combine studies with gaining professional experience in their fields. In terms of the learning environment and given the development and growing importance of online learning as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, future research should explore the effects of remote communication, both synchronous and asynchronous, in online learning on students’ adaptation and well-being.

This article offers an objective approach to reviewing the current state of the literature on language and communication in student adaptation by conducting a bibliometric analysis of 313 articles and a content analysis of 31 articles identified as the driving force in the field. Only articles in English were included due to the authors’ inability to read the identified articles in Russian, Spanish, or Chinese. Future research could extend the data search to other languages.

This review found support for the effects of language of communication on student adaptation, confirming major adaptation theories. Nevertheless, it also identified inconsistent results concerning communication with co-nationals and the complex effects of communication with host nationals. Thus, we suggested that future research better captures the adaptation outcomes by conducting contextualized research in various cultural contexts, tracking the formation of students’ social networks, and precisely conceptualizing interrelations among social interactions in the host country and different adaptation domains. Researchers should also consider students’ communication motivations and the mediating role of non-language-related factors in student adaptation models.

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Author contribution

Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Michał Wilczewski had the idea for the article, performed the literature search and data analysis, and drafted the manuscript. Ilan Alon critically revised the work, suggested developments and revisions, and edited the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

This research is supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange grant “Exploring international students’ experiences across European and non-European contexts” [grant number PPN/BEK/2019/1/00448/U/00001] to Michał Wilczewski.

Declarations

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Michał Wilczewski, Email: [email protected] .

Ilan Alon, Email: [email protected] .

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