President's Message: Beyond Representation...the Future of ICA
It has only been a few months since I wrote a newsletter column that framed immediate challenges facing ICA in terms of paradoxes of responsivity and rewards (December, 2012). Today, as the ICA Executive Committee, board members, committee chairs, and committee members prepare for our annual meeting in London, the paradoxical nature of international organizations is becoming even more apparent. This observation is based not only on my theoretical predilection for seeing (and enjoying) organizational paradox, or multiple references to paradoxes in international organizations during times of change that have appeared in the past few weeks, e.g. "Bergoglio: A pope of paradox for a church in transition" (Religious News Service, 13 March 2013) "Paradox of French president: Friendly yet disliked" (Star Telegram, 13 March 2013). Rather, my comments are grounded in the detailed, serious, exciting, nuanced, and well-articulated discussions and experiences of many of our committees as they work towards finalizing recommendations for the board to consider in June. Whether it is the ad hoc "I" in ICA committee; the membership committee; the standing or ad hoc publication committees addressing editorial processes, new structures, and alternative formats; or the awards committees, seeking ways to recognize excellence the tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas associated with striving to be a truly international organization are manifest. The excellent work of our committees to identify, name, and confront these tensions gives great promise for the future of ICA, but also moments of discomfort and stress.
These tensions are deeply rooted in our history, our identity as "international,” and our organizational consensus that we not only need to continue our efforts to maintain our position as the premier communication association in the world but also that our global interconnectedness requires new structures, new processes, and new ways of thinking about our routine and everyday practices as well as our mission and outreach. It was with these goals in mind that 15 years ago ICA established a new regional structure and created elected regional representatives. Because ICA membership was overwhelmingly based in the United States, the rationale was that we needed a way to a) encourage non-US membership, b) insure non-US representation on the board, and c) engage members from all regions in all aspects of ICA, reviewing, publishing, collaborative research, teaching, workshops, agenda-setting, socializing, et cetera.
In many ways and across several metrics, ICA is moving towards achieving our fundamental goal of international representation. The percentage of non-US based membership has grown to 45% and the ICA board now reflects this distribution. Of the 39 people on our board, 56% are from the US, 6% from the Americas, 21% from Europe, 7% from East Asia, 3% from West Asia, and 7% from Oceania/Africa. Since 2000 our ICA Executive leadership has become far more representative of our diverse membership. More than 40% of ICA Presidents since 2000 have been natives of countries other than the United States. Nineteen of the 30 members of our awards committees span 5 continents and represent nations other than the United States. Two of our five journal editors are non-US members, our editorial boards are becoming more international in scope, and each year the number of divisional elected officers and participants from countries other than the US are also increasing. We have co-sponsored conferences with regional and national associations and plan to continue to do so in the future (e.g. our regional conference in Malaga, Spain in July, 2013 and Shanghai, China in November, 2013). And yet paradoxically, even with this progress (indeed, perhaps as a direct result of this progress), discussions, concerns, and occasional frustration about our lack/slow pace of progress toward “internationalization” have increased rather than decreased. As an association we still struggle with engaging scholars from all regions in publication activities and other types of involvement and as an organization we are still viewed as US-centric both internally and externally. Clearly representation in governance structures is both an important and a necessary step, but not a sufficient one.
So why hasn't increased representation worked to the degree we had hoped? Why is that while for many years the Executive Council has been truly committed to internationalizing ICA, we are still far away from meeting our goals? Is it that we do not yet share a vision of what it means to be an international organization? Is it that our use of English as the common language to share and exchange knowledge creates inherent biases and privileged positions? Is it that what most of us really want are members who look, sound, and live differently but think, research, and write in the same manner? Is our divisional and regional structure hindering change? There are many possible explanations and our committees are exploring them as they develop proposals to be discussed, debated, reviewed, revised and hopefully enacted over the next year.
One way to frame our theoretical and practical dilemma is to consider the paradox of representation. As long as we see representation in The International Communication Association primarily in terms of national or even regional boundaries we are more likely to continue to reproduce the very system that we want to change. Rather the question of internationalization and how we can achieve it, as one committee member wrote is "not so much a question of what the “U.S. /non-U.S.” dichotomy signifies, or of whether people from different parts of the world working at U.S. institutions should be considered “international,” but rather of reflecting on the system of dispositions that ICA’s leaders and members co-constitute through their ways of valuing, acting, and interacting.
Indeed, ICA members from across the globe are embedded in an increasingly converging institutional field, subject to regulative and normative processes that define our interests, produce our identities and structure our views of what can and can not be. The practical puzzle for us as we strive to put the "I" in ICA involves many emerging questions: How do we deal with a world in which more and more universities across the globe use publishing in English as the metric of excellence? How do we diversify, open up, and transform our journals at the very time when there are more and more strictures at the global level for what counts as publications, for how we must publish, how our content must be made available, and for global comparative rankings of our universities, our programs and our faculties? How do we flourish as an organization at a time when resources are dwindling, expenses are going up, and the global economic downturn affects us all?
I believe that the essential project for ICA as we move ahead is how we address, these pressures while at the same time respecting and incorporating the very differences that these pressures make more pronounced and make our field vibrant and relevant. We need to recognize that we are struggling with issues of globalization as well as internationalization. To become a truly global organization, I believe we need to move beyond nation as our primary unit of analysis and seek to represent both the convergent as well as divergent experiences of all our members. For example, utilizing the UN nation categories for our fee structure makes continued sense but we also need to have our fee structure recognize the new global economic realities of the changing structure of educational employment and consider the part time, adjunct, and non- secure employment that many of our members confront throughout the world. While diversifying our editorial boards by national origin is an important move, it will not resolve issues of openness to diverse styles, methodologies and epistemologies, ISI rankings, citation counts, etc.
How ICA reflects and reacts to the pressures of global convergence and divergence and what it means to represent the very best in the communication discipline will be the subject of a great deal of interpersonal conversation, formal debate at the board meeting, plenary and mini plenary presentations, and divisional conversations at our conference in June. This is an exciting time for ICA. I look forward to taking part in these conversations and seeing you all in London.