Hermeneutic Communication Studies
Authors: Wilson Tony 
Published: February 2019

Diverse approaches to communication studies philosophically underwritten by a hermeneutic perspective are integrated in their perception of ubiquitous communication as fundamentally an embodied, equipped, recurrent practice. Hence behaviour receives from agents initiating activity their minimal concurrent attention or reflection. Habitual communication’s tacit assuming, or its wider understanding of society, is behaviorally emplaced, affirmatively “put in place.” Yet such understanding effaced in pursuits may be reflected on by participants, not least during research following such goal-focused behavior. Activity can range from the mundane—choosing health sustaining apples in the supermarket or television’s daily use—to more exotic pursuits such as families tossing Yee Sang at Chinese New Year reunion dinners. Implicit “understanding how” is distinguished here from an explicit “understanding that,” cast as subsequent subject of reflection. Shared familial television viewing “understands that” program choice can converge. Research turns away from screen image to its habituated behavioral consumption practices. A routinized “understanding how,” with its wider understanding implicit in haptic practices, is re-centered in this hermeneutic approach to communication studies—its investigating of the “ordinary.” The following sections discuss “communication” as embodied “practical consciousness,” implicit knowing how evident in behavior from supermarket consuming to supportive caring, tacitly presupposing social arrangements manifest on reflection. Routine practice can be shared in the familial use of television as with program choice, emplacing or putting in place wider cultural preferences. Habitual hence little reflected upon activity constituting “home” may be challenged in travel with resulting reflection, a need to attend and amend. This philosophical perspective emphasizing recurring communicative activities as fundamentally “knowing how,” preceding reflective claims of incorporated “knowing that,” can equally be located across hermeneutic interpretive marketing studies and hermeneutic qualitative psychology as well as informing sociology’s widely influential practice theories. In the first, consuming is considered to be a habituated exercise of cultural disposition shaped (perhaps) by media branding, subsequently discussed through an extended focus group, a reorientation that has significantly challenged the quantitative history of marketing. Interpretative phenomenological analysis, which emphasizes within psychology research its hermeneutic concern with understanding communication (e.g., anger) as practice, is focused in analysis on participant “theme” during interviews as an affective embodied concern (e.g., coping with chronic pain). Sociology in its now contemporary turning to practice theories is shaped by earlier interpretive philosophical thinking on cultural forms of life “written into” practice. Engaging with communication, acknowledging its everyday practice to be constituted by habituated routines tacitly incorporating sociocultural reference is grounded in hermeneutic theory —diversified through multidisciplinary appropriation and application.