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McChesney, The political economy of communication 111 dependent variable with little social significance in its own right. This tendency has been especially pronounced in the USA, where, not coincidentally, the corporate commercial model has been most thoroughly ingrained economically, politically and ideologically. Moreover, communication departments and research are presently under fiscal attack on many campuses; we are now at what in many respects is a critical juncture for the discipline. In the next decade or so it is likely that the future of the field on US campuses will be determined and, in some respects, its very survival is at stake. The field will not necessarily be abolished per se, but it could be relegated to (or maintained at) such a marginal status that it will never have the resources to generate a significant body of research. It is paradoxical that this threat to the field's growth and/or survival comes precisely at the historic moment that communication is roundly deemed to be a central and even defining feature of the national and global political economy and culture. This should, by all rights, be the field's day in the sun. Yet while differing scholars in communication easily accept the importance of the field, there is little evidence that those in the traditionally powerful disciplines at major research universities necessarily see communication as an equal. The reasons for communication's poor status are hardly top secret. For starters, there is the field's belated arrival. It developed a generation or two later than the other leading social sciences, largely due to the rapid emergence of communication as a significant social factor at the turn of the century. But being ʻlate to the table' hardly accounts for its current small portions, as the field of computer science attests. In addition, some argue that the field lacks the necessary focus to establish itself as a distinct field. To some extent this is due to the field's extremely heterogeneous antecedents. Modern communication has developed from English departments, speech programs, journalism schools, theater and drama departments, radio and TV departments, and film schools, and has been influenced by economics, political science, psychology and sociology. On many campuses, like the one I taught at for a decade in Madison, there are two or three departments devoted to communication and there is little rational explanation for which department does what. To the untrained eye this can seem quite strange. The contemporary practice of com- munication research extends from cognitive, experimental and survey research to rhetorical studies, cultural studies, political economy, law and archival history. Many, perhaps most, communication scholars have as much in common with people in other fields as they do with people in their own. This breeds the concern that the field can never generate the quality of research discipline can. Hence it receives fewer resources. But, when one looks closely, universities are scarcely meritocracies. It is not a case of the best research and most important topics attracting the most institutional support. Of greater importance is the perceived prestige of the field, and in this area communication suffers greatly in comparison to the other main social sciences. Prestige is only loosely related to quality and it has a self-fulfilling logic that is difficult to crack. Moreover, it cements an academic system that privileges un- original and noncontroversial work. From what I have seen of some of the super- prestigious social science departments in Madison and elsewhere, the emperor has no clothes or is only partially clad, that is, much of the actual work is mediocre and uninteresting if not banal. Communication researchers are justified in refusing to deem these fields and their scholars superior, but when the prestige standard is applied communication always falls way short. For any number of reasons, the pursuit of prestige is an occupational hazard for people in academia, even for those, like myself, who know just how asinine and hat a more definec