Communication, Culture and Social Change: Meaning, Co-option and Resistance

By Mohan Dutta

Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), this book re-imagines culture as a site for resisting the neocolonial framework of neoliberal governmentality. Culture emerged in the 20th Century as a conceptual tool for resisting the hegemony of West-centric interventions in development, disrupting the assumptions that form the basis of development. This turn to culture offered radical possibilities for decolonizing social change but in response, necolonial development institutions incorporated culture into their strategic framework while simultaneously deploying political and economic power to silence transformative threads. This rise of “culture as development” corresponded with the global rise of neo-liberal governmentality, incorporating culture as a tool for globally reproducing the logic of capital. Using examples of transformative social change interventions, this book emphasizes the role of culture as a site for resisting capitalism and imagining rights-based, sustainable and socialist futures. In particular, it attends to culture as the basis for socialist organizing in activist and party politics. In doing so, Culture, Participation and Social Change offers a framework of inter-linkage between Marxist analyses of capital and cultural analyses of colonialism. It concludes with an anti-colonial framework that re-imagines the academe as a site of activist interventions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030264703

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© The Author(s) 2020

M. DuttaCommunication, Culture and Social ChangePalgrave Studies in Communication for Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_1

1. Introduction: A Framework for Communicating Social Change

Mohan Dutta¹  

(1)

Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research & Evaluation (CARE), School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Mohan Dutta

Email: [e-mail]

Communication for social change is constituted amid the vectors of globalization, both in producing large-scale political-economic transformations across nation states captured in globalization-as-development, and in constituting processes of activist participation that resist the marginalizing effects of top-down globalization (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b, 2015, 2018; Wilkins, 2014). Described as time-space compression in the accelerated movement of capital, goods, labor, services, and images across national boundaries (Harvey, 1999; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993), globalization has been accompanied by a dramatic shift in the ownership of capital and resources, consolidating resources and power in the hands of transnational capital (Harvey, 1999, 2001, 2005). The contemporary framework of globalization can be traced back to the post-World War II development interventions that sought to open up nation states to US-based transnational corporations, conceived in the ambits of Cold War politics (Dutta, 2006a; Dutta, Thaker, & Sun, 2014). Over the last four decades, the political and economic organizing of the globe has been reconstituted under the framework of neoliberalism,¹ crystallized in the free market ideology, and marked by the financialization of global economies, minimization of state support for welfare programs, and minimization of barriers to free trade (Dutta, 2006a, 2019; Harvey, 2001, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008).

The symbolic constructions and processes of social change communication have been at the heart of the neoliberal transformation of global economies, shaped by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) on one hand, and development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Department for International Development (DfID), and Swiss Aid, on the other hand, referred to as the dominant institutions of social change (Dutta, 2007; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008; Payer, 1974; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993). Social change, implying planned and directed strategic communication efforts carried out by the dominant global organizations, originated in the broader context of development. On one hand, these development communication programs framed within the ambits of social change have been integral to the promotion of free trade in the post-World War II climate, and subsequently in the reorganizing of local economies through IFI-imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) (Dutta, 2006a; Peet, 2003). On the other hand, reproducing this overarching development logic in the framework of modernization, newly liberated postcolonial nation states across the global South, marked as the Third World on the basis of the developmentalist ontology that defined these spaces as lacking in development, started establishing their own development agendas and creating strategic frameworks for development communication.

What then has been the function of social change communication, described as planned social change communication, as conceived within the dominant order of political and economic organizing (Dutta, 2006a)? The very definition of social change communication implicitly as planned social change communication defines the parameters of what is generally discussed under the ambits of social change communication. As we will see in this chapter and the next, the definition of social change in the mainstream US- and Eurocentric communication literature has embedded within itself certain notions of what social change is and what it entails. The dominant literature on social change assumes change as individual-level transformation in knowledge, attitude, and behavior, with the impetus of change on improving individual behavior. Rooted in the war-military-intelligence interests of the US Empire, the managerialism that formed the basis of social change constructed individuals as change agents in the overarching pathway of development (Dutta, 2006b; Knafo, Dutta, Lane, & Wyn-Jones, 2019). This individualistic framework of communication for social change has circulated in the discipline from the roots of social change in the US, promoting capitalism and democracy in the Third World, to the neoliberal transformation of social change, driven by the allegiance to the free market as the solution to global problems. What then are the objectives of social change communication, as constituted within the prevailing logic of neoliberalism, articulated in the promotion of the free market? What are the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of social change communication efforts as conceived within the dominant logics of development, conceived of as the global promotion of transnational capitalism?

Any form of theoretical claim to an object of study is anchored within the overarching politics that constitutes it (Miller, 2004). That the knowledge formations we work with are shaped by the overarching political economies within which they come to take form therefore draws our attention to the claims that are backgrounded and/or erased. This dominant framework of social change communication will be interrogated for the assumptions it makes. These assumptions depict the general concepts of capitalism, technology, and democracy that shape how development has been historically constructed in communication. Our attention to these erasures and shadows of social change communication opens up the space for working through explicitly resistive forms of social change, embodied in the collectivization of struggles of the working classes, precariat, and large cross-sections of people across the globe struggling with poverty. In doing so, we will explore other less explored approaches to social change communication. How do these conceptualizations of social change communication converge with or depart from Marxist and participatory frameworks of social change communication? And most important, what are the transformative possibilities of social change when articulated as participatory communication grounded in community life directed at transforming the unequal social and economic policies of neoliberalism that constitute contemporary global inequalities?

Many of the contemporary debates on communication for social change have emerged around the concept of culture (see the edited collection Servaes, 2007). The categorization of culture as tradition formed the basis of the earliest forms of social change communication literature (Schramm, 1964). This literature, mostly emerging from an applied setting where the role of communication was being studied in the realm of its effectiveness in generating social change, developed universal theories that placed social change as the solution to the problem of culture. The universal theories of growth thus developed worked on culture to modernize it. This modernization framework was racist and imperialist in its treatment of culture, with studies and theories located within this paradigm reproducing this racist logic. The postcolonial and decolonial critiques of communication for social change put forth the concept of culture as a site for alternative interpretations. The turn to culture first emerging out of the anti-colonial movements from the newly independent nation states in the global South entered into the ambits of global cultural development agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and later turned into a key tool for the global implementation of neoliberal policies.

In this book, I offer a conceptual framework for closely looking at the ways in which culture has been erased, backgrounded, foregrounded, and catalyzed in the different threads that have flown through the different theoretical, methodological, and practical ways of doing communication for social change. Based on a framework that derives from my earlier work (Dutta, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) and in conversation with ongoing social change interventions, the book specifically delves into the various ways in which culture appears in the literature, in methods, and in applications of social change communication. The various modalities of knowledge formation, methodology, and practice in communication for social change are compared with each other, particularly attending to their treatment of the concept of culture. We are at a moment in the history and narrative of the discipline where calls to decolonize, de-westernize, and dismantle the hegemonic disciplinary configurations have foregrounded the vitality of building disciplinary anchors from elsewhere. The #CommunicationSoWhite piece published in the Journal of Communication drew attention to the Whiteness of the discipline of Communication. In response to the Whiteness of the award structures and editor selection processes of the National Communication Association (NCA), a Communication Scholars for Transformation (CST) movement emerged in/across the discipline that documented, interrogated, and created critical activist anchors for disrupting the hegemonic structures of the discipline (see, for instance, the timeline of the movement on the blog, and on my own blog for my responses to the Whiteness of the discipline). These conversations form the backdrop of the book, offering the impetus for recognizing the importance of activism within academia, resisting and transforming the knowledge claims reproduced within predominantly White academic structures.

Mapping out the framework of social change as conceived from within the mainstream logics of development then offers an entry point for conceptualizing communicative processes that seek to resist the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the power elite, transforming the ontology of social change from the ambits of transnational hegemony to the collective politics of grassroots-driven structural transformations at local, national, and global levels that are attentive to inequalities in access to resources and communicative spaces. The theorization of structures, the frameworks of organizing of material resources, at local, national, and global levels, and the role of communication in challenging these structures forms the basis of the second half of the book, outlining the key tenets of a grassroots, community-based, participatory culture-centered approach (CCA) that is explicitly directed at achieving structural transformations through the framing of alternative economic and political structures that both interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberalism and offer transformative spaces for challenging these assumptions (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010, 2013). The CCA foregrounds the role of communication as an organizing framework for the ensuing neoliberal transformation of the globe, and attends to the transformative capacity of communication as an entry point to meanings, interpretations, frames, and discourses that create alternative rationalities of political, economic, social, and cultural organizing. Communication, as a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed (Carey, 1989, p. 23), co-creates possibilities of change through co-constructions with disenfranchised communities that experience the effects of neoliberal change globally.

The goal of this chapter is to offer first a map of social change communication efforts in the backdrop of the political and economic configurations of globalization, examining the role of communication for social change historically in achieving the hegemony of neoliberalism, both in the form of top-down development interventions and in the form of participatory development communication interventions, and the corresponding role of social change communication as a symbolic resource for transforming neoliberalism in Marxist and culture-centered frameworks of structural transformation. The ascendance of neoliberalism as a hegemonic narrative for structuring global economics and politics has been achieved through the strategic use of communication framed under the language of poverty alleviation, development, and social change, enabled through free markets and new communication technologies (DeSouza, Basu, Kim, Basnyat, & Dutta, 2008; Dutta, 2007). IFI- and government-funded international development communication interventions (primarily sponsored by the USAID and DfID) have served as instruments for opening up economies and for exerting pressure on local elites through processes of top-down cultural change, thus creating global markets for transnational corporations (TNCs) (Dutta, 2005; Gershman & Irwin, 2000; Millen & Holtz, 2000; Millen, Irwin, & Kim, 2000). In these social change efforts specifically directed at opening up targeted national economies to transnational capital, communication has been at the center stage. In other words, global social, political, and economic change processes under neoliberalism have been conceived and implemented through communication, opening up economies and resulting in the corresponding inequalities, while at the same time framing these processes in the language of poverty alleviation, economic growth, and development. Given this role of communication as an instrument for consolidating power in the hands of transnational capital through planned social change, how then can communication be leveraged as a symbolic resource for transformative social change, addressing the large-scale inequalities and deep-rooted poverty across the various sectors of the globe produced by neoliberal transformations, and inverting the very language of social change that has been integral to the hegemony of the neoliberal project?

In theorizing about globalization processes, scholars draw attention to the modes of neoliberal governance that underlie the contemporary logics of globalization, played out in the promotion of free market economics, trade liberalization, minimization of tariffs and subsidies, and privatization of the public sectors (Harvey, 2001, 2005; Peet, 2003). These specific policies have been central to the political-economic organizing of nation states as mandated by the Bretton Woods Institutions, namely the WB, the IMF, and the WTO, and framed within the logics of the Washington Consensus (Peet, 2003). Scholars studying the economic effects of globalization point toward the increasing inequalities within and between nation states that have been brought about by the SAPs that typify neoliberalism (Gershman & Irwin, 2000; Millen & Holtz, 2000; Millen, Irwin, & Kim, 2000). Addressing these dramatic patterns of rise in inequalities is therefore deeply intertwined with shifting the symbolic resources that disseminate neoliberal values as the taken-for-granted universal markers of political and economic organizing.

I will begin the chapter drawing on an overarching framework for categorizing the different approaches to social change communication (Dutta, 2007), comparing the different paradigms of social change and the role of communication within these paradigms. The comparison will focus on the similarities and differences between the paradigms, and situate the paradigms in the context of broader political and economic processes globally, attending to the relationship of communication for social change with neoliberal processes. Because there already exist excellent reviews of the overarching literature on communication and social change, the review offered here is a critical reading of communication for social change processes, attending to the erasures and co-optations, and simultaneously suggesting possibilities for transforming the vast inequalities that often go uninterrupted in the overarching social change communication literature. Specific attention will be paid to the conceptualization of communication, the goals of communication, the tools of communication, and the outcomes attached to the communicative processes in each of the paradigms. The comparisons of the different approaches to social change communication will offer the basis for theorizing, measuring, and developing practices of communication for social change (Dutta, 2007, 2010, 2013; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Building on a discussion of the various threads of theoretical tenets of social change communication, the review will offer entry points for theorizing social change communication that seeks to transform global neoliberal organizing, and offers entry points for structural transformations globally.

1.1 Theoretical Framework: Categorizing Social Change Communication Efforts

The theoretical framework offered in this chapter as an organizing lens for understanding the different approaches to communication for social change is drawn from the article Culture-centered approach to social change communication and the book Communicating Social Change I had written earlier (Dutta, 2010, 2012a, 2012b), and is broadly defined on the basis of two orthogonal and intersecting dialectical tensions conceptualizing the level at which the change is designed and the process through which change is sought, forming a Cartesian coordinate system (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). Essential to this framework for plotting the various forms and structures of development communication is the acknowledgment of the notion that development is a politico-ethical construction (Preston, 2012, p. 17). In drawing on and revising this theoretical framework for categorizing the various approaches to communication for social change, I will note that there are fluidities and overlaps in the characteristics of communication for social change projects. Whereas a project and a particular implementation cycle of communication for social change might fall within a specific categorization group, it is possible that the project changes its nature as it develops. Similarly, it is also possible that implementation projects often embody multiple approaches and strands of communication for social change, thus occupying hybrid positions. Having said that, it is important to maintain and examine the distinctions articulated here in order to clearly position social change communication interventions. Moreover, as social change communication practitioners and scholars, it helps us grapple with our position as we consider the framework offered here.

Ongoing scholarship on theorizing communication for social change has offered some excellent extensions of the framework I introduced. For instance, in his extension of the framework, Tufte (2017) modifies the categorization of the different approaches I presented, particularly revising the placing of the participatory communication approach (more on this later). Moreover, Tufte’s analysis does an excellent job of juxtaposing the framework in the backdrop of the important theorizing in the work of Colin Sparks, finding parallels between the two approaches. Two special issues of key disciplinary journals, Communication Theory and Journal of Communication, attend to the overarching meta-theory of communication for social change. New initiatives at meta-theorizing communication for social change have taken the form of handbooks, such as The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change edited by Wilkins, Tufte, and Obregon (2014). Special issues edited by Srinivas Melkote (2018) have offered new spaces for theorizing communication for social change. A thread that runs through these important analyses is the recognition of the growing resistance to hegemonic formations to different degrees, although these hegemonic formations are theorized explicitly to different extent in these collections.

The framework of social change communication offered in my earlier work (Dutta, 2010, 2012a, 2012b) is revised here by specifically attending to the nature of the structure, the system of organizing resources and interpretations. The growing acknowledgment of resistance witnessed in the various threads of scholarship on communication and social change is given shape in this book in the form of conceptualizing communication as the basis for building alternative economic models. Moreover, in this revised version, I specifically attend to the way in which culture is conceptualized within the overarching project of social change communication. The nature of the structure is specifically theorized in the realm of the economic model that drives and in turn is reproduced by the projects of communication for social change. By looking at the overarching ideology that constitutes the agenda of social change communication, the nature of a social change communication project can be delineated. The location of a social change communication project within a particular ideology therefore shapes the form taken by that project. This discussion of the economic models tied to the nature of structures in social change communication is a break from extant theorizing of social change communication, as well as from my own earlier work on this subject. Because of the ways in which the terrains of power constitute the knowledge claims that are put forth, I argue here that the overarching economic models that have shaped the contours of knowledge in social change communication systematically erase or background the discussion of the economic models.

The first axis of the categorizing framework captures the tension between the level at which the change is sought, mapping change efforts along a continuum from social change at the structural level to social change targeted at individual beliefs, values, behavior, and lifestyle. I have argued earlier that structures are systems and patterns of organizing societal resources, and therefore social change communication directed at structures explicitly challenges and seeks to change the prevailing logics of existing structures (Dutta, 2010). In such social change efforts, the problem lies in the structural configurations, and therefore change should be brought about by fundamentally making changes in the structures and the underlying values, meanings, interpretive frames and discourses that legitimize these structures. Structurally directed social change communication is transformative because it seeks to resist the status quo, offering to bring an alternative framework for organizing global resources. In contrast, individual-level social change communication efforts frame individual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as the loci of problem, and therefore seek to bring about changes by altering individual beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, simultaneously leaving the status quo unchallenged. Social change is conceptualized as development in this framework, achieved through the incremental dissemination of positive behaviors.

The hegemonic role of the US Empire in shaping the knowledge categories of social change communication has resulted in the individual-level status quo model as the universal framework through which social change communication has been visualized (Dutta, 2006a). The underlying capitalist hegemony served by this model has been strategically obfuscated. The underlying ideology of the status quo approach to social change communication is one of reproducing capitalist hegemony, based on the notion that individual level changes in attitudes and behaviors produce citizen-consumers that participate in the circuits of capital (Lerner, 1958). The promotion of behavior change programs has also served the promotion of capitalism (Dutta, 2006a, 2006b). Simultaneously, the capitalist propaganda that has formed the infrastructure of the knowledge industry in communication for social change has meant that the resistive and oppositional economic model to capitalism—socialism—has been systematically erased from the discursive spaces of social change communication knowledge. That the very sites of knowledge production in social change communication have been at the heart of this campaign to vilify and erase the articulations of socialist alternatives is a point that remains naturally missing from the social change communication literature. Even in my own work, as I have talked about resistance and structural transformation, I have largely omitted the discussion of what this resistance to capitalism meant. My movement to Singapore, and the location of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Singapore, a Southeast Asian hub that serves as a prominent node in the US imperial propaganda across East, South, and Southeast Asia, formed the backdrop for the recognition that actively naming the sort of transformative resistance I was articulating in culture-centered projects as embedded within the socialist ideology was integral to reframing the change imaginary.

This book therefore, is located as a recognition of the economic cartography of social change communication. It argues that the active erasure of the socialist imaginary has been at the heart of the hegemonic social change communication industry. In communication studies even more so than other humanities and social sciences (I argue this has much to do with the uncritical and utilitarian location of communication studies within the US intelligence-military apparatus), the faddish turn to culture amid the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the Berlin Wall worked to constitute a framework of knowledge production that discussed cultural performances and micro-practices of resistance while simultaneously foreclosing the possibilities of revolutionary social change. Collective organizing as the basis of reorganizing economies in socialist principles remains largely missing from culturalist accounts. Recognizing this culturalist faddism, a number of criticisms appropriately call for the active focus on the universal reach of capital, working through this acknowledgment to craft socialist futures (Chibber, 2014). However, as I will argue in this book, this call to recognize the universal reach of capitalism often obscures that (a) capitalism itself is a cultural project, and (b) culture as a site for socialist imaginary offers powerful scripts for projects of social change communication. As we move toward building this argument about the socialist possibilities anchored in cultural narratives, we first begin by reworking the axes of status quo/structural transformation as capitalism/socialism. Therefore, whereas capitalism is the status quo economic model, socialism is the structurally transformative model.

Moreover, throughout the book, I will attend to the political economy of knowledge production, suggesting that where we theorize from shapes the ways in which we interpret a phenomenon and constitute it amid practices. This is particularly salient in the work of communication for social change. Given my earlier point about the ideology of capitalism, and its later version of neoliberal capitalism, that has usurped the discourse and materiality of communication for social change, the articulations of social change emerging from hegemonic organizations therefore are tools of co-option. Recognizing the locus of theorizing as critical to deciphering the politics of communication for social change, I call for critical readings that attend to the ways in which communication, voice, power, empowerment, activism, participation, and social movements get deployed. The growth of social change industries as profitable resources and economic opportunities translates into the proliferation of sectors of civil society organizations, transnational capital, aid agencies, and global organizations (including many United Nations organizations) that co-opt the radical spaces of activism, movements, and social justice precisely to serve the agendas of capital (Bernal & Grewal, 2014). For instance, the seductive narrative of techno-revolution in the backdrop of the Arab Spring on one hand obfuscates the grassroots transformative politics of change practices by unions, worker collectives, and similar organizations, and on the other hand builds the market for global technology corporations that brand themselves as the agents of change. The transformative politics of Arab Spring, co-opted within the US imperial agenda, emerged as an opportunity for the reproduction of global neoliberal capital. Close interrogation of technology capital, imperialism, and social change delineates the uncritical celebration of techno-activism or digital activism (Waisbord, 2018) while simultaneously exploring the radical work of theorizing social change in resistance to global capitalism. The incorporation of digital activism as the logic for promotion of neoliberal technologies, training in digital activism led by imperial techno-capital, and creation of new techno-markets serves neoliberal capital, not dismantle it. Similarly, the narrow focus on networks, flows, and frequencies of digital posts without attending to the larger political economy feeds the logics of neoliberalism rather than disrupting it. Unfortunately, because of the hegemonic blindfolds that shape our disciplinary practices, much of the literature on digital activism superficially limits itself to analyzing hashtags and tweets, without engaging seriously with the possibilities of radical politics.

The other axis in the Cartesian framework is constituted around the nature of the communicative process in the social change effort. In the traditional parlance of social change communication, experts play key roles in conceptualizing and planning development interventions directed at the target communities, with the root of development being understood through the lens imposed by the expert. In this top-down conceptualization of development, the knowledge exists with the expert, who must account for and explain development, as well as offer prescriptions for social change solutions through her/his understanding of development processes. In this sense, in top-down forms of development communication, change efforts are shaped by the expertise/knowledge of the expert, and the change comes from the initial efforts initiated by the expert (Lerner, 1958). The other end of the axis is occupied by community-driven grassroots social change efforts that emphasize the local participatory capacity of communities in participating in processes of change, foregrounding the agentic capacity of communities in determining the texture of change. Change here is conceptualized as being implemented through the involvement of community members in the change processes (Chambers, 1983, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). Participatory in nature, the impetus for social change in grassroots social change emerges from within the community; the fundamental problems and corresponding solutions emerge through the participation of the community members in the processes of change. It is worth noting that culture itself takes different forms, depending upon the ways in which it is conceptualized in the context of communication for social change. I will suggest that specific conceptualizations of culture are implicated within the paradigm commitments of the social change communication efforts (Fig. 1.1).

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Fig. 1.1

A conceptual framework for social change communication

The intersections of the social change versus status quo and the top-down versus participatory axes of social change communication generate four different types of approaches to social change, also depicting the different histories and traditions of social change communication processes. In social change framed within the status quo through top-down processes of communication, the objective of the social change processes is to work within these structures, their rules and roles, thus keeping intact their traditional systems of organizing (Lerner, 1958; Lerner & Schramm, 1967; Schramm, 1964; Schramm & Lerner, 1976). The dominant body of work on social change communication, also referred to as development communication, falls within this framework of status quo efforts that are based on top-down agendas as configured by outside agencies, funding agencies, Northern states, global civil society organizations, academic partners, and campaign/program planners (see Melkote & Steeves, 2001 for a critical interrogation of the dominant paradigm). Constituting the majority of social change communication initiatives, these traditional development communication campaigns locate the locus of problem in individual behaviors, and target them through communication technologies that are disseminated in the communities. This form of social change communication is capitalist, embedded within the ideology of liberal democracy. With inherent suspicion of the people and people’s movements, liberal notions of communication for social change are driven by experts, working alongside state actors, market, and civil society (Lippmann, 1922). The construction of the people, the popular, the public as irrational, as incapable of reasoned agency, is the basis of a liberal system of representative democracy, with the roles of news, media, policymakers, and other elites in shaping, guiding, and manipulating the public opinion. The work of communication designed by experts is to manage the people and public opinion through strategic deployment of mediated communication (Lippmann, 1922).

Marxist conceptualizations of social change communication are driven by top-down understandings of dominant social configurations and the inequalities that are produced by these configurations, thus mapping out transformative opportunities for inverting these structures (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). In Marxist theory, the exploitation of labor through unpaid work is overturned through the participation of the proletariat in revolutionary processes, thus turning profit that sustains capital. Extensions of a Marxist analysis in the realm of development connect the capitalist formations of global economies to logics of imperialism, fostering the space for the articulation of dependency and world system theories that connect the question of underdevelopment to the prevailing logics of development (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). The enlightenment of the oppressed classes is then tied to the revolutionary processes of change that are directed toward shifting the ownership of capital into the hands of the proletariat.

As opposed to the top-down understandings of social change processes in the literature, participatory communication processes working on social change foreground the participatory capacity of local communities in identifying problems and developing corresponding solutions (Servaes, Jacobson, & White, 1996). Challenging the top-down framework of development, participatory social change communication processes highlight community involvement as central to social change processes (Chambers, 1983). The vast body of work on participatory rural appraisal, community-based participatory research, and participatory development programs fall within this category as they center the decision-making capacity of local communities in developing technologies and interventions that fit within the existing configurations of the status quo, mostly focusing on delivering solutions within the existing structural configurations. As we will see later in the book, participatory social change communication processes have been integral to the neoliberal framework of global organizing, shifting the onus on local communities and simultaneously minimizing state resources that are directed toward addressing the needs of the margins. Participation within this framework is a tool for extending the reach of the status quo into communities at the margins.

In contrast to the top-down conceptualization of social change as noted in the Marxist approach, the CCA foregrounds the participatory capacity of local communities to participate in processes of structural transformation, to draw attention to the inequitable structures that constitute the lived experiences at the margins, to identify cultural resources as enablers of social change, and to work through participation in bringing about changes to inequitable structures (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010). Whereas the culture-centered approach is sensitized to the structural locations of specific issues, it responds to these structural constraints through local grassroots processes of communication that are based on participatory processes of listening to community voices. Culture, as a site of meaning-making, draws on values and interpretations passed across generations, and simultaneously resisted through everyday forms of participation. The emphasis of the culture-centered approach therefore is on creating local participatory processes in bringing about transformations in inequitable structural configurations in globalization politics. As opposed to the cultural participatory processes of neoliberalism that strategically obfuscate the struggles over structures, the CCA foregrounds structures as sites of transformation through local ownership of democratic and participatory processes. In the backdrop of the inequalities that constitute communities, the CCA offers an organizing framework for challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberal organizing, bringing to the fore alternative rationalities of organizing economies and politics.

1.2 Culture in Communication for Social Change

The concept of culture in relationship to social change communication is varied (Appadurai, 2013a, 2013b), starting from its treatment as a static barrier to social change, to its absence in theories of social change communication, to its treatment as a site for new capitalist transformations amid shifting geopolitics, to the role of culture as the basis for transformative social change. Within anthropology, the originary discipline that grappled with the concept of culture, culture was largely conceptualized as a characteristic attached to group, often geographically bounded, attached to tradition. This view of culture as a characteristic of a group is expressed in cultural values, beliefs, and norms, shared by the inhabitants of the community. Rituals, practices that mark the negotiations of liminal or in-between spaces, form the descriptive tools through which cultures emerge as objects of study. Similarly, myths reflect the stories that are circulated in cultures. Take the ethnographic account in Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski (1922), considered the first ethnographic text, where magic occupies a central place in the description of economic transactions. Consider, for instance, Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, where the Azande world of beliefs is described in richness to account for magic. Magic is the ethnographic subject of the cultural accounts in the works of several anthropologists engaged in the depiction of what they term primitive cultures. From within these descriptive accounts of primitive or savage cultures emerged two lines of anthropological thought on culture. Whereas for one line of thought, cultural practices were to be interpreted from within the meaning formations in the culture, in the other line of thought, cultural practices can be evaluated by outside experts based on access to objective standards of knowledge and reason.

The earliest concepts of culture in the ambits of social change communication appear in the Cold War climate, with culture being located elsewhere, as a marker of primitive or traditional societies in need for modernization programs of development (see, for instance, Daniel Lerner (1958), writing about modernization in The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East). Development, treated as equivalent to modernization, is set in opposition to culture as tradition. Traditional culture in this example reflects the overarching ideology of Cold War social science that saw culture as a characteristic of the other to be conquered through technologies of development that offered modernization. The notion of culture as the primitive other is evident in Weber’s (2013) account of culture as the site of magic, differentiating between magic and religion (referring to the protestant ethic as the basis of capitalism). Drawing on this distinction then, Weber offers an account of the Protestant ethic as the basis of capitalism, creating a framework for modernization theory that works on a trajectory of change from primitive forms of culture to modernization. Note here, and this is a key thread that forms the site of critical interrogation throughout the book, the juxtaposition of capitalism and modernization. Capitalism is modernization, and modernization is capitalism. The inevitable trajectory of modernization therefore is into capitalism. Communication for social change emerged from within this paradigm to offer a prescriptive pathway for social change through the introduction of new communication technologies and strategic communication messages, ultimately leading to the establishment of the capitalist order.

This colonial structure driving the framework of social change communication derives from the larger colonial agenda of the study of culture. The theorization of culture is deeply rooted in the colonial enterprise. Anthropologists as information gatherers on culture were integral to the reproduction of the Empire. Employed by the imperial security apparatus, anthropologists gathered patterns of data on biological patterns, terrains, shared values, rituals, and practices to enable strategies of colonization. An analysis conducted by Michael Lewis (2002) of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey, a study conducted by the Office of Security Strategic Services (OSS) alumnus and Smithsonian director, the ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley, showed that the program, presented as study of migratory bird patterns, was integral to a biological weapons program. Directed by the Army’s Biological Warfare Center, the program studies the biological pathogens carried by migrating birds precisely as an instrument for mapping the potential pathways for developing strategic biological warfare strategies. Consider the cross-cultural anthropological seminar at Columbia University launched by Ruth Benedict in 1946 to study enemy cultures under the umbrella of the Office of War Information. Benedict secured $100,000 from the Office of Naval Research under the umbrella of Columbia University’s Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) project to map cultural spaces in Communist and pro-Communist societies. Anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo were recruited into the program to study the cultural features of pro-Communist societies. Later extended into funding from the RAND Corporation, RCC research was deeply embedded in the intelligence apparatus of the Empire.

The linkage between early fathers of communication, US propaganda, and anthropologists is reflected in the Center for International Studies (CENIS) International Communication Planning Committee, the Ford Foundation’s internal grant program. CENIS housed or funded Cold War propagandists Harold Laswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Shils, Ithiel de Sola Pool, as well as noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz. CENIS researchers studying propaganda, information processing, persuasion, were single-handedly interested in the role of communication as a tool in the Cold War. They provided the research and technical support to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-organized anti-Communist coup in Guatemala, doing the intellectual work for the production of reference materials, reports, and documentaries. The Cold War social scientists Max Milikan and W. W. Rostow were integral to rooting the development framework into anti-Communist activities and US anti-insurgency program. Development communication, and its later version of communication for social change, is firmly rooted in the intelligence-military apparatus of the US Empire. Salient here is the interchanging relationship between the Ford Foundation and the CIA in funding anti-Communist projects, formulated into development communication.

The Modjokuto project at CENIS was one such intelligence-military program that employed economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map Indonesian villages, on one hand to develop strategies of counter-insurgency and on the other hand to map the development trajectory of the villages in the context of the US-imposed model of capitalism and markets (Price, 2016). Note the backdrop of the project amid the geostrategic interventions planned by the US military-intelligence-industrial complex targeting one of the largest grassroots-based Communist Parties in Asia, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI. The monograph published by Geertz, Agricultural Involution, offered a template of transformation of traditional village society through the penetration of the market and the capitalist framework. The depiction of culture is constructed within the overarching framework of modernization as a capitalist project, specifically anchored in the promotion of the US Empire. The thick description of the Balinese cockfight is the backdrop of an imperial project of US involvement in dismantling a democratically elected government, supporting a genocide that resulted in massacres of Indonesians suspected to belong to the Indonesian Communist Party, and in setting up new markets for expansion of US capital. Culture therefore has been a key companion to the social change communication project in propping up the US-driven model of capitalism as modernization.

The backlash against the treatment of culture as a tool of colonial management emerged amid the non-aligned movement, as newly independent nation states sought to challenge the Cold War ideology. This radical turn to culture emerged amid the articulation of communicative rights made in the context of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). This turn toward communicative rights, however, threatened the US capitalist interests in the media and communication industries, resulting in an active imperial campaign of delegitimizing the cultural turn in the arena of communicative rights. UNESCO adapted to these challenges by gradually navigating toward culture in development, which erased culture from its radical roots and reframed it instead in the logics of the emerging neoliberal hegemony. As the concept of culture evolved amid the turn to multiculturalism as an instrument of disseminating neoliberal policies, it was no longer looked at as a barrier, but rather turned into a resource that can generate economic and development benefits (see, for instance, Yúdice, 2003). Cultural knowledge and cultural industries are treated as resources that can generate economic value. The incorporation of culture into development under the umbrella of the United Nations formed the basis of cultural development policies that specifically placed emphasis on the economic value of culture (McGuigan, 2005). Formulated as an economic resource, culture can now be measured, evaluated, commoditized, and introduced into capitalist circuits of profiteering.

1.2.1 Culture as Static

The conceptualization of culture as a bounded system, with shared values, beliefs, and practices, forms much of the basis of the early theorizing of culture in communication (Lerner, 1958). Culture is located elsewhere, placed in traditional societies that are targets of modernization interventions. The depiction of static culture serves the bedrock for the social change communication intervention, with the work of communication directed at changing the culture under the universal scripts of modernization. The concept of culture emerges from the lens of the White academic located in the West studying the culture, needing to create boundaries around it, so it can be managed and controlled. Inherent in the conceptualization of culture is cultural management, deploying techniques for measuring aspects of the culture, quantifying these aspects/elements, and then incorporating them into techniques of management (Bauman, 2013). This role of cultural knowledge as the basis of colonial management forms the knowledge infrastructure of the Empire, with White anthropologists deployed, employed, and sustained by the colonial structure as tools for gathering cultural knowledge. The role of culture in colonial management forms the basis of the emergence of Cold War anthropology, with anthropologists deployed across the global South as intelligence gatherers, as instruments of the US security state.

1.2.2 Culture as Fluid

The concept of culture as static is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the concept of culture as fluid. Culture as fluid is dynamic, seen as changing, and constructed through communication. The role of communication as constitutive of culture and as constituted by culture attends to the ongoing interplay between culture and communication. Culture is seen as everyday meanings, everyday practices, and stories circulated by members. Situated within contexts, culture is expressed through the participation and negotiation of members in everyday life. An ethnographic approach to culture depicts culture through thick descriptions, in-depth and richly detailed accounts of everyday lives and accounts. Similar to the concept of culture as static, ethnographic accounts of culture have often been incorporated into neocolonial management techniques, with anthropologists often working within the Cold War ideology. The concept of culture as fluid also, however, offers an opening for working with the notion of culture as the site of structural transformation.

1.2.3 Culture as Closed

The treatment of culture as a closed system sees culture in terms of boundaries that define culture. Often conceptualized in terms of a community, culture is anchored in a geographically defined space. The study of culture then looks for shared values, shared meanings, and shared practices that are bounded within a space. Techniques of cultural measurement draw out specific characteristics of culture as a closed system to describe the culture and to incorporate it into processes of management. For instance, quantitative studies on cultural characteristics depict cultures and assign them scores on the basis of specific characteristics. A wide array of development projects are created around the concept of measuring culture and working with cultural categories.

1.2.4 Culture as Open

The depiction of culture as open attends to the ways in which cultures interact with each other, transforming themselves through these interactions. The emphasis here is on the spaces of exchanges and flows between cultures. The communicative process creates opportunities of transformations, working through the interactions that take place between cultures. Concepts such as hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and mimicking are some examples that draw on the notion of cultural flows, built on the concept of culture as open. Reading culture as open serves as the basis for conceptualizing hybrid modernities, where specific forms of modernization are explained in cultural terms. In such accounts, modernization is taken as the capitalist formation of development built on technology and anchored in reason. Cultural depictions of modernization therefore offer accounts of the development of capitalism in societies that departed from the liberal model of capitalist growth based on the marriage of democracy and capitalism.

1.2.5 Culture and Structures

In these various treatments of culture, the concept of culture is situated in relationship to structures, although structures remain mostly absent in discussion of culture in communication for social change (Dutta, 2010). Throughout the book, we will be engaging with structures, the forms of organizing and distributing resources, emergent in the rules, roles, and formations that constitute communication for social change. Structures are foregrounded in the analysis offered in the book, connected to the conceptualization of culture and to the formation of communication for social change. Noting that how we develop communication for social change has historically been situated amid dominant structures, constituted in the realm of power, we will explore the ways in which social change emerges as a transformative site for disrupting structures (Gunvald Nilsen, 2009). In disrupting structures, the very concepts of communication and social change need to be interrogated. That the concept of structural transformation points toward a role of communication anchored in socialist commitments becomes the basis for theorizing the various approaches to communication and explicitly making room for socialist articulations in communication for social change (Ware, 2019). The hegemony of the capitalist paradigm in communication for social change