Framing Practitioner Communities

Government practitioners and civil society partners in durable communities of practice are a more productive lens for investigating US public diplomacy than transitory government organizations. Foreign Service officers, cultural diplomats, international broadcasters, soldiers, citizen front groups, democratizers, and presidential aides, communities of practice with distinct norms, tools, and methods, emerged during the twentieth century. The chapter begins with Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, intellectuals whose ideas on public opinion in the 1920s revolutionized communication theory and media studies. They developed cognitive frames that help explain public diplomacy’s informational and relational methods. It then discusses two dynamics that shape the modus operandi of practitioner communities. Actor-centric characteristics: (1) instrumental communication, (2) perspectives on elite and mass publics, (3) short- and long-term time dimensions, (4) norms and methods imported from civil society, and (5) lagging adoption of technologies. Systemic characteristics: (1) restrictions on domestic dissemination, (2) shallow institutional roots, (3) influential scholarship, and (4) American exceptionalism.