Comparative History of Communication Studies: France and Germany

The aim is to outline general differences in two academic cultures, considering historic perspectives: German ‘Kommunikationswissenschaft’ with its roots in ‘Publizistik-’ and ‘Zeitungswissenschaft’ and French ‘Sciences de l’information et de la communication’ with its roots in semiotics and cultural views on communication. There are different internal and external (societal and political) means which influenced the development of communication studies and theories in each of the two countries. The Sciences de l’information et de la communication (SIC) gained their academic acceptance in France in 1975 which under international comparison was late. One strong external moment of the instutionalization of SIC was the political aim to modernize the French University for the so called ‘information society’. The French researchers developed their own focus. Semio-pragmatics and social constructivism are two basic theoretical orientations which, after the end of the limiting structuralistic paradigm of the 1960, lead to a fruitful connection of the analysis of the micro and the meso-level of communication processes. Thus, Pragmatics and Symbolic Interactionism played an important role in French SIC much earlier than in Germany.