The Concise Encyclopedia of Communication

Acknowledgments

The editor of an academic reference work certainly needs a profound overview, more a generalist than a specialist perspective on the field, and I can only hope that my talents sufficed for this. But, at least as much, the editor needs managerial skills, because such a work is anything but a one-man show. As I have indicated in the Introduction, this book is the joint product of the whole scientific community of communication – and in this definition I explicitly include people whose job is not to do research themselves but who have, in very different functions, contributed to the content.

My first thanks go to the more than 500 authors who have already contributed to the International Encyclopedia of Communication (IEC), the great majority of whom volunteered to abridge and update their entries for this concise edition (CEC). We all know that contributing to reference works is not the prime publishing task of academics today, but the majority of our authors already had such a high reputation that they could afford to let the next peer-reviewed journal article wait a while…

Almost all of the authors and the headwords of the entries they contributed were picked by the 30 area editors who already were the editorial backbone of the IEC. And I should not forget to thank the two Advisory Editors of the IEC, Jennings Bryant and Robert T. Craig, for their continuous stewardship in this whole project of ICA–Wiley Blackwell encyclopedias.

Over the ten years that we have ...