About Communicology

Communicology – as defined by Jorunn Sjøbakken and Truls Fleiner – is a meta-discipline; a field of knowledge that studies, compares and classifies knowledge from other disciplines.

Definition

• The study of the structure and dynamics of communication and change; when all experience and all behavior is defined, described and understood as communication
• The study of common key factors in change work

Literally translated, Communicology means the study of what is common.

Knowledge base and development

During the developmental process Sjøbakken and Fleiner have worked with systematizing specialist knowledge within and across different behavioral and social scientific disciplines with special focus on:
– communication and change processes
– studies of human interaction
– systemic frame of understanding

A systematization and classification of knowledge by:

• comparative studies of:
  • methods, models, theories, research etc. within and across disciplines
  • practitioners with different levels of skills
  • professional experiences from work in multidisciplinary teams
• conceptual analysis of terms and concepts
• discovering multiple description within and across several disciplines
• identification of recurrent descriptions – in many different terms – of basically the same essential phenomena and fundamental processes in various disciplines
  – conclusion: presupposing “key” factors in communication and change processes
• classification of terms and concepts into categories 
• selecting collective concepts/names for each category

The collective concepts/metanyms:

• are few in numbers 
• have a huge knowledgebase
• have wide application range
  – at any system level – individual, relationship, group, organization, society, cultures
  – in any fields of knowledge and branches