Feature Articles

An Interview with Michael Haley
by Sarah Buck, Continuations Bibliographer

Michael Haley is the Executive Director of the ICA (International Communication Association). Recently The ICA partnered with Blackwell's to create the Blackwell Encyclopedia of International Communication.

Can you say a little about the ICA?
We're an organization of individual academic scholars whose primary focus is research. There are other communication associations whose members are more focused on the applied side: how to teach, for example, speech and communication. But our members are researchers; they focus on all aspects of human communication. Basically how a message gets from one person to another. Whether it's through language or culture, we look at it.

Right now we have about 4500 members or so in 79 different countries, so the research is looked at from many, many cultural aspects. Conferences are quite exciting because you get to deal with lots of different cultural perspectives and languages and it's kind of fun. I like working with these guys.

Can you tell about your role in the ICA?
I'm the executive director. I'm the person who takes the mission and the vision of the board and the direction of the board and makes sure that it all gets implemented. I manage all of the staff in the central office. I manage all the contracts whether they are related to publishing, rental, employment, whatever. I am the person who's supposed to make the organization tick.

The ICA has collaborated with Blackwell's on the Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication. Can you talk about the collaboration experience?
Actually it's been a very positive one. One of my roles is to always be looking for ways that will provide outlets for research that the members do. How can people find out about what they do?

We recently (2 yrs ago) changed publishers to Blackwell. We did that primarily because Blackwell's has a high level entrepreneurial outlook. They're willing to take at look at projects that have a bit of risk, but in the end could serve academic populations very well. Academic presses such as Cambridge, Oxford, those kinds of places, they tend to be by nature a little more conservative, and they do very, very good jobs, but they just didn't match where we wanted to go as an organization.

And Blackwell did. And since we joined with Blackwell I've been brainstorming with them about numerous projects we could do that would help the world understand a little bit more about a) the communication discipline, and b) give more opportunities for our members to get their research out there so that it could be used by government, policy bodies, or by other people just interested in how people communicate.

The Encyclopedia was one of those projects they agreed to take a look at. The ICA had done something very similar 20 years ago, but the whole scholar/academic world has gotten much more international, so we felt that it was time to re-do that whole project, and Blackwell was willing to tackle it and work with me on establishing a good, strong editorial board. And we're off and running, and almost to the finish line on that project.

Do you foresee supplements to the encyclopedia being published?
This is a rather comprehensive encyclopedia, rather than a really state-of-the-art kind of thing. There may be updates. An emerging new field that is covered in this one but clearly would not have been in the last one is the whole study of game theory, and how that's affecting people in the way they communicate. Well, as more of those kinds of fields emerge, I would expect an update. I don't think given the way things are developing today you can say "well in 2 years we're going to do another." I think when the volume and the field has changed enough, then an update would then be warranted, and that can be 2 years, that can be 3. It will be driven by the field rather than an artificial deadline for an update.

Would updates be available in print or online?
Primarily online. The current edition is going to be available in either form. But most libraries who are going to be the prime subscribers for this really are out of bookshelves. Something like a 12-volume tome is just not something [libraries] have a lot of room for, and … people don't go to the library to search out an article. They want to be able to do online research, scan basic things for keywords, that sort of thing. You just can't do that in person. I would anticipate, frankly, that most all publishing from an academic point of view is headed toward online, for practical reasons as well as efficiency.

Did you find that working with Blackwell's gave you greater editorial control over its content?
Absolutely. We were able to pick who the prime editor and who the area editors were going to be. And then they, in turn, approached the people who actually write the pieces for the encyclopedia. Blackwell worked with us in that whole process, but we were able to select all the key people. Some publishers just have more control in that. Again, the whole Blackwell relationship fit their style to ours.

Any more books coming from the ICA?
We have a book series with Blackwell's and we also have a Handbook series that we are doing with another publisher. I'm always looking for new projects and I've begun developments with another publisher a project on how to take all of our theme sessions at an annual conference that are all highly related on a particular topic, and create an annual volume of whatever is covered in that conference in a given year. Again, this is a way to get more research out there and make a number of projects available. So I'm always looking. Got things up my sleeve . . .

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMMUNICATION

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