Symbolic convergence theory (SCT), a general communication theory, explains the emergence of a common symbolic consciousness – one that contains shared meanings, emotions, values, and motives for human action – among participants in a small group, organization, or other rhetorical community. SCT, as developed by Ernest Bormann, John Cragan, and Donald Shields, among others, is a messagecentered theory grounded through the observation of symbolic facts in communication. Observers noted the sharing of dramatized messages, called fantasy themes, within smallgroup communication, in mediated communication, and among the communicating memberships of organizations and other large publics. Within each context, researchers found that people shared, reiterated, and wove fantasy themes to form a larger, more complex view of reality called a rhetorical vision (e.g., the Cold War, global warming, or neo-conservatism). A rhetorical vision contains many fantasy themes that depict heroes and villains in dramatic action within a scene. Within a group such a vision establishes identity, cohesion, and culture.
People create and reproduce fantasy themes in conversations – the hallmark of human communication. Fantasy themes often ignite, catch up others, and chain out from person to person within a group or community. People share rhetorical fantasies to account for human experience, repeat them, embellish them, and accept them as their view of reality. The rhetorical principles of novelty, critical mass, and channel access advance symbolic convergence. Symbolic cues, fantasy types, and sagas are specialized fantasy themes. A symbolic cue is a shorthand, rhetorical indicant that stands for a fantasy theme (such as a group’s inside joke of “U$A” for materialist America). A fantasy type is a stock scenario that explains new events in a well-known dramatic form, such as Watergate becoming Iran-gate or Whitewater-gate for groups of news reporters explaining new instances of governmental corruption and cover-up. Similarly the initial “perfect storm” material fact, made famous in the book and film of the same name, now denotes new symbolic facts in which a complex series of unlikely events come together to cause economic disruption, political upheaval, educational turmoil, etc. A saga is the repeated telling of the achievements in the life of a person, group, community, organization, or nation, such as, in the USA, the genesis saga of the first “Thanksgiving.”
SCT’s message-structure concepts include a rhetorical vision’s dramatis personae, scene elements, plotline depictions, and sanctioning agent(s). Rhetorical visions reflect a life cycle containing stages in which consciousness is created (birth), is raised (critical mass), is sustained (repetition, reconfiguration, and embellishment to maintain commitment), declines (loss of interest or links to reality), and reaches a terminus (implosion). Rhetorical visions exist along pure-to-mixed, inflexible-to-flexible, intense-to-passive, secretive-toproselytizing, and paranoid-to-healthy continua. Other concepts flesh out the message structure of a rhetorical vision. The dramatis personae are fantasy theme depictions of the characters in the vision. Scene is found by looking for fantasy themes that detail the symbolic location of the action portrayed in the vision (such as “a smoke-filled room”). Plotline is to be found in those fantasy themes that portray the action of the vision, such as “restoration” or a “new day.” The sanctioning agent (e.g., “God,” “the Constitution,” or a “code of ethics”) is specified in those rhetorical fantasies that legitimize the vision’s symbolic reality. SCT’s dynamic concepts are the warring righteous, social, and pragmatic master analogs undergirding rhetorical visions. Righteous visions depict the correct or moral way of doing things, social visions portray a humane or compassionate way, and pragmatic visions present an efficient or cost-effective way. The communicator structure concepts are fantasizers, who co-join in dramatizing; a rhetorical community or group made up of the adherents to a rhetorical vision; communication style, or the broad language use of a rhetorical group or community; and propensity to fantasize, or the ease with which people use dramatized messages. The media that help propagate symbolic convergence are the small-group and public interaction processes that promote fantasychaining (repetition, embellishment, reiteration) and thus convergence and acceptance of the dramatized message.
SCT posits three evaluative concepts. Fantasy theme artistry prompts one to judge the rhetorical novelty, consistency, and creativity of fantasy themes, symbolic cues, fantasy types, and sagas. Shared group consciousness reminds those using SCT to check for the occurrence of convergence by identifying fantasy themes that are created, told, embellished, reconfigured, and reiterated by the members of a rhetorical group. Fantasy theme–reality links tie rhetorical visions and rhetorical fantasies to the objective reality of the authentic record and material facts. Such links remind those using SCT to assess the sensemaking capacity of fantasy themes and rhetorical visions present in group or public communication.
SCT’s attendant qualitative method is called fantasy theme analysis (FTA). The fantasy theme is the basic analytical unit when conducting an FTA. The fantasies one is searching for are rhetorical in nature (in the words) as opposed to psychoanalytic (in the subconscious) or psychological (in daydreams). One knows a rhetorical fantasy by its qualities, whether substantive (actual content of a theme, type, cue, or saga), structural (a rhetorical vision’s dramatis personae, plotline, scene, sanctioning agent) or stylistic (the linguistic dress of a fantasy theme, such as an animated, boisterous, chaining fantasy in small-group communication or an embellished, repeated, or reconfigured fantasy in public communication).
References:
- Ball, M. A. (2001). Ernest G. Bormann: Roots, revelations, and results of symbolic convergence theory. In J. A. Kuypers & A. King (eds.), Twentieth-century roots of rhetorical studies. Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 211–234.
- Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1994). In defense of symbolic convergence theory: A look at the theory and its criticisms after two decades. Communication Theory, 4, 259–294.
- Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1996). An expansion of the rhetorical vision concept of symbolic convergence theory: The Cold War paradigm case. Communication Monographs, 63, 1–28.
- Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (2001). Three decades of developing, grounding, and using symbolic convergence theory. In W. B. Gudykunst (ed.), Communication yearbook 25. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 271–313.
- Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1995). Symbolic theories in applied communication research: Bormann, Burke, and Fisher. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
- Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1998). Understanding communication theory. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.