Defeated profession, illegitimate discipline: it is time to understand the journalistic field´s institutionalization

Abstract

The difficulties of theoretical development in Journalism in the specific academic field (considered as the Journalism discipline, as well as the communication discipline), and the problems that they cause both in the professional and the academic fields ́ legitimizations, lead to the necessity for an investigation of its sources in the institutionalization of the field. Identifying that the dichotomy-based explanations are not enough to enlighten the issue, nor are the earlier investigations made by me, this paper has the objective of increasing the knowledge about the history of Journalism in the academic field, from the perspective of the sociology of Knowledge. This study analyzes data about the social and cognitive institutionalization of the field, its relation to Journalism and the university’s development, within the major contexts of society and culture.  The hypothesis is that the identification and the description of the frames  socially constructed in the institutionalization of the field can help to understand the epistemological difficulties observed in this development.