THE SETUP OF COMMUNICATION AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE IN ROMANIA

This paper aims to shed a light on the importance of looking on the epistemological and methodological grounds of communication as a discipline in Romania in order to be able to discuss about the professionalization of the domain. We start from the widely acknowledged idea that communication is a new and emerging field, drawing its concepts, theories, and methods from diverse other fields and domains. In Romania, as well as in other former communist countries, after 1990 the changes in the political and economic situation created the premises to establish university programs in communication and to create jobs for people working in communication. All these were possible with the help of “imports” from the Western world, imports that transferred not only concepts and theories, but also the epistemological dispute and weakness of the field. This paper explores the development and the current state of communication as an academic discipline in Romania. Through an analysis of the social documents available on the University program’s website, we seek to understand the theoretical roots of the discipline of communication, as well as its current development.

participants have a degree in communication (Beurer-Zuelling, Fieseler & Meckel, 2009). The third gap identified in the existent literature is the role that professional associations in communication have in Eastern Europe. As shown in the European Communicator Monitor (2009Monitor ( -2016, there is an increasing importance of professional associations in communication. The mere fact that a question about being a member of a professional association is included in this large-scale survey offers a valuable insight as to where (symbolic) professional recognition may lay. For the Romanian case, we must keep in mind that professional associations in communication (e.g. ARRP, CCRP) had to face challenges specific to a post-communist society like trying to develop a proper NGO sector and avoiding to be associated with the "dusty" reputation of unions. The fourth gap refers to a practical question: in Romania, tracing the careers of university graduates is left to the appreciation of each university or faculty. Therefore, every institution keeps its own records; data are seldom exploitable beyond bureaucratic objectives. Universities lack tools for tracking the short and mid-term evolution of any field, communication included, by looking into the career paths and employment patterns of graduates. To this, it is worth mentioning that after the fall of the communism, in Romania, some other challenges occurred. For example, in the early '90s, few scholars in Romania could read in English, as this language was less taught in school during the communist regime. The first scholars teaching communication grounded their teaching in other epistemologies, like philosophy, humanities, and sociology. Secondly, when the first job positions in communication became available in Romania, people with no previous experience or academic background in communication were hired. These issues are persisting today, as many job adverts in communication require a university degree, but not explicitly a degree in communication, especially for mid-senior and senior level, as might be proved by a quick visit on any popular job finder website in Romania. This paper is the result of the first phase study of a research project aiming to analyze the way communication as a field is established in Romania, by exploring its epistemological grounds, the research methodologies and the overall development of communication as a discipline in Romania. In doing so, we put under scrutiny the professionalization of the field of communication in Romania, by considering in Craig's terms (1999) that a clear theoretical ground and a paradigmatic consensus would lead to a deeper understanding of the identity of the communication field. Thus, solid communication study programs, together with a profound inquiry of the way communication is being perceived will lead to the further development of the field and to its professionalization. For professionals in social sciences it is useful to scrutinize their own domain, from time to time, and to question their role in society and as far as we know, there is a lack of scientific studies approaching the way in which communication as a field is structured in Romania. The originality of our research lies precisely in the effort to assess the perceptions and routes in the communication field, not only from an epistemological point of view, but also from a perspective that will bridge academia with labor market. The main objective taken by this paper is the assessment of the Romanian study programs in communication and the content, both in terms of numbers (how many programs are available at a national level; what the existing degree levels are; how many students attend the programs) and content (what disciplines are included in the curricula; what thesis subjects are defended). We aim to inquire the epistemological perspectives of the said institution's study program in communication through an analysis of their approach of communication-related disciplines.

Communication studies and institutional affiliation
It is not a new thing to say that communication, as so many other recent additions to university curricula, has emerged as an academic discipline roughly 30 years ago. Without dwelling upon the economic and social changes shaped Romanian universities since then, when looking at the timeline of the institutionalization of communication studies one may easily observe that although the first steps took place at the beginning of the 1990's, it is only ten years later when communication studies became an established field from an administrative viewpoint. Drawing from our data we see that many BA programs in communication are missing from the timeline below, especially when it comes to smaller university centers. In a broader perspective this makes sense: as we shall see further down our study. The cultivation of an institutional memory seems to be the hallmark of universities from larger cities. Since communication studies were established within pre-existing academic structures, it follows that, at least in its beginning, the domain wasfrom an administrative and institutional viewpointclose to other academic disciplines and molded into institutional forms that could fit the administrative requirement of the day. The current situation of faculties and departments proposing BA study programs in communication sciences is a reflection of those beginning as well as the consequence of institutional development and demographic changes in the area.

Figure 1: An overview of academic disciplines related to communication studies from an institutional viewpoint
As it shows in the chart above, there are three major academic domains within which communication sciences were adopted as BA discipline: social sciences (usually in close association with political sciences but not exclusively), journalism and philology. Usually, large university centers have more than one structure proposing a BA in communication sciences (as it is the case in Bucharest and Iasi), meanwhile smaller university centers usually have just one such structure. The chart relies on the current institutional situation and on the information provided on their websites by faculties and departments proposing studies in communication in three major university centers (Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi) and in three smaller university centers (Bacau, Sibiu, Craiova). However, although the journalism and media studies seems to have an upper hand on the overall development of the communication in academia, available data points toward a shift within their formal training: the teaching staff that holds a BA in journalism (communication sciences) chose (or was forced to choose, due to the lack of available options) to continue the PhD studies in another domain, usually sociology or philology.

Values and relevance
A characteristic shared by all the university structures proposing BA study programs in communication that we explored within this article is the emphasis on the outcomes derived from this choice. Usually those outcomes are organized around two main topics: the competences acquired by graduates and their career options presented mainly through the form of enumerating jobs that require (according to the regulation) formal academic training in communication. There is little variation or creativity in this section of the website: the job denominations are those form the list provided by the national occupational qualifications index, although the workforce market, especially within the private sector, provides a larger array of job titles. Sometimes the solution of mentioning a larger activity domain is preferred to providing a list of possible future jobs: "our graduates (…) are working nowadays within editorial teams of numerous national and local publications, of various TV and radio broadcast companies, within publishing houses or departments of communication and public relations" (University of Sibiu). The second common characteristic is to express the many ways in which the university and the staff is up to date with everything that may be correlated with modernity: a in association with political and administrative studies 4 in association with journalism studies 1 in association with philology 3 7 universities 8 faculties communication studies modern teaching approach and the opportunity to be involved in internships (with the most thought after employers) are values communicating by all the departments, in a variety of styles: • The systemic study of communication is an imperative, as the proliferation of communication media has transformed the world where we live in a complex universe, deeply inter-connected (Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Iasi, 2019). • Graduates of this specialization, extremely thought after on the workforce market, will be able to find a job in research institutions within the domain, PR and advertising agencies, departments of public communication within the central and local administration or within the corporate or NGO sector (Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, 2019).

Humans of … communication studies
An academic discipline is obviously built not only around sharing and developing new ideas or testing new theories, but also around the people involved in this process. By looking into the academic path of the staff involved in teaching communication studies within seven university structures across the country, our aim was to bring into attention some characteristics related to age and academic formation of people shaping the actual communication domain within academia, that may contribute to a broader understanding of the current development of this domain. Further research will enlarge the database used and will also look into more characteristics than age and academic training (BA and PhD). As shown in the table below, we perused a total number of 107 CVs and self presentations and as far as the age goes, our conclusions are only informed by 90 cases. The results are a mix between the state of communication as a "young" discipline in Romania and the current state of economic conditions related to jobs within academia. Therefore, the fact that only 2 persons out of 90 are under the age of 30 years old might be a consequence of the requirements that a young researcher must fulfill in order to land a fulltime job in academia (PhD degree) rather than anything else. The number of persons aged over 50 years old (24) is lower than any other age group and one may consider a correlation with the relatively "young age" of communication within universities.
Looking into the academic training of the staff that teaches and (and researches) within the communication domain, several characteristics are recurrent and we will present them without further elaboration, as we need more data in order to investigate eventual correlations or even causation. The teaching staff, both from small universities and from larger ones tends to be the "product" of that same university, even of the same faculty. Smaller university centers tend to recruit their staff from their own graduates (BA level) meanwhile for PhD studies they are gravitating around a larger university center from the area (this is the case of Bacau University and Iasi University as well as for Sibiu University and the University of Cluj). Only 3 out of 90 persons included in the current study hold a PhD degree emanating from a university outside Romania, and none of them are within the field of communication studies, although many of the teaching staff had the opportunity to study abroad more than one month, usually during their PhD studies or post-doctoral studies, either in Europe or in USA (Fullbright). The graphic below depicts the current situation of BA degrees and PhD degrees held by the staff employed within the faculties and departments of communication. Most of the staff involved in teaching communication disciplines were formally trained in philosophy, philology and sociology (across all the age groups) and communication studies (only for the younger generation). The category labeled as "other" includes study fields such as geography, theology, physics, engineering, economics and law: either for BA degrees or PhD degrees in those categories there were only one or two persons holding those specific degrees. Philosophy, philology and sociology have shaped the field of communication in its beginnings as an academic domain; nowadays, those three domains alongside communication studies are shaping the field of communication through their researches in terms of topics and methods.

Conclusions
Although based on preliminary findings, our study shows some very interesting results regarding the roots and the current development of academic programs in communication. First, data shows that the in Romania communication is not only following the multi-and interdisciplinary features of the domain, but also has been developed under other major academic domains. Thus, from the early beginning, Universities in Romania put communication in direct linkage with already known academic domains: social sciences (e.g. political sciences), philology and journalism. Second, the emergence of communication studies as an academic field is already producing consequences at the very level of the academic institutionalization of this new study domain: the younger generation of communication scholars is overwhelmingly trained within the very field they are shaping. Third, the dynamics of small and larger university centers seems to indicate the consolidation of several "centers of influence" in terms of scholarly approaches of communication: however, those centers are not limited to the "traditional" larger universities (in Bucharest, Cluj, and Iasi) as small university centers are developing alternative routes towards the consolidation of their status as competitive higher education institutions.