Dialogical self
Inspired by the original ideas of William James and Mikhail Bakhtin, Hubert Hermans, Harry Kempen and Rens van Loon wrote the first psychological publication on the "dialogical self" in which they conceptualized the self in terms of a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous "I"-positions in the (extended) landscape of the mind. In this conception, the "I" has the possibility to move from one spatial position to another in accordance with changes in situation and time. The "I" fluctuates among different and even opposed positions, and has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established. The voices function like interacting characters in a story, involved in processes of question and answer, agreement and disagreement. Each of them have a story to tell about their own experiences from their own stance. As different voices, these characters exchange information about their respective Me's and mines, resulting in a complex, narratively structured self.
Communication Theory as a Field
Russill did not write his dissertation with the goal of constructing a tradition of communication theory, rather he was attempting to "resuscitate and reconstruct Dewey's theory of the public as a pragmatist theory of democratic communication." To accomplish this goal Russill places Dewey in conversation with a variety of theorists including William James, John Locke, James Carey, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Walter Lippmann among others. Russill makes the argument that the pragmatist tradition "conceptualizes communication in response to the problem of incommensurability." Incommensurability being how a pluralistic society can engage in cooperation when there is an absence "of common, absolute standards for resolving differences." Russill briefly attempted to construct a pragmatist tradition of communication only to establish Dewey's theory of the public within that tradition. To do this he outlines pragmatism as a tradition that identifies the problem formulation as "incommensurability", and the vocabulary as "democracy, publics, power, criticism, response-ability, triple contingency."