| Chapter 1: | Introduction and Underlying Assumptions |
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Fish (1980, 2001) addressed this objection and counters it with the notion of interpretive communities. Interpretive communities, he stated, are composed of people who share a set of interpretive strategies. These interpretive strategies emerge from shared assumptions, a common language, a collective body of knowledge, and so forth. People who belong to the same interpretive community tend to interpret texts in similar ways and to create similar meanings. This way, generalization becomes possible, but one should be cautious generalizing beyond the boundaries of an interpretive community. An interpretive community, engrossed in its own worldview, might not accept or even see the meaning taken for granted in another community.
Fish’s concept of interpretive communities is consistent with the social constructionist epistemology in communication theory, which claims that meanings are culturally constructed, and therefore local, and warns against broad generalizations. The concept of interpretive communities (Fish, 1980, 2001) is not foreign to public relations either, where it finds a close correspondent in the notion of publics. An organization’s public shares a set of assumptions, interpretations and values (Botan & Soto, 1998), interests (Dewey, 1927), cognitions and behaviors (J. E. Grunig & Hunt, 1984) which place its members in the same interpretive community (Vasquez, 1993) or zone of meaning (Heath, 1993). Publics interact with and interpret organizational discourse, not literary texts, but the same dynamics of an interpretive community constructing meaning from a text apply. Thus, reader-response theory and public relations share important basic assumptions that make it possible to approach public relations Web sites from an experience-centered perspective. The experience-centered perspective focuses on the public’s experience and interpretation of Web sites. The next section discusses the implications of adopting this perspective.