A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a "humanities" or a "social science", a "practice" or a "technology", and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This article explores some of the frames that have been borrowed and built to guide theorization of and research on communication practices. It then examines briefly the efforts to institutionalize communication studies academically, professionally, and economically as an American case-study of the rhetoric of inquiry: the ways in which the knowledge industries form species, divide the intellectual universe, and defend knowledge claims. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)