Communications Research Since Lazarsfeld
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The Revival of Economic Sociology
Chapter 1 The Revival of Economic Sociology MAURO F. G UILLEN´ , RANDALL COLLINS, PAULA ENGLAND, AND MARSHALL MEYER conomic sociology is staging a comeback after decades of rela- tive obscurity. Many of the issues explored by scholars today E mirror the original concerns of the discipline: sociology emerged in the first place as a science geared toward providing an institutionally informed and culturally rich understanding of eco- nomic life. Confronted with the profound social transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the founders of so- ciological thought—Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel—explored the relationship between the economy and the larger society (Swedberg and Granovetter 1992). They examined the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services through the lenses of domination and power, solidarity and inequal- ity, structure and agency, and ideology and culture. The classics thus planted the seeds for the systematic study of social classes, gender, race, complex organizations, work and occupations, economic devel- opment, and culture as part of a unified sociological approach to eco- nomic life. Subsequent theoretical developments led scholars away from this originally unified approach. In the 1930s, Talcott Parsons rein- terpreted the classical heritage of economic sociology, clearly distin- guishing between economics (focused on the means of economic ac- tion, or what he called “the adaptive subsystem”) and sociology (focused on the value orientations underpinning economic action). Thus, sociologists were theoretically discouraged from participating 1 2 The New Economic Sociology in the economics-sociology dialogue—an exchange that, in any case, was not sought by economists. It was only when Parsons’s theory was challenged by the reality of the contentious 1960s (specifically, its emphasis on value consensus and system equilibration; see Granovet- ter 1990, and Zelizer, ch. -
Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication 12-2008 Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research Jefferson Pooley Muhlenberg College Elihu Katz University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Pooley, J., & Katz, E. (2008). Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research. Journal of Communication, 58 (4), 767-786. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00413.x This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/269 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research Abstract Communication research seems to be flourishing, as vidente in the number of universities offering degrees in communication, number of students enrolled, number of journals, and so on. The field is interdisciplinary and embraces various combinations of former schools of journalism, schools of speech (Midwest for ‘‘rhetoric’’), and programs in sociology and political science. The field is linked to law, to schools of business and health, to cinema studies, and, increasingly, to humanistically oriented programs of so-called cultural studies. All this, in spite of having been prematurely pronounced dead, or bankrupt, by some of its founders. Sociologists once occupied a prominent place in the study of communication— both in pioneering departments of sociology and as founding members of the interdisciplinary teams that constituted departments and schools of communication. In the intervening years, we daresay that media research has attracted rather little attention in mainstream sociology and, as for departments of communication, a generation of scholars brought up on interdisciplinarity has lost touch with the disciplines from which their teachers were recruited. -
The Email Is Down!
Today it is hard to imagine daily communication with out email file:///Q:/TechSvcs/MOspace/MOspace%20content/School%20of%20Jo... The E-mail is Down! Using a 1940s Method to Analyze a 21 st Century Problem by Clyde H. Bentley Associate Professor Missouri School of Journalism University of Missouri and Brooke Fisher Master’s Student Missouri School of Journalism University of Missouri 181D Gannett Hall Columbia, MO 65211-1200 (573) 884-9699 [email protected] \ Presented to the Communications Technology and Policy Division AEJMC 2002 Annual Convention Miami Beach, Florida Aug. 7-10, 2000 1 of 19 2/19/2009 1:31 PM Today it is hard to imagine daily communication with out email file:///Q:/TechSvcs/MOspace/MOspace%20content/School%20of%20Jo... The E-mail is Down! Using a 1940s method to analyze a 21 st century problem Abstract When the electronic mail system at a university crashed, researchers turned to a methodology developed more than 50 years earlier to examine its impact. Using a modified version of Bernard Berelson “missing the newspaper” survey questionnaire, student researchers collected qualitative comments from 85 faculty and staff members. Like the original, the study found extensive anxiety over the loss of the information source, plus a high degree of habituation and dependence on the new medium. 2 of 19 2/19/2009 1:31 PM Today it is hard to imagine daily communication with out email file:///Q:/TechSvcs/MOspace/MOspace%20content/School%20of%20Jo... The E-mail is Down! Using a 1940s Method to Analyze a 21 st Century Problem It seldom puts lives at risk and almost always is accompanied by viable alternatives. -
PART I the Columbia School 10 Peter Simonson the Columbia and Gabriel School Weimann
Critical Research at Columbia 9 PART I The Columbia School 10 Peter Simonson The Columbia and Gabriel School Weimann Introduction That canonic texts refuse to stand still applies, a fortiori, to the classics of the Columbia “school.” The pioneering work of Paul Lazarsfeld and associates in the 1940s and 1950s gave communications research its very name and yet, at the same time, evoked devastating criticism. The Chi- cago school decried Columbia’s psychologistic and positivistic bias and denounced its pronouncement of “limited effects”; the Frankfurt school refused to accept that audience likes and dislikes had any bearing on understanding the culture industry; and British cultural studies threw darts at the idea of defining media functions by asking audiences how they “use” them. Todd Gitlin went so far as to accuse Lazarsfeld’s “domin- ant paradigm” of willfully understating the persuasive powers of the media, thereby relieving their owners and managers of the guilt they ought to feel. It is true that the Columbia school – not satisfied to infer effects from content – developed methodologies for studying audience attitudes and behavior; it is true that sample surveys were preferred to ethnographic study or other forms of qualitative analysis; it is true that many studies were commercially sponsored, even if their products were academic; and it is true that media campaigns, like it or not, have only limited effects on the opinions, attitudes, and actions of the mass audience. But it is also true that, in the meantime, some of Columbia’s harshest critics have themselves turned (perhaps too much so) to “reception” studies – that is to say, toward Columbia-like observations of the relative autonomy of audience decodings. -
Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Media Research
Personal Influence’s fifteen-page account of the development of mass communication research has had more influence on the field’s historical self-understand- ing than anything published before or since. According to Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld’s well-written, two- stage narrative, a loose and undisciplined body of pre- war thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which showed time and again that media impact is in fact limited. This “powerful-to- limited-effects” storyline remains textbook boilerplate Fifteen Pages and literature review dogma fifty years later. This article traces the emergence of the Personal Influence synop- That Shook the sis, with special attention to (1) Lazarsfeld’s audience- dependent framing of key media research findings and (2) the surprisingly prominent role of Edward Shils in Field: Personal supplying key elements of the narrative. Influence, Keywords: Paul Lazarsfeld; Edward Shils; Elihu Katz; media research; history of social Edward Shils, science; disciplinary memory and the The bullet model or hypodermic model posits Remembered powerful, direct effects of the mass media. Survey studies of social influence conducted in History of Mass the late 1940s presented a very different model from that of a hypodermic needle in which a Communication multistep flow of media effects was evident. That is, most people receive much of their Research information and are influenced by media secondhand, through the personal influence of opinion leaders (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). —Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose (2006, 403) By JEFFERSON POOLEY Jefferson Pooley is assistant professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College. -
Centennial Bibliography on the History of American Sociology
University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sociology Department, Faculty Publications Sociology, Department of 2005 Centennial Bibliography On The iH story Of American Sociology Michael R. Hill [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sociologyfacpub Part of the Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, and the Social Psychology and Interaction Commons Hill, Michael R., "Centennial Bibliography On The iH story Of American Sociology" (2005). Sociology Department, Faculty Publications. 348. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sociologyfacpub/348 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sociology, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sociology Department, Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Hill, Michael R., (Compiler). 2005. Centennial Bibliography of the History of American Sociology. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. CENTENNIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY Compiled by MICHAEL R. HILL Editor, Sociological Origins In consultation with the Centennial Bibliography Committee of the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology: Brian P. Conway, Michael R. Hill (co-chair), Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (ex-officio), Jack Nusan Porter (co-chair), Pamela A. Roby, Kathleen Slobin, and Roberta Spalter-Roth. © 2005 American Sociological Association Washington, DC TABLE OF CONTENTS Note: Each part is separately paginated, with the number of pages in each part as indicated below in square brackets. The total page count for the entire file is 224 pages. To navigate within the document, please use navigation arrows and the Bookmark feature provided by Adobe Acrobat Reader.® Users may search this document by utilizing the “Find” command (typically located under the “Edit” tab on the Adobe Acrobat toolbar). -
Celebrating Katz: Introduction
International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), Feature 2175–2177 1932–8036/2014FEA0002 Celebrating Katz Introduction MICHAEL X. DELLI CARPINI Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, USA On March 6 and 7, 2014, more than 200 of Elihu Katz’s colleagues, friends, family, and current and former students (many of us falling into more than one of these categories) gathered at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication to celebrate him as both a scholar and a person. The stated reason for this gathering was Elihu’s transition, after more than 20 years as a member of the Annenberg faculty, to emeritus status, though of course no excuse is needed for honoring someone whose intellectual contributions are as deep, varied, and lasting as his. For well over half a century, his works— and, more importantly, his ideas—have been central to the formation and development of the field of communication and media studies. Indeed, in the genealogical tree of the field, Elihu’s place is more root or trunk than branch. The highlight of our two-day celebration was a talk by Elihu himself, followed by reflections on both the scholarship and the person from two of our field’s leaders, Sonia Livingstone and Paddy Scannell. Edited versions of these insightful and engaging presentations follow this introduction. As all three describe in more detail and from different perspectives, Elihu’s intellectual and geographic journey has been a rich and rewarding one. He received his BA, MA, and PhD (all in sociology) from Columbia University. At the time, Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and its collection of eminent theorists and researchers were engaged in applied and scholarly studies on the influence of various forms of interpersonal and mass communications, research that would become one of the foundations of the communication field. -
Seminar in Media Studies COMM502
Seminar in Media Studies COMM502 Zizi Papacharissi, PhD Professor and Head, Communication Office BSB 1140A Office hours Tue‐Thu 3‐5pm Office phone 312.996.3188 E‐mail [email protected] Course description The seminar will survey the major traditions of media studies scholarship with a particular focus on North America. Its purpose is to provide historical context for a nuanced understanding of the field of media and communications research in the 21st century. The seminar will consist primarily of discussions of readings, which will consist mostly of primary documents—pieces of research now considered classic /formational /canonical in the field. Students will be expected to read carefully and participate actively in criticizing, evaluating, and appraising this research. Course Objectives Media and communications research is a field composed of incommensurable perspectives, approaches, and traditions. The course begins with the assumption that no grand synthesis or grand narrative of the field will be acceptable to all interested parties, and that any synthesis or narrative, consciously or unconsciously, will be rooted in a particular research tradition. The seminar intends to instil an awareness of the stakes and dynamics of disciplinary histories. At the end of the semester, it is hoped that each student will have arrived at one’s own position on the proper approaches and research traditions of the field. Reading materials • Durham Peters and Peter Simonson, eds, Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919‐ 1968. • Dennis McQuail, McQuail’s Reader in Mass Communication Theory. • Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, and Avril Orloff, eds., Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be Any? How About These? These are available online, used or new through various online vendors. -
PAUL LAZARSFELD—THE FOUNDER of MODERN EMPIRICAL SOCIOLOGY: a RESEARCH BIOGRAPHY Hynek Jerábek
International Journal of Public Opinion Research Vol. No. –/ $. PAUL LAZARSFELD—THE FOUNDER OF MODERN EMPIRICAL SOCIOLOGY: A RESEARCH BIOGRAPHY Hynek Jerˇa´bek ABSTRACT Paul Lazarsfeld contributed to unemployment research, public opinion and market research, mass media and communications research, political sociology, the sociology of sociology, the history of empirical social research, and applied sociology. His methodological innovations—reason analysis, program analyzer, panel analysis, survey analysis, elaboration formula, latent structure analysis, mathematical sociology (especially the algebra of dichotomous systems), contextual analysis—are of special importance. This study responds to the critiques of Lazarsfeld’s ‘administrative research’ by Theodor W. Adorno, of ‘abstract empiricism’ by Charles W. Mills, and of the ‘Columbia Sociology Machine’ by Terry N. Clark. The paper discusses the merits of the team-oriented style of work presented in Lazarsfeld’s ‘workshop,’ his teaching by engaging in professional activities in social research and methodology, and his consecutive foundation of four research institutes, Vienna’s Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle, the Newark Uni- versity Research Center, the Princeton Office of Radio Research, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in New York. By his manyfold activities, Paul Lazarsfeld decisively promoted the institutionalization of empirical social research. All these merits make him the founder of modern empirical sociology. One hundred years have passed since the birth of the founder of modern empirical sociology, Paul Lazarsfeld. Without him, sociology today would not know terms and concepts such as panel study, opinion leader, latent structure analysis, program analyzer, elaboration formula, reason analysis, and many others. Lazarsfeld’s influence on empirical sociological research, market and public opinion research, and communication research has been much stronger than most of us realize. -
Professional, Critical, Policy, and Public Academics in Canada1
PROFESSIONAL, CRITICAL, POLICY, AND 1 PUBLIC ACADEMICS IN CANADA ROBERT J. BRYM M. REZA NAKHAIE Abstract. This paper analyzes the results of a unique 2000 study of Canadian academics (n=3,318), providing the first empirical assessment of Burawoy’s intellectual types: professional, critical, policy, and public. After determining the distribution of academic types in the Canadian professoriate as a whole, the paper demonstrates that academic types fall along a left-right continuum; dif- ferent fields of study contain different distributions of academic types; and pub- lic, policy, and critical academics tend to have different sociodemographic and economic characteristics than professional academics. The picture that emerges from the analysis is of a professoriate whose contours substantiate the broad outlines of Burawoy’s typology. Keywords: professors, intellectuals, universities Résumé. Le présent article analyse les résultats d’une étude unique, faite en 2000, d’un échantillon représentatif d’universitaires canadiens (n=3 318) pour établir la première évaluation empirique des types intellectuels distingués par Burawoy: professionnel, critique, politique et public. Après avoir déterminé la distribution des types universitaires dans le professorat canadien en général, l’ar- ticle démontre que ces types se distribuent sur une gamme de la gauche politique à la droite; que différentes disciplines offrent des distributions différentes de ces types; et que les universitaires publics, politiques et critiques tendent à avoir des traits socio-démographiques et économiques différents des universitaires professionnels. L’analyse révèle un professorat dont les contours confirment les grandes lignes de la typologie de Burawoy. Mots-clés: professeurs; intellectuels; universités 1. We thank Rick Helmes-Hayes, Charles Kurzman, Neil McLaughlin, John Myles, and two anonymous CJS reviewers for helpful comments on a draft. -
The Polish Career of the American Soldier from the Model to the Legend1 Antoni Sułek [email protected]
ARTICLE The Polish Career of The American Soldier 1 From the Model to the Legend Antoni Sułek [email protected] Abstract The study conducted by Samuel Stouffer and his team in the US Army during World War II is gen- erally considered to be a founding study in quantitative empirical sociology. The book The American Soldier (1949-1950) played an important role in the development and institutionalization of empir- ical social research. Joseph Ryan’s monograph Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey (2013) analyzes the history and reception of the research and book in the United States. This paper investigates the reception and impact of the book far from the United States: in Poland. Keywords The American Soldier; Samuel Stouffer; empirical social research; Polish sociology Introduction In the spring of 1945, divisions of the victorious American army halted at the Elbe, in the center of Germany. This border was to become the demarcation line between communist countries and the “free world.” Many Poles regretted that the American soldiers had not gone further east. However, a soldier of sorts did venture further; The American Soldier, the work of the Research Branch created by Samuel Stouffer. This is the story of its career. The research on the American military by Stouffer’s branch during World War II was intended to provide reliable information to the leadership about soldiers’ attitudes in order to aid decisions re- garding the guidance and management of the armed forces. Generally speaking, the research helped the military—in war conditions—to move from an authoritarian model to a managerial one, replacing an emphasis on obedience with one on morale (Ryan 2013). -
The Ethnic Factor in the Future of Inequality. INSTITUTION Center for Migration Studies, Inc
DOCUMENTRESUME ED 141 234 so 01Q 109 AUTHOR Tomasi,, Lydio F. TITLE The Ethnic Factor in the Future of Inequality. INSTITUTION Center for Migration Studies, Inc. , Staten Island, N.Y. PUB DATE 73 NOTE 39p. AVAILABLEFROM center for Migration studies, 209 ·Flagg Pl ace, Staten Island, Ne v York, New York 10 30 4 ($1.00 papertound) EDRS PRICE IIP-$0. 83 Plus Postage. BC .Not Available fromfro ■ EDRS. DESCRIPTORS cultural Background ; cultural Factors, €Cultural Pluralism; Pluralis ■ ; *Ethnic Groups; Ethnic studies; Futures (of society); Gr oup Membership ; Humaneu ■ an Dignity; Immigrants; I ■■ igrants ; • s ocial Change ; Social Developaent; Social Problems;Proble ■ s· Social Responsibility; •social Stratification; Social structure; Social Systems;sys t e ■ s ; Social Values; *Sociology; Theories ; . •United States History · ABSTRACT · The paper analyzes how the attemptatte ■ pt to assimilateassi ■ ilate ethnic groups into Americansociety has contributed to social, economic, ,cono ■ ic , and political inequality. The hy pothesis is that the official model■ odEl of classical sociology bas blinded us to a ·vast range . of social phenomenaphEno ■ ena which must■ o st be understood if we are to cope with the problems the----proble ■ s of contemporary■ porary lAmerica. ■ erica . While not often e xplicit, the American · 1 ■ er ican ideal that ethnic groofs should be incorporated into the melting ■ eltin9 pot bas created a society in which many■ any observable forms of inequality are perpetrated. This stratification analysis extends the concept of poverty beyond the narrow limitsli ■ its of incomeinco ■e to include political and personal relations. Amongl ■ ong issues addressed are _ i ■ ■ igrant immigrant,. social history, acceptance, po ver and elitist vs .