Media Sociology

A Reappraisal

Silvio Waisbord

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745684079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Where is sociology in contemporary media studies? How do sociological questions and arguments shape media analysis? These are the questions addressed in this timely collection on media sociology. Sociology was fundamental in defining the analytical boundaries of early media studies, from the study of news and communities to media effects and public opinion, in the first half of the last century. Since then, media sociology has experienced significant changes that have led to new theoretical questions and thematic priorities. This book aims to reassess the past and present relationship between media studies and sociology. With original contributions from leading scholars, Media Sociology: A Reappraisal examines the significance of sociology for the study of media economics, industries, news, audiences, journalism, and digital technologies, and the links between media and race, gender, and class. As a whole, this much-needed volume takes a retrospective view to trace the evolution of media sociology and assess current research directions.

PART I

Media, Institutions, and Politics

1

Strategy Follows Structure:
A Media Sociology Manifesto

Rodney Benson

Sometimes the best sociology comes from non-sociologists. I was reminded of this truism the other day when I came across an article about John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard. Asked to explain why his company had substantially lower fees than other mutual fund companies, he pointed to its nonprofit ownership model that prevented profits being siphoned away to pay investors or shareholders. In short, Bogle concluded, “strategy follows structure.”¹ If contemporary media sociology is in need of a new raison d’être, I cannot think of a better one.

Across the vast landscape of media studies, the trends in recent years have been for work that highlights contingency (to the point of voluntarism), complexity (verging toward obscurantism), and culture (ignoring institutionalized power). I speak here of claims, implicit or explicit, in certain strains of theories of networks or actor-networks, post-structuralism, and/or cultural sociology (as opposed to the sociology of culture), which is not to say that these diverse schools agree among themselves! While each of these approaches has its virtues, to affirm that strategy follows structure suggests a different understanding of the social world, a different research agenda, and a different way of linking theory, research, and practice. I do not claim that a critical, structural, “variation-oriented” media sociology should be the only kind of media sociology or the only kind of media studies on offer, but I do argue that it can contribute important insights that none of these other approaches are likely to contribute.²

To return to our non-sociologist but sociologically minded thinker John Bogle, I see four distinct propositions embedded in his claim that “strategy follows structure” worth underlining: First, there is such a thing as structure and it has an important social component. Second, both structures and strategies are multiple (in Vanguard’s case, there are of course alternatives to nonprofit ownership): this claim sets this approach apart from totalizing or holistic structural theories. Third, structure is pervasive and primary (generating strategies, rather than the inverse). And fourth, perhaps more controversially, some structural arrangements are normatively preferable to others (e.g. an egalitarian or social justice ethos inherent in the effort to keep fees low for non-elite investors). Let us examine each of these claims in turn before turning to some concrete examples of structural media sociology and a discussion of how structural media sociology counters or complements other approaches to media research and theorizing.

The elements of structure

At the most fundamental level, to speak of the structural is to emphasize the patterned character of human action and to thus create categories that group together various patterns. This move is fundamental to the sociological imagination. While each case is unique, it also shares certain properties with other cases, making generalization possible.

In creating categories, structural analysis inevitably selects and simplifies, opening itself up to charges of reductionism. But any attempt to model social reality involves simplification. Even Geertzian thick description makes choices about what to describe and what to leave out. Structural analysis at its best is simply more transparent about these choices. It encourages a constructive dialogue about which factors – or facets of a complex reality – should be incorporated if the model is to advance understanding and insight. Evidence thus consists of cases that are found to fit into this or that constructed category. Is this a kind of “violent” suppression of the particularity of any given case (an individual or particular social grouping)? In a sense, it is. But as Walter Lippmann long ago showed in Public Opinion (1922), simplifying categories – or stereotypes – are produced organically at all levels of society. A reflexive structural sociology has the potential, at least, of minimizing the symbolic violence.

Given that one should be skeptical of all categories, the key question is what to do next. One response, the luxury of the deconstructionist, is to only critique. This kind of work keeps empirical researchers on their toes. In the long run, it can lay the groundwork for new political projects responsive to societal transformations; in the short run, by its refusal to engage with the “system,” it can leave the political field open to domination by the most conservative forces. Critical structural sociology, even at its most politically radical, mobilizes critique to (always tentatively) construct new categories that can then be mobilized – both to generate new insights, through the crucible of empirical testing, and to deploy them in real political struggles to combat injustice and discrimination of whatever sort.

Structure, however, generally refers to something more than persistent patterns. It also suggests the importance, if not indeed the primacy, of the social. The cultural turn was a wrong turn to the extent that it acted as if social structure no longer existed. Even if all social reality is discursively constructed, the concept of social structure calls attention to inequalities in the distribution of resources, material as well as symbolic. By diverting attention from such inequalities, the cultural turn is complicit with neoliberalism, as even the respected cultural theorist William H. Sewell, Jr (2005) has conceded. Cultural sociology, as articulated by Jeffrey Alexander (2007), acknowledges the existence of social structure but insists on “analytically” separating it from culture. Unfortunately, the effect is the same: social structure is effectively ignored.³ A structural approach to media sociology should neither dismiss nor privilege culture, but should seek to understand the complex (but not unpredictable) interrelations between the discursive and the social; there is also virtue in abandoning altogether the structure–culture binary, given that all human activity is both socially patterned and culturally meaningful (see also Gans 2012).

If the mere existence (and persistence) of social structural constraints is thus a first premise of structural media sociology, the second is that these constraints should not be understood in a holistic, allor-nothing fashion. Fundamental to most sociological approaches is the search for and explanation of variation. Across the social sciences and humanities, field theory – incorporating its many permutations (see e.g. Bourdieu 1984, 1993; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Lewin 1951; Martin 2003) – has arguably become the dominant model of structural variation. Further developed through a range of national and international comparative case studies (e.g. Benson 2009, 2013; Benson and Neveu 2005; Fourcade 2009; Kuipers 2011; Medvetz 2012), this institutional framework conceptualizes the social world as a set of hierarchically organized, semiautonomous more or less specialized spheres of action, each with their distinct histories and rules of the game. How do these social spheres or fields differ in their functioning, ideals, practices, and stakes? How did they come into being and how have they changed over time? Which tend to be dominant?

Field theory offers a marked advance in analytical sophistication and explanatory power over the binary system/nonsystem model typical of work influenced by directly or indirectly by Weber’s “rationalization” thesis. In Foucault (1995), disciplinary regimes may change over time but in a given era one reigns supreme and structures all social action, except at the very margins; in Adorno (2001), there is virtually no escape from the culture industry or the administered world.⁴ Under certain conditions, of course, institutional forces may produce homogenization (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), but there are always countervailing forces of differentiation (see e.g. Boczkowski 2010 for a compelling analysis of both processes in online news production). In field analyses, homogenization is a variable, not a destiny.

In his early characterizations of the “system,” Habermas (1987b) seemed to be following in the totalizing tendencies of the Frankfurt School, but he has subsequently offered a more variegated rendering of the multiple institutional layers (organized civil society, academia and think tanks, media, legislative bodies, etc.) that lie between the peripheral lifeworld and the executive core of liberal democratic national systems (see Habermas 1996). Manuel Castells’s detailed empirical modeling of the flows of “network society” acknowledges variations aplenty but fails to draw them together into an explanatory theory. Just to cite one example, Castells (2007: 244) argues that distrust in government is on the rise across the western world, yet notes in passing that the Scandinavian countries are an exception to this pattern. Always emphasizing fluidity and contingency, this everon-the-move sociology of flows doesn’t stop long enough to wonder why: a sociology of structural variation would see in this anomaly precisely the kind of data that could refine its explanations.

Structural media sociology’s third premise is that structures are pervasive and primary. Why not say structure follows strategy? Structures have to be structured before they can become structuring, do they not? ⁵ Absolutely, but structuring moments build on pre-existing structures, or as Marx (1994) put it far more eloquently: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” We start with a set of structures, simultaneously cultural and social, and we innovate by making new combinations. The capacity to act, and in certain ways rather than others, is structurally produced.⁶

At the individual level, the capacity to choose among strategies is predicated on a plurality of institutional structures, each with its own distinct logic. Even though each of us may be predisposed to act in a certain way given our family background, education, and occupation (in sum, our habitus), the persistence of some degree of institutional pluralism keeps open the possibility of constructing alternative subjectivities. This possibility is captured in Swidler’s (1986) concept of culture as “toolkit” or Lamont and Thévenot’s (2000) “cultural repertoires.”

At the macro-societal level, widespread cultural innovation or transformation is more difficult to achieve. At moments of economic, social, political, military, even climactic turmoil – in other words, “critical junctures” (Thelen 1999) – there are increased possibilities of creating new institutions (and thus new subjectivities). At best, after the dust settles, what seem to be revolutions of one sort or another usually produce only limited change. A revolution would mean a dramatic deviation from a pre-established course, which is indeed difficult to achieve. “Path dependency” (Thelen 1999; Sewell 2005) is shorthand for all the factors that contribute to inertia: because it is too costly to retool, because of entrenched interests, because after a period of time it simply seems natural and the possibility of things being otherwise becomes literally unimaginable, and so on.

For all these reasons, investigation of the causes and effects of variable social structural arrangements lies close to the heart of the sociological imagination, and by extension, to what is distinctive about a sociological approach to media studies. I would add, however, a fourth and final element of such a research program that perhaps sits less easily with sociological orthodoxy: the need to acknowledge the normative element present in all research. To insist that strategies follow structures is to imply that some structures might in fact be preferable to others. The ongoing furor in some quarters over Habermas’s attempts to construct a universal discourse ethics shows clearly the lack of normative consensus. But that should not preclude the attempt to discuss normative questions, far from it: all research, sociological or not, ought to make clear the specific political and ethical presuppositions implicit in the questions it asks.

Normative concerns inevitably guide one’s choice of research questions and obviously underpin some of the most frequently studied aspects of media performance. Why do we study sensationalism, diversity, inclusion, and critique, or lack thereof, if we did not think that these somehow contribute to or detract from the good society, however defined? Media sociologists ought to set an example to other sociologists – as well as non-sociologists – by always clarifying “what’s at stake.” For Habermas (2006), what’s at stake is the institutional structuring of an ideal public sphere or spheres, understood in relation to the imperatives of noncoercive, open-ended deliberation. Castells (2012) is less clear but at bottom he seems to be a participatory democrat, concerned with grassroots inclusion and mobilization against oppressive systems of power, whether economic or political. Actor-network theorists’ reticence toward making any claims about social power seems puzzling until one understands their overriding concern with the potentially oppressive effects of expert-produced systems of knowledge and their concomitant insistence on the ground-up production of social solidarity.⁷ Alexander’s (2007) cultural sociology, including his strong injunctions against any form of social reductionism, seems to be mostly motivated by a concern to promote noninstrumentalist forms of civil solidarity.

Specifying what’s at stake, however, does not necessarily require the sociologist to take a position. What matters is that the findings are situated in relation to transparent accounts of their implications. This is precisely the approach taken by Myra Marx Ferree, William Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht (2002) in their comparative study of German and US news discourse about abortion: rather than trying to make a global judgment of the democratic deficits or virtues of either media system, they situate their comparative findings in relation to four distinct democratic traditions.

The kind of normatively transparent, structural variation-focused sociology I have outlined so far could be enacted via a variety of media-related case studies, samples, and methods. One way or the other, however, it must be comparative: variation in both the independent and dependent variables must be incorporated into the research design. Cross-national research is useful to the extent that it provides additional cases and can help test the generalizability of single nation-bound findings; it is absolutely necessary if one is trying to test for the effects of variation in nation-state system-level characteristics, such as national media policies or journalistic professional logics.

Searching for consequential structural variation in media

The first thing to do is banish all references to “the media.” The word is plural. There is no single media logic. In addition of course to various technological mediums, there are: media systems (subnational, national, and transnational), media organizations, and media producers and audiences (these latter sometimes interchangeable). These correspond, in turn, to fields of power, particular organizational fields, and the social space of classes. In Shaping Immigration News (Benson 2013), my study of US and French newspaper and television news coverage of immigration over the past four decades, I refer to these three elements of field structure as position, logic, and structure. Each of these facets of structural power shapes media production and reception in distinct ways.

Fields of power

Even if globalization is breaking down national boundaries, the nation-state still retains its primary structuring power (Morris and Waisbord 2001). This power is not unitary, however, but is constituted of oppositions. In secular democratic nation-states, an important structuring opposition is that between the commercial and the noncommercial, that is, between the logic of the consumer/client versus that of the citizen. As even Herbert Marcuse (1998 [1941]: 58) once acknowledged, in an otherwise sweeping denunciation of bureaucracy, there can be a real difference between private and public: “In the democratic countries, the growth of the private bureaucracy can be balanced by the strengthening of the public bureaucracy…. The power of the public bureaucracy can be the weapon which protects the people from the encroachment of special interests upon the general welfare.” Marcuse added one caveat: the public bureaucracy “can be a lever of democratization … as long as the will of the people can effectively assert itself.” (This passage is a fine example of structural sociology of media: Marcuse affirms that structure consists of institutional forms, that these forms vary, that variations in these forms produce different outcomes, and that these different outcomes are normatively consequential.)

Indeed, the overwhelming verdict of systematic discourse analyses is that noncommercial, government-subsidized media, including newspapers in many countries, are more critical, ideologically pluralist, and engaged with historical context and policy substance than purely commercial media (Aalberg and Curran 2011; Benson and Powers 2011; Cushion 2012).

Of course, it is not always the case that publicly funded media serve democratic ends; in many countries, what are called “public” media are in fact government propaganda agencies. Yet, commercial media also often serve, wittingly or unwittingly, as propaganda mouthpieces for governments. Other commercial media effectively promote ideologies – party-based, religious, consumerist – without need of any direct link to government. The question, then, is not specific to government but to all institutional forms. What kinds of ownership, funding, organizational, and professional institutional arrangements promote more or less of various democratic (or other normative) discursive or social outcomes?

Weber’s notion of “rational-legal” authority, as elaborated by Hallin and Mancini (2004: 192–3), points to a response. Bureaucratic systems, whether public or private, can be designed in ways that are self-limiting. Where there is effective rule of law, supported by custom as well as coercion, bureaucracies can in fact achieve a certain degree of accountability and autonomy. Th...