The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research

The Future of the Magazine Form

David Abrahamson, Marcia R. Prior-Miller, David Abrahamson, Marcia R. Prior-Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138297449
• eBook ISBN: 9781317524526
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Scholarly engagement with the magazine form has, in the last two decades, produced a substantial amount of valuable research. Authored by leading academic authorities in the study of magazines, the chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research not only create an architecture to organize and archive the developing field of magazine research, but also suggest new avenues of future investigation. Each of 33 chapters surveys the last 20 years of scholarship in its subject area, identifying the major research themes, theoretical developments and interpretive breakthroughs. Exploration of the digital challenges and opportunities which currently face the magazine world are woven throughout, offering readers a deeper understanding of the magazine form, as well as of the sociocultural realities it both mirrors and influences.

The book includes six sections:

• Methodologies and structures presents theories and models for magazine research in an evolving, global context
• Magazine publishing: the people and the work introduces the roles and practices of those involved in the editorial and business sides of magazine publishing
• Magazines as textual communication surveys the field of contemporary magazines across a range of theoretical perspectives, subjects, genre and format questions
• Magazines as visual communication explores cover design, photography, illustrations and interactivity
• Pedagogical and curricular perspectives offers insights on undergraduate and graduate teaching topics in magazine research
• The future of the magazine form speculates on the changing nature of magazine research via its environmental effects, audience, and transforming platforms

Part IMAGAZINE RESEARCH

Methodologies and Structures

1 Theory and Methods of Analysis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315722283-2

Models for Understanding Magazines

Carolyn Kitch

Over the past quarter-century, magazine scholars have been influenced by many of the theoretical ideas that have informed the larger field of communication inquiry, as well as other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The resulting work has offered new understandings of magazines and magazine audiences as economic, social and cultural forces. This chapter surveys those developments, considering how they add to the literature and yet also underscore some central tensions in beliefs about the role of media in society.

In simplest terms, theory can be understood as our central assumptions about how the world around us works. Such assumptions are inherently historical, influenced by time and place. Researchers’ uses of theory, therefore, shed light on not only the institutional and social climate of the subject at hand—the topic of study—but also the scholarly climate of the discipline in which the topic is studied. In other words, trends in theory tell us about our own academic enterprise as well as about the media world. This essay reviews applications of theory, and their consequent implications for methodology, in recent magazine scholarship. Because another chapter of this book discusses methods in more detail, this essay focuses primarily on philosophical views about the role of magazines in society (i.e., theory) and on how those perspectives affect scholars’ views of what is worth studying and how it should be studied (i.e., topic and method).

Magazine scholars long have brought theoretical concepts to their research, whether or not explicitly; even those who have disavowed “theory” nevertheless have had to design their studies based on certain assumptions about what magazines are and do (or should be and do) and how they do or do not affect society. Even so, for many years magazine research was dominated by descriptive studies of magazine institutions and documentary studies of magazine content. More than a decade ago, scholars such as David Abrahamson urged researchers to go “beyond the mirror metaphor,”¹ in which magazines are seen merely as a reflector of an independent social reality, accepting that they play an important role in constructing that reality. This shift has occurred. In fact, in recent years, the construction view has become the default assumption—in a vast amount of scholarship about all kinds of media, including magazines—by scholars drawing on largely European theories from sociology, anthropology and literature that have taken hold across academic disciplines. Although many of these ideas, some of which are more than a century old, were initially articulated without specific regard to media, they have become popular in media studies, including magazine scholarship.

Most researchers today agree that magazines are prescriptive as well as descriptive: They convey messages about not only how society is, but also how it should be, constructing ideals to which readers should aspire. The “should” in this premise prompts some scholars to view magazines negatively, as commercial vehicles of control in service of economic profit and the political status quo, while it prompts other scholars to view magazines positively, as cultural vehicles of aspiration drawing together imagined communities of like-minded people.

This chapter considers how such differing beliefs have affected the shape of magazine scholarship by briefly discussing the broader theories at hand and then noting how they have been used in recent research. Those studies are offered merely as examples and are not necessarily the definitive works in each area, although some of them have been quite influential. Similarly, this chapter offers a discussion of some noticeable trends but is not an exhaustive survey of all theoretical approaches employed within what is, across many disciplines, now quite a large body of research that in some way involves magazines.

In the following sections, recent scholarship is sorted into three different models for understanding magazines: as a form of control, as a form of community and as a form of culture. The first two models are (or seem to be) parallel to the philosophical split described above, while the third model combines elements of both. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the implications of theory for the possible future of magazine scholarship, especially in light of current challenges facing the journalism industries.

Magazines as Control

Critical theorists have tended to embrace an essentially Marxist belief that magazines (among other kinds of media) are influential players in systems of power, serving the economic imperative of profit as well as the political regime in which that economy exists. Political-economy theory draws on the philosophy of not only Karl Marx but also Louis Althusser, in whose model media are one of many societal institutions that dispense official ideology and that limit citizens’ identities and power by addressing them in certain ways (“hailing” or interpellation).² To explain why such top-down power systems survive, many media scholars turn to political theorist Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, a process in which powerful institutions convince the public that the status quo is in their best interests³; others use philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of discourse, the circulation and reinforcement of certain ideas at the expense of others.⁴

In all of these views, magazines are instruments of power, and the typical research question investigates how they work to maintain it. Usually part of that question has to do with representation or rhetoric, how ideals are verbally and visually constructed and emphasized in order to promote certain kinds of behavior that maintain the existing economic and political system. This kind of research is further interested in how those messages address and assemble readers as groups of consumers, as markets rather than people, thus commodifying the readers as well as the topics of the magazines.

The two most common kinds of magazine research—historical studies and studies of body image among female magazine readers—frequently take this theoretical route. Quite a number of historical studies have explained magazines as key players in the emergence of modern commercial culture at the turn of the twentieth century. That era was the focus of several influential books that were published within just a two-year period during the mid-1990s and were written by scholars of sociology and literature as well as history: Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century; Helen Damon-Moore's Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910; Jennifer Scanlon's Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture; and Ellen Gruber Garvey's The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s.⁵

As their titles suggest, all of these works connect the emergence of mass-audience consumer markets to magazines’ strategic constructions of class and gender. Scanlon writes that during this era magazines promoted a “ ‘consensus’ view” by publishing “stories, editorial pieces, and advertisements [that], although seemingly fragmentary and perhaps unrelated, actually worked together to provide [a] larger, dominant picture.”⁶ Damon-Moore contends that they “creat[ed] … a gendered commercial discourse and a commercial gender discourse” through a “hegemonic” process in which both audiences and producers were participants and yet were “unequal players.”⁷ Their work provided a theoretical foundation for other research on the same time period, an era when mass-circulated magazine artwork created “a visual vocabulary of womanhood that now seems natural.”⁸

The role of mass media in defining and naturalizing female beauty ideals was a primary focus of the earliest generation of feminist research during the 1970s, when popular-culture scholar Judith Williamson published Decoding Advertisements ⁹ and sociologist Gaye Tuchman declared “the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media,”¹⁰ and it remains probably the most common topic of research on current magazines. Another influential early work was Angela McRobbie's ideological analysis of the content of the British teen magazine Jackie, which inspired many other works about magazines for adolescent girls.¹¹

This kind of scholarship, which has emerged alongside a similar body of criticism in the popular press, often focuses on magazine content, embraces a strong-power model of media messages and uses several methodological tools that are linked with particular theoretical perspectives. Some researchers perform semiotic analysis in order to study the patterns through which images “signify,” as initially described by semiotician Roland Barthes.¹² Others, drawing on the work of sociologist Erving Goffman and political theorist Robert Entman,¹³ employ framing analysis, the study of how media emphasize certain aspects of events or phenomena in order to create a sense-making frame for their meaning. Still other researchers use focus groups, surveys, observation or interviews with audience members to measure their reactions to media content. The shared assumption is that magazines’ messages limit readers’ knowledge or negatively influence their self-image and behavior. This is an especially common theme in media literacy research, which focuses on media effects among children and young teens.

Given the extent to which magazines are part of a broader and aggressive commercial culture, these concerns are warranted, yet they have become problematized by newer ideas about the nature of audiences and identity. During the 1980s researchers began to suggest that while ideological messages are encoded into media texts by producers, they also must be decoded by audiences, whose readings can be “negotiated” or even “oppositional.” Those terms were used by Stuart Hall¹⁴ and other British cultural theorists involved in the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, which turned a critical spotlight on working-class subcultures—the audience itself. Angela McRobbie's early work was an attempt to consider the role of gender within the Centre's focus on class, and in subsequent essays she noted the importance of studying readers as well as text...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Font Chapter
• Dedication page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Magazine Research: Methodologies and Structures
• Part II Magazine Publishing: The People and the Work
• Part III Studies in Content: Magazines as Textual Communication
• Part IV Studies in Presentation: Magazines as Visual Communication
• Part V Pedagogical and Curricular Perspectives
• Part VI The Future of the Magazine Form
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index