Media Effects and Beyond

Culture, Socialization and Lifestyles

Karl Erik Rosengren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780415756198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134874545
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Addressing a multitude of questions and issues surrounding how we use the media, Media Effects and Beyond represents the results of an international research programme into the use and effects of television, video and music. Seeing the viewer not simply as passive object but as a very active subject, the contributors engage with every aspect of children's, adolescents' and families' use of the media - its character, causes and consequences. Topics explored include media and social mobility; family commumication, and consumer lifestyles.
Confronting the two traditions of lifestyle research and effects research, Media Effects and Beyond offers a much-needed reconceptualization of both. Written at a time when traditional European public service media systems struggle against a tidal wave of commercial electronic media, this book will be important reading for students of contemporary culture and communications, as well as media policy for decision makers.

Part I

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Introduction

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Chapter 1

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Culture, media and society

Agency and structure, continuity and change
Karl Erik Rosengren

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This book represents an attempt to offer an overview of results gained during twenty-five years of systematic longitudinal research on mass media use by Swedish children, adolescents and young adults, and on the causes and consequences of that media use. Organized within the longitudinal Media Panel Program (MPP) at the Unit of Media and Communication Studies, University of Lund in Sweden, the research has been carried out by a team of communication scholars and sociologists of communication in close contact with European, American and Asian colleagues. The overall theoretical framework of the research venture will be presented in this chapter. Later chapters will offer specification and variation to this overall framework.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

All human societies may be conceptualized as being composed of three closely related systems: a cultural system of ideas, a social system of actions, and a material system of artefacts. In empirical reality, of course, ideas, actions and artefacts are very closely intertwined, so that it may be extremely difficult to disentangle the ideational, actional and material aspects from each other. This is no argument against the analytical distinction, but it does make empirical analyses difficult, especially since there are a number of other societal subsystems, all of which, in all societies, necessarily encompass elements of those three basic systems. For theoretical purposes each of the three systems may be used to characterize any society (and from either the structural or the processual side of the system, or from both sides). It is often practical, however, to regard societies as being structured primarily by a central element in the ideational, cultural system: its value system (witness innumerable comparative studies; for a recent example, see Lipset 1993).

Actually, all societal structures may be understood in terms of two pairs of very basic value orientations:

•Cognitive/normative value orientation.

•Expressive/instrumental value orientation.

The two pairs of value orientations are defined by the four values of truth and righteousness, beauty and usefulness. These value orientations are very basic indeed. Indeed, they seem to be virtually timeless. They may be expressed in terms of four Indo-European verbs (Latin: sapere/debere, esse/facere; cf. French: savoir/devoir, être/faire) which have their functional counterparts in other families of languages. These very basic value orientations were discussed by early Greek philosophers in terms of Logos and Ethos, Pathos and Praxis. In the eighteenth century, the German poet Friedrich Schiller wrote poetry about them, as did many of his precursors and followers, and recent students of modern advertising and public relations also use them (see Pollay 1984; Nowak 1992: 182). All societal institutions have emerged out of these two pairs of value orientations, and they are still gradually developing around them. The history of basic societal structures and processes may thus be interpreted in terms of an ever-growing functional differentiation between a relatively small number of societal institutions, each based on one specific constellation of value orientations defined by the two pairs of basic value orientations (see, for instance, Parsons 1966). Within each of these institutions, the three basic systems of ideas, actions and artefacts are to be found, so that all institution-based societal subsystems may be conceptualized from an ideational, an actional and an artefactual perspective.

Figure 1.1, illustrating the ‘great wheel of culture in Society’, offers a typology of basic societal institutions grouped around the two pairs of basic value orientations: expressive vs. instrumental value orientation, and cognitive vs. normative value orientation (Rosengren 1984; Rosengren and Windahl 1989: 159 ff.; see, for instance, Berger and Berger 1972: 20; Giddens 1984: 17). The typology is shaped as a so-called circumplex (Guttman 1954; see Katz et al. 1973; Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Shepard 1978). The circumplex locates the main societal subsystems in a two-dimensional space in a way which suggests their closest ‘neighbours’ in society: the system of economy being located between the political and technological systems; literature, between art and scholarship, etc. The circumplex is similar, of course, to several other, more or less Weberian or Parsonian typologies of societal structures, but closest, perhaps, to that presented by Namenwirth and Bibbee (1976), which includes also the element of time, however (see Namenwirth and Weber 1987).

Figure 1.1 represents the three basic systems of ideas, action and artefacts by means of concentric circles. At the centre of the circumplex – the ‘hub of the wheel’ - we find culture, the ideational system of society. Culture, then, is both cognitively and normatively oriented, both expressive and instrumental. It unites and relates, one to the other, the four basic value orientations and their various subsystems. The network of broken lines relating the societal subsystems to each other tells us something about the complexity of the overall system, and of the immense communicative and co-ordinating functions fulfilled by culture: twenty-eight first order interdependencies,

Figure 1.1 The great wheel of culture in society (Adapted from Rosengren (1984))

innumerable secondary and tertiary interdependencies and interactions. These relations connect society's institutional subsystems to each other: religion and politics; politics and science; science and technology; technology and religion, and so on, in never-ending chains of mutual interaction. All such relations may affect both ideas, actions and artefacts of the subsystems, but for pictorial convenience, the lines have been drawn going only from the system of action within one institutional subsystem to that of another.

This way of pictorial representation signals that all these relations have to be established by means of action, often by means of a very special type of action: communication. In all societies, these relations are carried out by means of interpersonal, face-to-face communication; in modern societies, they are often established also by means of mediated interpersonal communication, as well as by organizational and mass communication. As these relations continue, a never-ending process of differentiation between the various societal institutions continues. The institutions thus grow increasingly differentiated and yet remain mutually interdependent. All of them have to keep some part of general societal culture incorporated within their own substructures, continually balancing specific culture (‘political culture’, ‘economic culture’, etc.) against general societal culture. In terms of Figure 1.1., these specific cultures may be thought of as being situated within that part of the communicative network located in the action part of the great wheel of culture in society.

Culture, however, is not only a huge telephone exchange for society, connecting societal systems to each other, not only an immense exchange office converting values of one type into values of another type. It is also an important societal system in its own right, and as such it has to relate to other large societal systems, including the two basic systems of action and artefacts, as well as to virtually all institutionalized subsystems, although, paradoxically, and unlike other large societal systems, culture has no well-established institution of its own. (The institutions of art and literature, of course, deal primarily with high culture, certainly an important component of societal culture, but even more certainly not to be mistaken for societal culture.) What culture actually does have, however, is a set of institutions handling its relationship with the rest of society, primarily the so-called agents of socialization (see below).

The relations between culture and other societal systems form a classic problem of social science. Within a given society, four types of such relations are possible (Rosengren 1981). Figure 1.2 orders these four types in a typology. This is a typology of the relations between the ideational system of culture and the systems of actions and artefact, but it is also a typology of theories concerning these relationships.

Figure 1.2 Four types of relationship between culture and other societal systems (Adapted from Rosengren (1981))

For centuries, heated philosophical debates raged along the axis of materialism/idealism, debates which were rekindled by the wave of Marxist revivalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Gradually, however, the scientific and scholarly discussions moved to the ideologically less inflammable but perhaps more realistic axis of interdepedence/autonomy – even if sometimes the old terminology has been preserved (Bell 1976; Bunge 1981; Harris 1979; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). The answer to these classic debates to a very high degree is related to the time perspective applied. Depending on the level of abstraction (Meddin 1975; cf. Johansson and Miegel 1992: 73), values may change on a time-scale ranging from millennia through centuries and decades to years and parts of a year. ‘It would be strange indeed, if the relationship between culture and other societal structures would be the same under those very different circumstances’ (Carlsson et al. 1981). More often than not, however, interdependence seems to be the best answer (see Rosengren 1981).

The horizontal relations between culture and other societal systems are important, but there is also another type of relations to be heeded, the vertical relations linking units at the macro, meso and micro levels of society to each other. (For recent discussions about these relations in ontological, epistem-ological, theoretical and methodological terms, see, for instance, Alexander et al. (1987), and especially Munch and Smelser (1987).) In these ‘vertical’ relations, society's culture flows from the level of society down to the individual level and back again, in modern societies often by way of the organizational level. In this ever-continuing process relating the macro to the micro level by way of the meso level, societal culture is transformed into indi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Media use: differentiation, change and stability
• Part III Young people and media use: individual, class and socialization
• Part IV Lifestyle and the use of media
• Part V Conclusion
• Subject index
• Name index