Media and Communication

Paddy Scannell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781473943438
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Media and Communication traces the historical development of media and communication studies in the 20th century. Paddy Scannell explores how the field formed and developed in both North America and in Europe, expertly introducing and explaining a host of essential media thinkers, ideas and concepts along the way. Including a new chapter on media events, this second edition of a classic text provides a comprehensive yet personal – and always accessible – analysis of media and communication theory and history. It is an invaluable resource for students across media and communication studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Part I The masses

1 Mass communication Lazarsfeld, Adorno, Merton USA, 1930s and 1940s

Sociology and communication

The great, defining period of American sociology spanned the decades immediately before and after the Second World War, from the mid-1930s through to the mid-1950s. It was a period of continuing innovation and exploration both in terms of methodology and subject matter for a new academic discipline whose question concerned the nature of social life. It was appropriate that American universities should take the lead in systematic investigation of a question that in some respects appeared to be if not peculiar at least particularly appropriate to America itself. The new world was more evidently a social invention and a political experiment than the more historically deep-rooted old world from which so many millions had emigrated in search of a new and better life. America had less historical baggage than Europe. The West had only finally been ‘settled’ by the end of the nineteenth century and something of the ‘new frontier’ mentality pervaded American progressive thought in the early decades of the twentieth century and its concern with the ‘great society’ – the practical realization of the American dream; the hopes and aspirations of the huddled masses who had arrived on its Eastern shores believing in it as the new-found land of opportunity.

Thus, a range of questions about the nature of the social – What is a society? What are the bonds between people? What regulates individual behaviours? How should they live together as a community? How is community created? What is the relationship between the self and others? How do they communicate? – were never, in the American context, simply academic questions. Nor were they retrospective. They were about the present and the future. The relationship between individual and ‘group’ in a city like Chicago – the fastest growing city in the world in the late nineteenth century, with a rich and teeming mix of newly arrived peoples of diverse ethnicities, languages, religions and beliefs – presented itself as an immediate and pressing issue, there on its doorstep, for the university’s Department of Sociology, the first in the United States, founded in 1899. Urban studies was pioneered in Chicago and, along with this, the question of communication. In an urban world in flux, without established traditions and customs – in which nothing was familiar or given and everything had to be invented, in which individuals encountered each other daily as strangers – questions of how people related to each other (how they interacted, how they communicated) had something of the force of a naturally ‘found’ object of sociological enquiry. Communication was both the problem and the solution to social psychology’s basic question: the link between individuals (the psychological) and groups (the social). Social psychology and urban studies developed early in Chicago and formed the core of the department’s research and teaching, giving it a distinctive sociological agenda and identity as the ‘Chicago School’ (Abbott, 1999).

Paul Lazarsfeld

The study of communication at Chicago dealt with it in psychological and sociological terms, focusing on individual and small (or primary) group interactions in immediate, face-to-face situations. It was not concerned with the study of mediated communication. That development took place elsewhere in the 1930s at Columbia University, NY, where the then ‘new’ media of mass communication began to be systematically investigated. Chicago’s research style was based on ethnographic fieldwork, with researchers immersing themselves as participant observers in the cultures that they studied. Although data were gathered and facts found, they were always to be understood in situ, in terms of their particular location or ecology (a key Chicago concept); the specificity of context was always critical in the Chicago School. This approach was overshadowed in the 1930s by the rise of Columbia and the growth of opinion polling and market research (ibid.: 205–10). In situ studies of individuals and small groups in local social settings (real people in real places) were displaced by decontextualized data collection of attitudes, opinions and beliefs to serve as evidence for strategic or policy decisions by businesses, advertisers, broadcasters or politicians. Here what mattered was the evidential reliability of the information that had been gathered and the logic of the inferences that could be drawn from it for administrative purposes. Chicago, one might over-simply say, pioneered qualitative methods of social investigation while Columbia took the lead in quantitative social science research whose results were guaranteed by their statistical reliability and the internal logic of the relationship between data variables. The leader in this field of research was Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901–76), an Austrian émigré, who settled in the United States in the early 1930s and made a fundamental contribution to establishing sociology as an empirical social science.

Lazarsfeld’s early career

Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna in 1901 of Jewish parents. His father was a lawyer, his mother an Adlerian psychoanalyst, and both were fervent socialists. He studied maths and physics at university and wrote his doctoral thesis on a mathematical aspect of Einstein’s gravitational theory.¹ He was, like many of his contemporaries, fascinated by politics and psychoanalysis, and began post-doctoral work with Karl and Charlotte Buhler who had established an Institute of Psychology at the University of Vienna. In what was then a strikingly novel arrangement, Lazarsfeld suggested to the Buhlers that he should establish a financially independent unit that did commercial contract research, attached to but not part of the university. The idea was to do surveys for local industries (herein lies the origin of market research) to raise enough money to pay Lazarsfeld and his co-workers (whom the Buhlers were unable to support from university resources) and any surplus would be applied to socio-psychological studies. Lazarsfeld and his young, enthusiastic co-workers did not merely gather and analyse data for their clients, they re-interpreted their initially simple commercial tasks to produce more subtle, socially revealing information:

When a laundry wanted to know why more housewives did not make use of its services, they set out to discover on what occasions housewives sent their laundry to be done outside the house. As a result, the firm learned to watch for occasions such as births, deaths, weddings and the like. Studying the purchase of different kinds of food, they made a profile of the ‘proletarian’ consumer as compared to the middle class consumer. When Radio Vienna wanted to know what radio programs people preferred, they made a social class profile of tastes for light versus heavy music. (Schramm, 1997: 48)

1 These biographical details are mainly compiled from Coleman (1980), Wiggershaus (1994) and Schramm (1997). See also Lazarsfeld’s own intellectual memoir in Fleming and Bailyn (1969: 270–338). For a wide-ranging collection of essays on many aspects of Lazarsfeld’s life and career, see Merton et al. (1979). See Peters and Simonson (2004: 84–7). Douglas (2004: 126–39) offers an excellent character sketch of Lazarsfeld and his work in Austria and the USA. David Morrison, who did his PhD on Lazarsfeld, is the best and most detailed guide to Lazarsfeld’s life and work in Austria and the United States. See Morrison (1998: 1–120 and passim).

The last study would turn out to be the precursor of Lazarsfeld’s later detailed work on the American radio industry.

In the early 1930s, Lazarsfeld and two colleagues, Marie Jahoda (his first wife) and Hans Zeisel, made a study of the impact of unemployment in a small Austrian mill-town, Marienthal, where most of the adult male population was out of work. A key (and typically Lazarsfeldian) question for the research team concerned the political effect of unemployment: did it radicalize individuals or make them more apathetic? The answer, regrettably, was that unemployment seemed to have the latter effect. The report was published in 1933 at the precise moment that Hitler came to power. It was immediately repressed and not republished in German until 1960 and not in English until 1971. But the Buhlers thought it important and sent Lazarsfeld to report his findings at the International Congress of Psychology at Hamburg. There he impressed the European representative of the Rockefeller Foundation who was attending the conference and was offered a one-year travelling fellowship to America. In October 1933, Lazarsfeld arrived in New York.

Following up on contacts he had made at Hamburg, Lazarsfeld quickly got in touch with Robert Lynd, a recently appointed Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Lynd and his wife Helen had published, in 1929, a widely reviewed and highly praised survey of changing patterns of work and leisure in America social life.² In Middletown (1929) the Lynds attempted an anthropology of everyday life in the American town of Muncie, Indiana (Robert Lynd’s home state). It was a study of a community in transition, comparing the ways of life in the city a generation or so earlier at the turn of the century with new patterns of work and leisure emerging at the time of the study. The community study methods used by the Lynds were employed by Lazarsfeld and his associates in their survey of Marienthal. Lynd was to be, in Schramm’s words, Lazarsfeld’s ‘guardian angel’ in America, helping him get started and finally establishing him at Columbia.

2 Middletown was much admired by F.R. Leavis at Cambridge, UK, who regarded it as a key contemporary analaysis of the impact of ‘mass civilization’ on older more traditional ways of life. See Chapter 4.

Within months of arriving in the USA, there was a fascist coup in Austria and Lazarsfeld decided to remain in the USA. Lynd found him a job at the University of Newark, New Jersey, supervising student relief provided by a New Deal organization, the National Youth Administration. Soon Lazarsfeld had persuaded the president of Newark that he needed a research centre which he proceeded to set up on the same principles as the institute he had invented at the University of Vienna. He got a career-making break when the opportunity to head a major research project into radio came his way, at Lynd’s suggestion, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and initially in association with Hadley Cantril of Princeton and Frank Stanton, director of research at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The project got off to a rocky start and was finally stabilized when Princeton withdrew and Lazarsfeld transferred to New York where, again through Lynd’s good offices, what had started as the Princeton Radio Project in association with the Newark Research Centre finally emerged from its chrysalis as the project of the Columbia Office of Radio Research, expanded and renamed, a few years later, as the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia.

Much has been written about this famous research centre that Lazarsfeld founded and ran for many years. It was the prototype of the university-based organization for large-scale social research that was subsequently taken as a model by many other universities in the USA and abroad. The independent research institute, hosted by a university but funded by income generated from projects commissioned by industry and government, was Lazarsfeld’s first enduring creation. His second, crucial contribution was to the then emergent discipline of sociology. More than anyone else, Lazarsfeld gave it its methodology. He pioneered techniques and rationales for both quantitative and qualitative research methods. These were worked out and applied in three new areas of sociological enquiry: opinion polling, voting behaviours and market research. Third, Lazarsfeld was committed to research as a collective collaborative endeavour: the roll call of those who worked with him on one project or another includes some of the most distinguished names in American sociology and European social theory in those days: Theodor Adorno, Robert Merton, Elihu Katz, David Riesman and Bernard Berelson. Lazarsfeld’s style was not that of the lone scholar. On the contrary, as Merton notes, he was happiest as the initiator and organizer of collaborative enquiries, as his many co-authored publications indicate. I propose to explore the development of the study of mass communicatio...