An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld - Jeff Pooley

392 Pages·2006·2.54 MB·English

by  Jefferson Pooley

A A M
N CCIDENT OF EMORY
EDWARD SHILS, PAUL LAZARSFELD AND THE
HISTORY OF AMERICAN MASS
COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
Jefferson D. Pooley
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
under the Executive Committee of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2006
© 2006
Jefferson D. Pooley
All Rights Reserved
Abstract

An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld
and the History of American Mass Communication
Research

The main memory of American mass communication research holds that scholars
around Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in the years during and after World War II, dispelled the
conventional wisdom that media marinate the defenseless American mind. According to
the story, 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 storyline, first
narrated in Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence (1955), remains textbook
boilerplate and literature review dogma fifty years later. The dissertation traces the
emergence of this “powerful-to-limited effects” disciplinary legend, with special
emphasis on the surprising contributions of sociologist Edward Shils, the mandarin
theorist and intellectual maverick with little interest in the empirical study of media. In
the crucial postwar years, Shils provided an account of the disappearance and
reemergence of “small group” research, which he framed as a contrast between pictures
of society—between the mistaken European view of impersonal isolation as against his
view, that Gemeinschaft elements endure. Shils’s treatment of small-group research, and
especially his embedding of that story in terms of societal imagery, was essential to the
field’s mnemonic emplotment. Shils had his own intellectual reasons for narrating the
history in the manner that he did—reasons rooted in his evolving and deeply engaged
search for the underpinnings of modern social order. In a sense, however, his reasons did
not matter once the narrative itself was released to the American sociological public;
Lazarsfeld and Katz had their own reasons for adopting the historical picture that Shils
put forward—reasons largely centered on scholarly competition and norms of originality.
The powerful-to-limited-effects narrative in Personal Influence, in turn, was so widely
embraced in the late 1950s for a still-different set of reasons—because of the scholarly
support it lent to the public intellectual defense of American popular culture, in the
context of an evolving Cold War liberalism. The staying power of this limited-effects
narrative was ultimately guaranteed, however, by the newly institutionalized, would-be
discipline of “communication”—which retained the storyline as a usable, and teachable,
past.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field ................................... 1
Chapter One
The Young Shils and the Downcast Intellectual ............ 21
Chapter Two

Shils and the Interwar Crisis of Liberalism ................... 59
Chapter Three
Shils’s Discovery of the Small Group ......................... 117
Chapter Four
Paul Lazarsfeld, Accidental Media Researcher ........... 179
Chapter Five
Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence ................................... 216
Postscript
Shils and the “Mass Society” Label ............................. 300
Bibliography
Dissertation Bibliography ............................................ 304
Appendix
History of Communication Studies Bibliography ........ 332
i
Acknowledgements
The dissertation that I planned to write hardly resembles this, the completed
manuscript. I set out to write a history of leftist media research, and ended up with an
account of the field’s remembered history: from Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe, in
my early conception, to Edward Shils and Paul Lazarsfeld here. My dissertation sponsor,
James W. Carey, adapted cheerfully to the topical meandering. Few if any
communication scholars share his broad-based intellectual literacy, and I benefited
enormously from his erudition and guidance—inside and outside the classroom. I owe
him the profoundest debt.
Of my other graduate teachers, two sociologists—Craig Calhoun and Jeff Olick—
stand out for their intelligence and commitment to truth-seeking. They both earned my
deepest respect as scholars and human beings, and both inform the dissertation in
numerous and particular ways. Another sociologist, Elihu Katz, helped shape my
understanding of the history of mass communication research, even if we did not always
share the same interpretation. I would never have finished without his generosity, wit, and
gentle prodding. Todd Gitlin, since my first independent study with him at NYU, has
been a reliable source of advice and feedback, and the dissertation bears his imprint.
Andie Tucher, in addition to her tireless work on behalf of the Communications PhD
program, modeled the historian’s craft for me.
My colleagues in the Media and Communication Department at Muhlenberg
College have generously supported me from the day I arrived in Allentown as an ABD.
Sue Curry Jansen deserves special mention: Her quiet wisdom—familiar to all who know
her—informed more of the dissertation than she realizes; our wide-ranging conversations
remain rich and rewarding to me.
ii
I could not have made it through that first Muhlenberg year without the constant
companionship of Jeremy Teissere, Janine Chi, and Charles Anderson—like me, brand-
new faculty disoriented by Allentown and the College’s demands. Though I left my close
friend Justin Nowell behind in New York to assume the Muhlenberg post, our frequent
conversations and day trips back and forth eased my Pennsylvanian transition.
I have boundless gratitude for my wife Karen, whose emotional support, patience,
and forgiving love were fundamental to the dissertation’s completion. She made many
sacrifices, and I hope to return the favors as she toils to complete her own dissertation.
My brand-new daughter Keller arrived just as I was applying the finishing touches, and
her presence made completion that much sweeter.
iii
1
INTRODUCTION
Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field
The main memory of American mass communication research holds that scholars
around Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in the years during and after World War II, dispelled the
conventional wisdom that media marinate the defenseless American mind. According to
the story, 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.
If we were to trust the first chapter of Personal Influence—the landmark 1955
study by Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld—the whole of pre-World War II research would
seem to us naïve in its methods and crude in its conclusions.1 Katz and Lazarsfeld’s well-
written, fifteen-page synopsis of the “ideas with which mass media research began”
ascribes to past scholarship one of “two opposite inclinations”: The interwar body of
work either decried the mass media as “instruments of evil design,” or else heralded those
media as a “new dawn for democracy.” Both tendencies—the fearful and the ebullient—
described the media message as a “direct and powerful stimulus.” Swept up by popular
alarm or blinded by utopian rhetoric, both kinds of scholars based their judgments on
intuition or folk wisdom or speculative European theory. None of this will do, write Katz
and Lazarsfeld. Fortunately, a new body of work has emerged that rejects the folk
wisdom and spurns the Europeans, and opts instead for a sober and quantitative approach.
1. Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "Images of the Mass Communications Process," in Personal
Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
1955) 15-42.
2
Katz and Lazarsfeld conclude their fifteen pages with a review of the new research,
whose “greater precision” has generated “increasing skepticism about the potency of the
mass media.”
In one short chapter, the field’s untidy past was neatly emplotted. A naïve,
intuitive prehistory—given over to the mistaken belief that radio and film wield
enormous power—got displaced by a calmer, scientific appraisal: These media, according
to the new evidence, have only “limited” effects. This Personal Influence history is
simple, direct, and meagerly sourced. Its clean narrative is resolved by the second act.
And it was believed: Fifty years later, the “powerful-to-limited-effects” storyline remains
textbook boilerplate and literature review dogma. Katz and Lazarsfeld’s fifteen pages
have had more influence on the field’s historical self-understanding than anything
published before or since.
All of the historiographical cliches of the decades to come—the interwar “magic
bullet theory,” for example, or the idea of a “hypodermic needle” model—trace their
origins to those fifteen pages. They themselves do not employ these terms—the
“hypodermic” image, as it turns out, was first invoked in passing by their colleague at the
Bureau of Applied Social Research, Bernard Berelson in his 1954 Voting study.2 But
Katz and Lazarsfeld lay out the whiggish two-stage history that would become the
common reference point—the default citational authority—for the many later
elaborations of the “powerful-to-limited-effects” storyline.
2. Berelson et al., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1954) 102. Lazarsfeld, of course, is the study’s second author. Deb
Lubken brought my attention to the Voting passage with the ‘hypodermic’ reference
3
********
It is a fitting irony that the sociologist Edward Shils, a mandarin theorist and intellectual
maverick with no interest in the empirical study of media, supplied the coalescing field of
mass communication research with a usable past. It was Shils who furnished, without
intending to, Personal Influence’s basic plot.
While it is possible to discern inchoate gropings toward the “limited effects”
storyline before Shils’s unwitting intervention, these were scattered and inconsistent,
without narrative tightness. As early as 1943, Lazarsfeld and others started to note the
difficulty of bringing about attitude change through media persuasion.3 But this
observation—repeated often over the next ten years—wasn’t yet framed as a claim of
minimal media impact, nor as a happy repudiation of precursor overreach. Indeed, the
discovery of the obstinate audience was typically discussed as a technical problem, as an
obstacle in the design of effective propaganda. Occasionally, especially in the years
immediately after the war, the failure of straightforward persuasion was treated in broad,
media-impact terms, but almost always in tension with the ongoing search for careful
propaganda design.4 This two-track, schizophrenic framing—a concern, on the one hand,
for finding out how to make persuasion work, and on the other, an effort to draw
3. The earliest research synthesis that places an emphasis on audience intransigence is Lazarsfeld and
RobertK.Merton,"StudiesinRadioandFilmPropaganda,"TransactionsoftheNewYorkAcademyof
Sciences6(2)(1943).Slightly,modified,thesynthesiswasincludedinRobertK.Merton’senormously
influential Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory and Research
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949/1968).
4. Two classics of media research from the immediate postwar years—Merton’s Mass Persuasion and
Lazarsfeld and Merton’s “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action”—
display this tension in acute form. (Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946); and "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized
Social Action," in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Harper, 1948)
95-118.)