Paul Lazarsfeld - Lazarsfeld's Work With Robert K. Merton

Lazarsfeld's Work With Robert K. Merton

Lazarsfeld was noted for his ability to forge productive collaborations with a wide range of thinkers. One of his most celebrated collaborations was with Robert K. Merton. Both Merton and Lazarsfeld were new faculty members in Columbia University’s Department of Sociology appointed in 1941. Merton was seen as a budding theorist, while Lazarsfield was considered a methodology specialist. Apparently the pair had little contact until Merton and his wife came to dinner at the Lazarsfeld’s Manhattan apartment on Saturday evening, 23 November 1941. Upon arrival Lazarsfeld explained to Merton that he had been just asked by the U.S. government’s Office of New Facts and Figures to evaluate a radio program. Thus ‘Merton accompanied Lazarsfeld to the radio studio, leaving their wives in the Lazarsfeld apartment with the uneaten dinner’. Lazarsfeld was using the famous Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program-Analyzer, to record the responses of listeners, and in the ensuing interviews they conducted, Merton was instrumental in ensuring questions were properly answered. This was believed to be the start of the ‘focused group interview’, or what we now known as the ‘focus group’. It was also the beginning of a rich and influential collaboration in the field of communication studies.

The paper for which Lazarsfield and Merton is best known is their ‘Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action’ (1948). Widely anthologized, the paper has been proposed as a canonical text in media studies. Lazarsfeld and Merton set out to understand the burgeoning public interest in problems of the ‘media of mass communication’. After a critical consideration of how common and problematic approaches to the mass media — noting that the ‘sheer presence of these media may not affect our society so profoundly as is widely supposed’ — they work their work through three aspects of what they see as the problem. They highlight three ‘social functions’ that cast a long shadow into the present day. The first of these is status conferral function, or the way that the ‘mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements’. The second function is the ‘enforcement of social norms’, where the mass media uses public exposure of events or behaviour, to expose ‘deviations from these norms to public view’. The third function, and perhaps best known, is the ‘narcotizing dysfunction’, in which energies of individuals in society are systematically routed away from organized action — because of the time and attention needed to simply keep up with reading or listening to mass media: ‘Exposure to this flood of information may serve to narcotize rather than to energize the average reader or listener’.

The remainder of Lazarsfeld and Merton’s paper discusses structure of ownership and operation of the mass media specific to the U.S.— especially the fact that in the case of magazines, newspapers, and radio advertising ‘supports the enterprise’: ‘Big business finances the production and distribution of mass media … he who pays the piper generally calls the tune’. They point out the ensuing problems of social conformism, and consider the impact upon popular taste (a controversy which rages unabated until the present). The final section of the paper considers a topic of great salience in the post-World War II period, propaganda for social objectives. Here they propose three conditions for rendering such propaganda effective, terming these ‘monopolization’ (the ‘absence of counter propaganda’), ‘canalization’ (taking established behaviour and enlisting it in a particular direction), and ‘supplementation’ (the reinforcement of mass media messages by face-to-face contact in local organizations). Lazarsfeld and Merton’s classic essay has long been criticized as a high point of the dominant effects tradition in communication theory. However, revisionist accounts have now drawn attention to the mix of ideas it contains from ‘critical’ communication traditions, as much as empirical, methodological, and quantitative approaches.