Chapter five
Wanted: Audiences.
On the politics of empirical audience studies
In his pioneering book The “Nationwide” Audience, David Morley situates his research on which the book reports as follows: “The relation of an audience to the ideological operations of television remains in principle an empirical question: the challenge is the attempt to develop appropriate methods of empirical investigation of that relation.”1
Although this sentence may initially be interpreted as a call for a technical discussion about empirical research methods, its wider meaning should be sought in the theoretical and political context of Morley's work. To me, the importance of The “Nationwide” Audience does not so much reside in the fact that it offers an empirically validated, and thus “scientific” account of “the ideological operations of television,” or merely in its demonstration of some of the ways in which the television audience is “active.” Other, more wide-ranging issues are at stake.
Since its publication in 1980, The “Nationwide” Audience has played an important role in media studies, especially in Britain, western Europe, and Australia, not so much because of its inherent “informational” value, but because of its strategic position in the field of qualitative empirical research on media audiences – a field that has gone through a rapid development in the 1980s. It seems fair to say that Morley's book forms a major moment in the growing popularity of an “ethnographic” approach on media audiences – Morley himself termed his project an “ethnography of reading.”2 This type of qualitative empirical research, usually carried out in the form of in-depth interviews with a small number of people (and at times supplemented with some form of participant observation), is now recognized by many as one of the most adequate ways to learn about the differentiated subtleties of people's engagements with television and other media.
This “ethnographic” approach seems to be gaining popularity in both “critical” media studies and “mainstream” mass communications research.3 A sort of methodological consensus seems to be emerging, a common ground in which scholars from divergent epistemological backgrounds can thrive. On the one hand, qualitative methods of empirical research seem to be acceptable because they offer the possibility to avoid what C. Wright Mills has termed abstracted empiricism,4 which is often leveled at quantitative methods by “critical” scholars; on the other hand, some “mainstream” audience researchers at least have acknowledged the limitations on the kind of data that can be produced by large-scale, quantitative survey work, and believe that ethnographically oriented methods can overcome the shortcomings observed. Given this enthusiastic, rather new interest for the qualitative aspects of television viewing, I would like to reflect upon its general implications for our understanding of television audiences. What kind of knowledge does it produce? What can this manner of doing empirical research on audiences mean? In short, what are the politics of audience “ethnography”?
It is my intention in exploring these questions to try to clarify some of the issues that are at stake in developing a critical perspective in empirical audience studies. The term “critical” – as I would like to use it here – refers first of all to a certain intellectual-political orientation toward academic practice: whatever its subject matter or method of analysis, essential to doing “critical” research would be the adoption of a self-reflexive perspective, one that is, first, conscious of the social and discursive nature of any research practice, and, second, takes seriously the Foucaultian reminder that the production of knowledge is always bound up in a network of power relations. By characterizing “critical” research in this way, that is as an orientation rather than as a fixed “paradigm,” I aim to relativize the more rigid ways in which “critical” and “mainstream” research have often been opposed to one another. Formally speaking, positions can only be “critical” or “mainstream” in relation to other positions within a discursive field. The two terms thus do not primarily signify fixed contents of thought, but their status within a whole field of thinking. The relations of force in that field can change over time: what was once “critical” (or marginal) can become part of the “mainstream”; what was once “mainstream” (or dominant) can lose its power and be pushed aside to the marginal. Furthermore, as Larry Grossberg has usefully remarked, the term “critical” can bear uneasy arrogant connotations: after all, is there any scholar whose work is not “critical” in some sense?5
This does not mean, of course, that the distinction is totally devoid of any substantive bearings. Historically, those scholars who are committed to doing “critical” work have been led in their research agendas by certain philosophical, theoretical, and political influences and currents, which have shaped their interests and perspectives, and profiled their problematics. For example, in media studies the “critical” tradition, whose beginnings can be located in the work of the Frankfurt School, has generally derived its philosophical inspiration from continental schools of thought such as Marxism and (post)structuralism. In terms of research problematics, it has mainly been concerned with the analysis of the ideological and/or economic role of the media in capitalist and patriarchal society, while its epistemological underpinnings are generally characterized by a strident anti-positivist and anti-empiricist mentality.6
This distrust of positivist empiricism on the part of “critical” theorists, however, does not necessarily imply an inherent incompatibility between “critical” and empirical research, as is often contended by “mainstream” scholars.7 Indeed, if doing “critical” research is more a matter of intellectual-political orientation than of academic paradigm-building, then no fixed, universal yardstick, theoretical or methodological, for what constitutes “critical” knowledge is possible. On the contrary, in my view what it means to be critical needs to be assessed and constantly reassessed in every concrete conjuncture, with respect to the concrete issues and directions that are at stake in any concrete research field. In other words, I am proposing an open and contextual definition of “critical” research, one that does not allow itself to rest easily on pre-existent epistemological foundations but – on the contrary – engages itself in reflecting on the ways in which it contributes to our understanding of the world.
In the following, I hope to clarify some of the implications of this perspective on doing “critical” research for an evaluation of the current developments in audience studies. More concretely, what I will discuss and try to elaborate in this chapter is what I take as the political and theoretical specificity of the cultural studies approach as a “critical” perspective, from which David Morley, coming from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has developed his work.8 I will set this perspective on audience studies against the uses and gratifications approach, in which an interest in the “ethnographic” has been growing recently. In doing this it is not my intention to construct an absolute antagonism between the two approaches. Rather, I would like to highlight some of the differences in preoccupation in both approaches, in order to specify how the project of audience ethnographies can take on a “critical” outlook in the sense I have outlined. Before doing this, I will first give a short sketch of the intellectual arena in which Morley intervened.
Against textual determinism
The “Nationwide” Audience appeared at a time when critical discourse about film and television in Britain was heavily preoccupied with what Morley, following Steve Neale, calls an “abstract text/subject relationship,” formulated within a generally (post)structuralist theoretical framework.9 In this discourse, primarily developed in the journal Screen, film and television spectatorship is almost exclusively theorized from the perspective of the “productivity of the text.” As a consequence, the role of the viewer was conceived in purely formalist terms: as a position inscribed in the text. Here, the subject-in-the-text tends to collapse with “real” social subjects. In this model, there is no space for a dialogical relationship between texts and social subjects. Texts are assumed to be the only source of meaning; they construct subject positions which viewers are bound to take up if they are to make sense of the text. In other words, the reading of texts is conceived here as entirely dictated by textual structures.
It is this model's textual determinism that fueled Morley's dissatisfaction. Theoretically, it implied an ahistorical, asocial, and generalist conception of film and television spectatorship. Methodologically, the analysis of textual structures alone was considered to be sufficient to comprehend how viewers are implicated in the texts they encounter. Politically, this model left no space of manoeuvre for television consumers. They are implicitly conceived as “prisoners” of the text. It is against this background that Morley decided to undertake an empirical investigation of how groups of viewers with different social positions read or interpret one particular text: an episode of the television program Nationwide, One of the most important motivations of Morley's intervention, then, was to overcome the theoreticism of Screen theory's discourse, in which the relation of text and subject is dealt with “as an [a] priori question to be deduced from a theory of the ideal spectator ‘inscribed’ in the text.”10 By looking at how one text could be decoded in different ways by different groups of social subjects, Morley intended, and succeeded, to demonstrate that encounters between texts and viewers are far more complex than the theory would suggest; they are overdetermined by the operation of a multiplicity of forces – certain historical and social structures, but also other texts – that simultaneously act upon the subjects concerned.11 Principally, what The “Nationwide” Audience explores is the notion that the moment of decoding should be considered as a relatively autonomous process in which a constant struggle over the meaning of the text is fought out. Textual meanings do not reside in the texts themselves: a certain text can come to mean different things depending on the interdiscursive context in which viewers interpret it.
The meaning and politics of Morley's turn toward empirical research of the television audience should be assessed against this critical background. It is first of all a procedure that is aimed at opening up a space in which watching television can begin to be understood as a complex cultural practice full of dialogical negotiations and contestations, rather than as a singular occurrence whose meaning can be determined once and for all in the abstract. Doing empirical research then is here used as a strategy to break out of a hermetically closed theoreticism in which an absolute certainty about the ideological effectivity of television is presumed. Thus, when Morley says that the relation of an audience to television “remains an empirical question,” what he is basically aiming at is to open up critical discourse on television audiences, and to sensitize it for the possibility of struggle in the field of television consumption – a struggle whose outcome cannot be known in advance, for the simple reason that encounters between television and audiences are always historically specific and context-bound.
Academic convergence?
The “Nationwide” Audience has generally been received as an innovative departure within cultural studies, both theoretically and methodologically. If Screen theory can be diagnosed as one instance in which critical discourse on television suffered from the problem of the “disappearing audience,”12 Morley's project is an indication of a growing acknowledgment within cultural studies that television viewing is a practice that involves the active production of meanings by viewers.
But the book has also been welcomed by some adherents of the influential uses and gratifications approach, who see it as an important step on the part of “critical” scholars in their direction, that is as an acceptance of, and possible contribution to, a refinement of their own basic axiomatic commitment to “the active audience.” On the other hand, some uses and gratifications researchers, for their part, have begun to take over semiologically informed cultural studies concepts such as “text” and “reader,” thereby indicating an acknowledgment of the symbolic nature of negotiations between media texts and their readers which they, in their functionalist interest for the multiple relationships between audience gratifications and media “uses,” had previously all but ignored.13
On top of this conceptual rapprochement, these social scientists have also expressed their delight in noticing a methodological “concession” among “critical” scholars: finally, so it is argued, some “critical” scholars at least have dropped their suspicion of doing empirical research. In a benevolent, rather fatherly tone, three senior ambassadors of the uses and gratifications approach, Blumler, Gurevitch, and Katz, have thus proclaimed a gesture of “reaching out” to the other “camp,” calling for incorporating some of the insights developed within the “critical” perspective into their own paradigm.14 Evoked then is the prospect of merging the two approaches, to the point that they may ultimately fuse into a happy common project in which the perceived hostility between the two “camps” will have been unmasked as academic “pseudo-conflicts.” As one leading gratifications researcher, Rosengren, optimistically predicts: “To the extent that the same problematics are empirically studied by members of various schools, the present sharp differences of opinion will gradually diminish and be replaced by a growing convergence of perspectives.”15
However, to interpret these recent developments in audience studies in terms of such a convergence is to simplify and even misconceive the issues at stake. For one thing, I would argue that the two perspectives only superficially share “the same problematics,” and that what separates a “critical” from a “mainstream” perspective is more than merely some “differences of opinion,” sharp or otherwise: it concerns fundamental differences not only in epistemological, but also in theoretical and political attitudes toward the aim and status of doing empirical research as such.
The academic idealization of joining forces in pursuit of a supposedly common goal as if it were a neutral, scientific project is a particularly depoliticizing strategy, because it tends to neutralize all difference and disagreement in favor of a forced consensus. If I am cautious about this euphoria around the prospect of academic convergence, it is not my intention to impose a rigid and absolute eternal dichotomy between “critical” and “mainstream” research. Nor would I want to assert that Morley's project is entirely “critical” and the uses and gratifications approach completely “mainstream.” As I have noted before, the relationship between “critical” and “mainstream” is not a fixed one; it does not concern two mutually exclusive, antagonistic sets of knowledge, as some observers would imply by talking in terms of “schools” or “paradigms.” In fact, many assumptions and ideas do not intrinsically belong to one or the other perspective. For example, the basic assumption that the television audience is “active” (rather than passive) and that watching television is a social (rather than an individual) practice is currently accepted in both perspectives. There is nothing spectacular about that.16 Also, I would suggest that the idea that texts can generate multiple meanings, and that the text/reader relationship takes the form of negotiations, is not in itself a sufficient condition for the declared convergence.17
In other words, in evaluating whether we can really speak of convergence, it is not enough to establish similar research questions, or to identify a common acknowledgment of the usefulness of certain methods of inquiry. Of course, such commonalities are interesting enough and it would be nonsense to discard them categorically. I do think it is important to get rid of any dogmatism or antagonism-for-the-sake-of-it, and to try to learn from others wherever that is possible. But at the same time we should not lose sight of the fact that any call for convergence itself is not an innocent gesture. It tends to be done from a certain point of view and therefore inevitably involves a selection process in which certain issues and themes are highlighted and others suppressed. And it is my contention that an all too hasty declaration of convergence could lead to neglecting some of the most important distinctive features of cultural studies as a critical intellectual enterprise.
A difference in conceptualizing the object of study is a first issue that needs to be discussed here. Thus, to take the common interest in “audience activity” as an example in a cultural studies perspective, “audience activity” cannot and should not be studied in isolation. Rather than dissecting “audience activity” into variables and categories in order to be able to study them one by one, so that we could ultimately have a complete and generalizable formal “map” of all dimensions of “audience activity,” which seems to be the drive behind the uses and gratifications project,18 the aim of cultural studies, as I see it, is to arrive at a more historicized insight into the ways in which “audience activity” is related to social and political structures and processes. In other words, what is at stake is not the understanding of “audience activity” as such as an isolated and isolable phenomenon and object of research, but the embeddedness of “audience activity” in a network of ongoing cultural practices and relationships.
As a result, an audience researcher working within a cultural studies sensibility cannot restrict herself or himself to “just” studying audiences and their activities (and, for that matter, relating those activities with other variables such as gratifications sought or obtained, dependencies, effects, and so on). She or he will also engage with the structural and cultural processes through which the audiences she or he is studying are constituted and being constituted. Thus, one essential theoretical point of the cultural studies approach to the television audience is its foregrounding of the notion that the dynamics of watching television, no matter how heterogeneous and seemingly free it is, is always related to the operations of forms of social power. It is in this light that we should see Morley's decision to do research on viewers’ decodings: it was first of all motivated by an interest in what he – in the quote at the beginning of this chapter – calls “the ideological operations of television.”
It is important then to emphasize that the term “active audience” does not occupy the same symbolic status in the two approaches. From a cultural studies point of view, evidence that audiences are “active” cannot simply be equated with the rather triumphant, liberal-pluralist conclusion, often expressed by gratificationists, that media consumers are “free” or even “powerful” – a conclusion which allegedly undercuts the idea of “media hegemony.” The question for cultural studies is not simply one of “where the power lies in media systems” (i.e. with the audience or with the media producers),19 but rather how relations of power are organized within the heterogeneous practices of media consumption. In other words, rather than constructing an opposition between “the” media and “the” audience, as if these were separate ontological entities, and, along with it, the application of a distributional theory of power (that is, power is a property that can be attributed to either side of the opposing entities), cultural studies scholars are interested in understanding media consumption as a site of cultural struggle, in which a variety of forms of power are exercised, with different sorts of effects.20 Thus if, as Morley's study has shown, viewers can decode a text in different ways and sometimes even give oppositional meanings to it, this should not be conceived as an example of “audience freedom,” but as a moment in that cultural struggle, an ongoing struggle over meaning and pleasure which is central to the fabric(ation) of everyday life.
I hope to have made clear by now that in evaluating the possibility or even desirability of convergence, it is important to look at how “audience activity” is theorized or interpreted, and how research “findings” are placed in a wider theoretical framework. So, if one type of “audience activity” which has received much attention in both approaches recently has been the interpretative strategies used by audiences to read media texts (conceptualized in terms of decoding structures, interpretative communities, patterns of involvement, and so on), how are we to make sense of those interpretative strategies? The task of the cultural studies researcher, I would suggest, is to develop strategic interpretations of them, different not only in form and content, but also in scope and intent, from those offered in more “mainstream”-oriented accounts.21 I will return to this central issue of interpretation.
Beyond methodology
A troubling aspect about the idea of (and desire for) convergence, then, is that it tends to be conceptualized as an exclusively “scientific” enterprise. Echoing the tenets of positivism, its aim seems to be the gradual accumulation of scientifically confirmed “findings.” It is propelled by the hope that by seeking a shared agreement on what is relevant and by developing shared methodological skills the final scientific account of “the audience” can eventually be achieved. In this framework, audience studies are defined as just another branch of an academic discipline (i.e. mass communication), in which it is unproblematically assumed that “the audience” is a proper object of study whose characteristics can be ever more accurately observed, described, categorized, systematized, and explained, until the whole picture is “filled in.” In principle (if not in practice), this scientific project implicitly claims to be able to produce total knowledge, to reveal the full and objective “truth” about “the audience.” Audience here is imagined as and turned into an object with researchable attributes and features (be it described in terms of arrays of preferences, decodings, uses, effects, or whatever) that could be definitively established – if only researchers of different breeding would stop quarreling with each other and unite to work harmoniously together to accomplish the task.22
From such an academic point of view, the question of methodology becomes a central issue. After all, rigor of method has traditionally been seen as the guarantee par excellence for the “scientific” status of knowledge. In positivist social science, the hypothetico-deductive testing of theory through empirical research, quantitative in form, is cherished as the cornerstone of the production of “scientific” knowledge. Theory that is not empirically tested, or that is too complex to be molded into empirically testable hypotheses, is dismissed as “unscientific.” These assumptions, which are central to the dominant version of the uses and gratifications approach as it was established in the 1970s, are now contested by a growing number of researchers who claim that reality cannot be grasped and explained through quantitative methods alone. Furthermore, they forcefully assert that to capture the multidimensionality and complexity of audience activity the use of qualitative methods – and thus a move towards the “ethnographic” – is desperately called for.23
From an academic point of view, it is this methodological challenge that forms the condition of possibility of the perceived convergence. However, although I think that the struggle for legitimization of qualitative research is a very important one, I do believe that it is not the central point for critical cultural studies. This is because the struggle is cast primarily in methodological terms, and therefore its relevance is confined to the development of audience research as an academic enterprise. Given the decade-long hegemony of positivism and the quantifying attitude in audience research, this development is a significant one indeed. Unfortunately, however, many discussions about the usefulness of qualitative methods still do not question the epistemological distinction between science and common sense that lies at the heart of positivism. The aim is still the isolation of a body of knowledge that can be recognized as “scientific” (in its broadest meaning), the orientation is toward the advancement of an academic discipline, and concomitantly, the technical improvement of its instruments of analysis.
A cultural studies perspective on audience research cannot stop short at this level of debate. For a critical cultural studies, it is not questions of methodology or academic struggle as such that prevail. On the contrary, we should relativize the academic commitment to increasing knowledge for its own sake and resist the temptation to what Stuart Hall has called the “codification” of cultural studies into a stable realm of established theories and canonized methodologies.24 In this respect, the territorial conflict between “mainstream” and “critical,” quantitative and qualitative, humanistic and social scientific, and so on, should perhaps not bother us too much at all in the first place. As James Carey once remarked, “perhaps all the talk about theory, method, and other such things prevents us from raising or permits us to avoid raising, deeper and disquieting questions about the purposes of our scholarship.”25 And indeed: why are we so interested in knowing about audiences in the first place? In empirical audience research, especially, it is important to reflect upon the status of the knowledge produced. After all, scrutinizing media audiences is not an innocent practice. It does not take place in a social and political vacuum. Historically, the hidden agenda of audience research, even when it presents itself as pure and objective, has all too often been its commercial or political usefulness. In other words, what we should reflect upon is the political interventions we make when talking about audiences – political not only in the sense of some distant societal goal, but, more importantly, in that we cannot afford ignoring the political dimensions of the process and practice of knowledge production itself. What does it mean to subject audiences to the researcher's gaze? How can we develop insights that do not reproduce the kind of objectified knowledge served up by, say, market research or empiricist effects research? How is it possible to do audience research which is “on the side” of the audience?26 These are nagging political questions which cannot be smoothed out by the comforting canons of epistemology, methodology, and “science.”
Of course, it is not easy to pin down what such considerations would imply in concrete terms. But it could at least be said that we should try to avoid a stance in which “the audience” is relegated to the status of exotic “other” – merely interesting in so far as “we,” as researchers, can turn “them” into “objects” of study, and about whom “we” have the privileged position to acquire “objective” knowledge.27 To begin with, I think, critical audience studies should not strive and pretend to tell “the truth” about “the audience.” Its ambitions should be much more modest. As Lawrence Grossberg has suggested, “the goal of [critical research] is to offer not a polished representation of the truth, but simply a little help in our efforts to better understand the world.”28 This modesty does not have so much to do with some sort of false humility as with the basic acknowledgment that every research practice unavoidably takes place in a particular historical situation, and is therefore principally of a partial nature. As Hammersley and Atkinson have provocatively put it, “all social research takes the form of participant observation: it involves participating in the social world, in whatever role, and reflecting on the products of that participation.”29 The collection of data, either quantitative or qualitative in form, can never be separated from their interpretation; it is only through practices of interpretative theorizing that unruly social experiences and events related to media consumption become established as meaningful “facts” about audiences. Understanding “audience activity” is thus caught up in the discursive representation, not the transparent reflection, of realities having to do with audiences.
These considerations lead to another, more politicized conception of doing research. It is not the search for (objective, scientific) knowledge in which the researcher is engaged, but the construction of interpretations, of certain ways of understanding the world, always historically located, subjective, and relative. It is the decisive importance of this interpretative moment that I would like to highlight in exploring the possibilities of critical audience studies.30
In positivism, interpretation is assigned a marginal place: as a result of its emphasis on the empirical testing of theory, interpretation is assumed to follow rather automatically from the so-called “findings.” Achieved then is an apparent innocence of interpretation, one that is seemingly grounded in “objective social reality” itself. In fact, the term “interpretation” itself would seem to have definite negative connotations for positivists because of its connection with “subjectivism.” And even within those social science approaches in which the interpretative act of the researcher - not only at the moment of data analysis, but also at that of data collection – is taken more seriously, interpretation is more often than not problematized as a methodical rather than a political matter, defined in terms of careful inference making rather than in terms of discursive constructions of reality.
It should be recognized, however, that because interpretations always inevitably involve the construction of certain representations of reality (and not others), they can never be “neutral” and merely “descriptive.” After all, the “empirical,” captured in either quantitative or qualitative form, does not yield self-evident meanings; it is only through the interpretative framework constructed by the researcher that understandings of the “empirical” come about. The choice of empirical methods of investigation is only one part of a double venture: it is in the dialectic between the empirical and the theoretical, between experience and explanation, that forms of knowledge, that is interpretations, are constructed. Here then the thoroughly political nature of any research manifests itself. What is at stake is a politics of interpretation: “to advance an interpretation is to insert it into a network of power relations.”31
This also implies a shift in the position of the researcher. She or he is no longer a bearer of truth, but occupies a “partial” position in two senses of the word. On the one hand, she or he is no longer the neutral observer, but is someone whose job it is to produce historically and culturally specific knowledges that are the result of equally specific discursive encounters between researcher and informants, in which the subjectivity of the researcher is not separated from the “object” s/he is studying. The interpretations that are produced in the process can never claim to be definitive: on the contrary, they are necessarily incomplete (for they always involve simplification, selection, and exclusion) and temporary. “If neither history nor politics ever comes to an end, then theory (as well as research) is never completed and our accounts can never be closed or totalized.”32 And on the other hand, and even more important, the position of the researcher is also more than that of the professional scholar: beyond a capable interpreter, she or he is also inherently a political and moral subject. She or he is an intellectual who is not only responsible to the Academy, but to the social world she or he lives in as well. It is at the interface of “ethics” and “scholarship” that the researcher's interpretations take on their distinctive political edge.33
Of course, all this entails a different status for empirical research. Material obtained by ethnographic fieldwork or depth-interviews with audience members cannot simply be treated as natural “data.” Viewers’ statements about their relation to television cannot be regarded as self-evident facts. Nor are they immediate, transparent reflections of those viewers’ “lived realities” that can speak for themselves. What is of critical importance, therefore, is the way in which those statements are made sense of, that is interpreted. Here lies the ultimate political responsibility of the researcher. The comfortable assumption that it is the reliability and accuracy of the methodologies being used that will ascertain the validity of the outcomes of research, thereby reducing the researcher's responsibility to a technical matter, is rejected. In short, to return to Morley's opening statement, audience ethnographies are undertaken because the relation between television and viewers is an empirical question. But the empirical is not the privileged domain of the answers, as the positivist would have it. Answers (temporary ones, to be sure) are to be constructed, in the form of interpretations.34
Towards interpretative ethnography
I would now like to return to David Morley's work, and evaluate its place in the research field in the light of the foregoing reflections. To be sure, Morley himself situates his work firmly within the academic context. And parallel to the recent calls for convergence and cross-fertilization of diverse perspectives, Morley seems to have dropped his original antagonistic posture. For example, while in The “Nationwide” Audience he emphasizes that “we need to break fundamentally with the ‘uses and gratifications’ approach,”35 in his most recent book, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, he simply states that this new piece of research draws “upon some of the insights of this very approach.”36 The latter book is also in a more general sense set in a less polemical tone than the first one: rather than taking up a dissident's stance against other theoretical perspectives, which is a central attribute of The “Nationwide” Audience, Family Television is explicitly presented as a study that aims to combine the perspectives of separate traditions in order to overcome what Morley calls an “unproductive form of segregation.”37 Furthermore, both books are written in a markedly conventional style of academic social science, structured according to a narrative line which starts out with their contextualization within related academic research trends, followed by a methodological exposition and a description of the findings, and rounded off with a chapter containing an interpretation of the results and some more general conclusions. In both books Morley's voice is exclusively that of the earnest researcher; the writer's I, almost completely eliminated from the surface of the text, is apparently a disembodied subject solely driven by a disinterested wish to contribute to “scientific progress.”38
Morley's academistic inclination tends to result in a lack of clarity as to the political thrust of his analyses. For example, the relevance of Family Television as a project designed to investigate at the same time two different types of questions – questions of television use on the one hand, and questions of textual interpretation on the other – is simply asserted by the statement that these are “urgent questions about the television audience.”39 But why? What kind of urgency is being referred to here? Morley goes on to say that it is the analysis of the domestic viewing context as such which is his main interest, and that he wishes to identify the multiple meanings hidden behind the catch-all phrase “watching television.” Indeed, central to Family Television's discourse are, as Stuart Hall remarks in his introduction to the book, the notions of variability, diversity, and difference:
We are all, in our heads, several different audiences at once, and can be constituted as such by different programmes. We have the capacity to deploy different levels and modes of attention, to mobilise different competences in our viewing. At different times of the day, for different family members, different patterns of viewing have different “saliences.”40
Yet, when taken in an unqualified manner, it is exactly this stress on difference that essentially connects Morley's project with the preoccupations of the uses and gratifications research. After all, it is their self-declared distinctive mission to get to grips with “the gamut of audience experience.”41 For them too, the idea of plurality and diversity is pre-eminently the guiding principle for research. A convergence of perspectives after all?
Despite all the agreements that are certainly there, a closer look at the ramifications of Morley's undertaking reveals other concerns than merely the characterization and categorizing of varieties within viewers’ readings and uses of television. Ultimately, it is not difference as such that is of main interest in Morley's work. To be sure, differences are not just simple facts that emerge more or less spontaneously from the empirical interview material; it is a matter of interpretation what are established as significant differences.42 In cultural studies, then, it is the meanings of differences that matter – something that can only be grasped, interpretatively, by looking at their contexts, social and cultural bases, and impacts. Thus, rather than the classification of differences and varieties in all sorts of typologies, which is a major preoccupation of a lot of uses and gratifications work, cultural studies would be oriented toward a detailed understanding of how and why varieties in experience occur – a venture, to be sure, that is a closer approach to the ethnographic spirit.
In Family Television, for example, Morley has chosen to foreground the pattern of differences in viewing habits that are articulated with gender. What Morley emphasizes is that men and women clearly relate in contrasting ways to television, not only as to program preferences, but also in, for example, viewing styles. The wives interviewed by Morley tend to watch television less attentively, at the same time doing other things such as talking or housework. The husbands, in contrast, state a clear preference for viewing attentively, in silence, without interruption “in order not to miss anything.”43 These differences are substantiated and highlighted by Morley's research as empirical facts, but he is careful to avoid considering these as essential differences between men and women. As Charlotte Brunsdon has noted, it seems possible “to differentiate a male – fixed, controlling, uninterruptible gaze – and a female – distracted, obscured, already busy – manner of watching television. There is some empirical truth in these characterizations, but to take this empirical truth for explanation leads to a theoretical short-circuit.”44 Indeed, in mainstream sociological accounts, gender would probably be treated as a self-evident pregiven factor that can be used as “independent variable” to explain these differences. Male and female modes of watching television would then be constituted as two separate, discrete types of experience, clearly defined, fixed, static “objects” in themselves as it were.45 Such an empiricist account not only essentializes gender differences, but also fails to offer an understanding of how and why differentiations along gender lines take the very forms they do.
In contrast to this, both Morley and Brunsdon start out to construct a tentative interpretation which does not take the difference between male and female relations to television as an empirical given. Neither do they take recourse to psychological notions such as “needs” or “socialization” – as is often done in accounts of gender differences, as well as in uses and gratifications research – to try to understand why men and women tend to watch and talk about television in the disparate ways that they do. In their interpretative work Morley and Brunsdon accentuate the structure of domestic power relations as constitutive for the differences concerned. The home generally has different meanings for men and women living in nuclear family arrangements: for husbands it is the site of leisure, for wives it is the site of work. Therefore, television as a domestic cultural form tends to be invested with different meanings for men and women. Television has for men become a central symbol for relaxation; women's relation to television, on the other hand, is much more contradictory. Thus asserts Brunsdon, in commenting on Morley's research:
The social relations between men and women appear to work in such a way that although the men feel ok about imposing their choice of viewing on the whole of the family, the women do not. The women have developed all sorts of strategies to cope with television viewing they don’t particularly like. The men in most cases appear to feel it would be literally unmanning for them to sit quiet during the women's programmes. However, the women in general seem to find it almost impossible to switch into the silent communion with the television set that characterises so much male viewing.46
Women's distracted mode of watching television thus does not have something to do with some essential femininity, but is a result of a complex of cultural and social arrangements which makes it difficult for them to do otherwise, even though they often express a longing to be able to watch their favorite programs without being disturbed. Men, on the other hand, can watch television in a concentrated manner because they control the conditions to do so. Their way of watching television, Brunsdon concludes, “seems not so much a masculine mode, but a mode of power.”47
What clearly emerges here is the beginning of an interpretative framework in which differences in television viewing practices are not just seen as expressions of different needs, uses, or readings, but are connected with the way in which historical subjects are structurally positioned in relation to each other. Women's viewing patterns can only be understood in relation to men's patterns; the two are in a sense constitutive of each other. Thus, if watching television is a social and even collective practice, it is not a harmonious practice.48 Because subjects are positioned in different ways toward the set, they engage in a continuing struggle over program choice and program interpretation, style of viewing, and textual pleasure. What kind of viewer they become can be seen as the outcome of this struggle, an outcome, however, that is never definitive because it can always be contested and subverted. What we call “viewing habits” are thus not a more or less static set of characteristics inhabited by an individual or group of individuals; rather they are the temporary result of a never-ending, dynamic, and conflict-ridden process in which “the fine-grained interrelationships between meaning, pleasure, use and choice” are shaped.49
Morley's empirical findings, then, acquire their relevance and critical value in the context of this emerging theoretical framework. And of course it could only have been carried out from a specific interpretative point of view. Needless to say that the point of view taken up by Morley and Brunsdon is a feminist one, that is, a position that is sensitive to the fact that male/female relationships are always informed by power, contradiction, and struggle. Television consumption, so we begin to understand, contributes to the everyday contruction of male and female subjectivities. At this point, we can also see how Morley's research enables us to begin to conceive of “the ideological operations of television” in a much more radical way than has hitherto been done.50 The relation between television and audiences is not just a matter of “negotiations” between texts and viewers. The process of television consumption, and the cultural positioning of television as such, have created new areas of constraints and possibilities for structuring social relationships, identities, and desires. If television is an “ideological apparatus,” to use that old fashioned-sounding term, this is not so much because its texts transmit certain “messages” as because it is a cultural form through which those constraints are negotiated and those possibilities take shape.
But, one might ask, do we need empirical research or, more specifically, audience ethnographies to arrive at such theoretical understandings? Why approach audiences empirically at all?51 I would like to make one last comment on Morley's work here. Due to his academistic posture Morley has not deemed it necessary to reflect upon his own position as a researcher. We do not get to know how he found and got on with his interviewees, nor are we informed about the way in which the interviews themselves took place. One of the very few things we learn about this in Family Television is that he gave up interviewing the adults and the young children at the same time, reportedly “because after an initial period of fascination the young children quite quickly got bored”!52 But what about the adults? What were the reasons for their willingness to talk at such length to an outsider (or was David Morley not an outsider to them)? And how did the specific power relationship pervading the interview situation affect not only the families, but also the researcher himself? These are problems inherent in conducting ethnographic research that are difficult to unravel. But that does not mean that audience researchers should not confront them, and, eventually, draw the radical and no doubt uncomfortable conclusions that will emerge from that confrontation.53
Meanwhile, I do think that, in the ever-expanding field of audience studies, an ethnographic approach can and does have a distinct critical value. Ethnographic work, in the sense of drawing on what we can perceive and experience in everyday settings, acquires its critical mark when it functions as a reminder that reality is always more complicated and diversified than our theories can represent, and that there is no such thing as “audience” whose characteristics can be set once and for all.54 The critical promise of the ethnographic attitude resides in its potential to make and keep our interpretations sensitive to concrete specificities, to the unexpected, to history; it is a commitment to submit ourselves to the possibility of, in Paul Willis’ words, “being ‘surprised,’ of reaching knowledge not prefigured in one's starting paradigm.”55 What matters is not the certainty of knowledge about audiences, but an ongoing critical and intellectual engagement with the multifarious ways in which we constitute ourselves through media consumption. Or, as in the words of Stuart Hall: “I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going on theorizing.”56
Notes
1 David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 162.
2 David Morley, “’The Nationwide Audience’ – A Critical Postscript/’ Screen Education 39 (summer 1981): 13. It should be noted, however, that the term “ethnographic” is somewhat misplaced in this context. Within anthropology, ethnography refers to an in-depth field study of a culture and its inhabitants in their natural location, which would require the researcher to spend a fair amount of time in that location, allowing her/him to acquire a nuanced and comprehensive insight into the dynamics of the social relationships in the culture under study, and enabling her/him to produce a “thick description” of it. Most qualitative studies of media audiences do not meet these requirements. In Morley's Nationwide study, for example, the informants were extracted from their natural viewing environment and interviewed in groups that were put together according to socio-economic criteria. In a looser sense, however, the use of the term “ethnographic” could be justified here in so far as the approach is aimed at getting a thorough insight into the “lived experience” of media consumption. For a useful introduction to the principles of ethnography as an instance of social research, see Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles in Practice (London and New York: Tavistock, 1983).
3 See, for example, Dorothy Hobson, “Housewives and the Mass Media,” in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 105–14; and Dorothy Hobson, “Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Ien Ang, Watching “Dallas”. Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); James Lull, “The Social Uses of Television,” in Human Communications Research 6, no.3 (1980): 198–209; Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “Mutual Aid in the Decoding of Dallas: Preliminary Notes from a Cross-Cultural Study,” in Phillip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds) Television in Transition (London: British Film Institute, 1985), pp. 187–98; Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “Patterns of Involvement in Television Fiction: A Comparative Analysis,” European Journal of Communication 1 (1986): 151–71; Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Making Sense of the News (Ahrhus: University of Ahrhus Press, 1986); Thomas Lindlof (ed.) Natural Audiences: Qualitative Research and Media Uses and Effects (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company, 1987); James Lull (ed.) World Families Watch Television (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988).
4 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), chapter 3.
5 Lawrence Grossberg, “Critical Theory and the Politics of Empirical Research,” in Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy (eds) Mass Communication Review Yearbook, vol 6 (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1986), pp. 86–106.
6 It should be stressed, however, that the “critical” tradition is not a monolithic whole: there is not one “critical theory” with generally shared axioms, but many different, and often conflicting “critical perspectives,” e.g. political economy and cultural studies.
7 Thus, I take issue with the conceptualization of recent debates in communication studies in terms of a dichotomization of “critical” and “empirical” schools, as is done in some contributions to the Ferment in the Field issue of the Journal of Communication 33, no.3 (1983).
8 For an overview of the media studies work of the Centre, see Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language. For an introduction to the cultural studies approach, see e.g. Thomas Streeter, “An Alternative Approach to Television Research: Developments in British Cultural Studies in Birmingham,” in Willard D. Rowland, Jr. and Bruce Watkins (eds) Interpreting Television: Current Research Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984), pp. 74–97; John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television,” in Robert C. Allen (ed.) Channels of Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 254–69.
9 Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience, p. 161; Steve Neale, “Propaganda,” Screen, 18, no.3 (1977).
10 Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience, p. 162.
11 The direct theoretical inspiration of Morley's research was the so-called encoding/decoding model launched by Stuart Hall, which presented a theoretical intervention against “Screen theory.” See his “Encoding/Decoding” in Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128–38, and also, in the same volume, Stuart Hall, “Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology: A Critical Note,” pp. 157–62. Morley himself elaborated on the “interdiscursive” nature of encounters between text and subjects in “Texts, Readers, Subjects,” in Culture, Media, Language, pp. 163–73.
12 See Fred Feyes, “Critical Communications Research and Media Effects: The Problem of the Disappearing Audience,” Media, Culture, and Society 6 (1984): 219–32.
13 “Gratifications researchers, in their paradigmatic personae, have lost sight of what the media are purveying, in part because of an overcommitment to the endless freedom of the audience to reinvent the text, in part because of a too rapid leap to mega-functions, such as surveillance or self-identity.” (Jay G. Blumler, Michael Gurevitch, and Elihu Katz, “Reaching Out: A Future for Gratifications Research,” in K.E. Rosengren, L.A. Weimer, and Ph. Palmgreen (eds) Media Gratifications Research: Current Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985), p. 272)
14 ibid.
15 Karl Erik Rosengren, “Communication Research: One Paradigm, or Four?” Journal of Communication 33 (1983): 203; also Tamar Liebes, “On the Convergence of Theories of Mass Communication and Literature Regarding the Role of the Reader” (paper presented to the Conference on Culture and Communication, 1986); and Kim Christian Schroder, “Convergence of Antagonistic Traditions? The Case of Audience Research,” European Journal of Communication 2 (1987): 7–31. Such an insistence upon convergence is not new among “mainstream” communication researchers. For example, Jennifer Daryl Slack and Martin All or have recalled how in the late 1930s Lazarsfeld hired Adorno in the expectation that the latter's critical theory could be used to “revitalize” American empiricist research by supplying it with “new research ideas.” The collaboration ended only one year later because it proved to be impossible to translate Adorno's critical analysis into the methods and goals of Lazarsfeld's project. Lazarsfeld has never given up the idea of a convergence, however. See Jennifer Daryl Slack and Martin Allor, “The Political and Epistemological Constituents of Critical Communication Research,” Journal of Communication 33 (1983): 210.
16 Note, for instance, the striking similarities between the following two sentences, one from a uses and gratifications source, the other from a cultural studies one: “There seems to be growing support for that branch of communications research which asserts that television viewing is an active and social process” (Katz and Liebes, “Mutual Aid,” p. 187); “Television viewing, the choices which shape it and the many social uses to which we put it, now turn out to be irrevocably active and social processes” (Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in David Morley, Family Television. Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Comedia, 1986), p. 8).
17 Tamar Liebes suggests that “the focus of the convergence is on the idea that the interaction between messages and receivers takes on the form of negotiation, and is not predetermined” (“On the Convergence,” p. 1). However, as I will try to show, what makes all the difference in the theoretical and political thrust of ethnographic audience studies is the way in which “negotiation” is conceived. Furthermore, “not predetermined” does not mean “undetermined,– and how (complex, structural, conjunctural) determinations should be conceived remains an important point of divergence between “critical” and “mainstream” studies. It is also noteworthy to point out that, while uses and gratifications researchers now seem to be “rediscovering the text,” researchers working within a cultural studies perspective seem to be moving away from the text. This is very clear in Morley's second book, Family Television, on which I will comment later in this chapter. In fact, it becomes more and more difficult to delineate what “the television text” is.
18 See, for example, M. R. Levy and S. Windahl, “Audience Activity and Gratifications: A Conceptual Clarification and Exploration,” in Rosengren et al., Media Gratifications Research, pp. 109–22.
19 Blumler et al, “Reaching Out,” p. 260.
20 In stating this I do not want to suggest that cultural studies is a closed paradigm, or that all cultural studies scholars share one – say, Foucaultian – conception of power. Thus, the Birmingham version of cultural studies, with its distinctly Gramscian inflection, is criticized by Lawrence Grossberg for its lack of a theory of pleasure. An alternative, postmodernist perspective on cultural studies is developed by Grossberg in his “Cultural Studies Revisited and Revised,” in Mary S. Mander (ed.) Communications in Transition (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 39–70.
21 Strategic interpretations, that is interpretations that are “political” in the sense that they are aware of the fact that interpretations are always concrete interventions into an already existing discursive field. They are therefore always partial in both senses of the word, and involved in making sense of the world in specific, power-laden ways. See Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-American Reader-Response Criticism,” in Jonathan Arac (ed.) Postmodernism and Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 26–54.
22 Rosengren expresses this view in very clear cut terms, when he reduces the existence of disagreements between “critical” and “mainstream” researchers to “psychological reasons” (“Communication Research: One Paradigm, or Four?,” p. 191).
23 Cf. James Lull, “The Naturalistic Study of Media Use and Youth Culture,” in Rosengren et al., Media Gratifications Research, pp. 209–24; Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “Qualitative Audience Research: Towards an Integrative Approach to Reception,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987): 21–36; Thomas R. Lindlof and Timothy P. Meyer, “Mediated Communications as Ways of Seeing, Acting and Constructing Culture: The Tools and Foundations of Qualitative Research,” in Lindlof, Natural Audiences, pp. 1–30.
24 Lawrence Grossberg (ed.) “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no.2 (summer 1986): 59.
25 James Carey, “Introduction,” in Mander Communications in Transition, p. 5.
26 I borrowed this formulation from Virginia Nightingale, “What's Happening to Audience Research?,” Media Information Australia 39 (February 1986): 21–2. Nightingale remarks that audience research has generally been “on the side” of those with vested interests in influencing the organization of the mass media in society, and that it is important to develop a research perspective that is “on the side” of the audience. However, it is far from simple to work out exactly what such a perspective would mean. The notion of the “active audience,” for example, often put forward by uses and gratifications researchers to mark the distinctive identity of the “paradigm,” is not in itself a guarantee for a stance “on the side of the audience.” In fact, the whole passive/active dichotomy in accounts of audiences has now become so ideologized that it all too often serves as a mystification of the real commitments behind the research at stake.
27 Reflections on the predicaments and politics of research on and with living historical subjects have already played an important role in, for example, feminist studies and anthropology, particularly ethnography. At least two problems are highlighted in these reflections. First, there is the rather awkward but seldom discussed concrete relation between researcher and researched as human beings occupying certain positions invested with power; second, there is the problem of the discursive form in which the cultures of “others” can be represented in non-objectifying (or better, less objectifying) ways. See, for example, Angela McRobbie, “The Politics of Feminist Research,” Feminist Review 12 (October 1982): 46–57; James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 1, no. 2 (1983): 118–46; James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986). Researchers of media audiences have, as far as I know, generally been silent about these issues. However, for a perceptive and thought-provoking engagement with the problem, see Valerie Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy,” in Victor Bürgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds) Formations of Fantasy (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 167–99.
28 Grossberg, “Critical Theory,” p. 89.
29 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, p. 16.
30 For a general overview of the interpretative or hermeneutic turn in the social sciences, see Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (eds) Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979). A more radical conception of what they call “interpretive analytics” is developed by Hubert Dreyfuss and Paul Rabinow in their Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
31 Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations,” p. 52.
32 Grossberg, “Critical Theory,” p. 89.
33 Cf. Paul Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, pp. 234–61.
34 A more general, lucid criticism of empiricist mass communications research is offered by Robert C. Allen in his Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), chapter 2.
35 Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience, p. 14. Morley's main objection to the uses and gratifications approach concerns “its psychologistic problematic and its emphasis on individual differences of interpretation.” At another place, Morley even more emphatically expresses his distance from the uses and gratifications approach: “Any superficial resemblance between this study of television audience and the ‘uses and gratifications’ perspective in media research is misleading” (David Morley, “Cultural Transformations: The Politics of Resistance,” in Howard Davis and Paul Walton (eds) Language, Image, Media (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 117).
36 Morley, Family Television, p. 15.
37 ibid., p. 13.
38 Note that in positivist epistemology intersubjectivity is considered as one of the main criteria for scientific “objectivity.” One of the myths by which the institution of Science establishes itself is that of scientific discourse as a process without a subject. Hence the normative rule that the concrete historical subject of science, the researcher, should be interchangeable with any other so as to erase all marks of idiosyncratic subjectivity.
39 Morley, Family Television, p. 13.
40 ibid., p. 10.
41 Blumler et al., “Reaching Out,” p. 271.
42 It goes without saying that we are not speaking about significant differences in the quantified, statistical sense here.
43 Morley, Family Television, chapter 6.
44 Charlotte Brunsdon, “Women Watching Television,” MedieKultur 4 (1986): 105; also quoted in Morley, Family Television, p. 147.
45 All sorts of cautious qualifications as to the generalizability of such “findings,” so routinely put forward in research reports that the validity of the given typifications are said to be limited to certain demographic or subcultural categories (e.g. the urban working class), do not principally affect this reification of experential structures.
46 Brunsdon, “Women Watching Television,” p. 104.
47 ibid., p. 106.
48 An image of the television audience as consisting of harmonious collectivities is suggested by Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes when they describe the social process of decoding a television programme as an activity of “mutual aid.” See Katz and Liebes, “Mutual Aid.”
49 Hall, “Introduction,” in Morley, Family Television, p. 10.
50 In contrast to his later Family Television, The “Nationwide” Audience focused on the ideological operations of the television medium itself.
51 Some critical scholars still dismiss the idea of doing empirical audience research altogether, because, so they argue, it would necessarily implicate the researcher with the strategies and aims of capitalist culture industry. See, for example, Tania Modleski, “Introduction,” in Tania Modleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xii.
52 Morley, Family Television, p. 174.
53 Cf. Walkerdine, “Video Replay”: “Much has been written about the activity of watching films in terms of scopophilia. But what of that other activity … this activity of research, of trying so hard to understand what people see in films? Might we not call this the most perverse voyeurism?” (p. 166).
54 This is not the place to go into the more radical, metatheoretical attempts to deconstruct the concept of audience as a useful starting point of research and analysis. The future of audience studies, however, cannot afford not to reflect on the consequences of such basic, radical critiques. See Briankle G. Chang, “Deconstructing the Audience: Who Are They and What Do We Know About Them?” in Margaret L. McLaughlin (ed.) Communication Yearbook 10, (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1987), pp. 649–65; Martin Allor, “Relocating the Site of the Audience: Reconstructive Theory and the Social Subject,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1988): 217–33.
55 Paul Willis, “Notes on Method,” in Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language, p. 90.
56 Grossberg (ed.), “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” p. 60.