Chapter 13
Starting up
Karl Erik Rosengren
In this chapter an attempt will be made, not to summarize the contents of the preceding chapters – the various chapters and their authors are perfectly able to speak for themselves – but to highlight some themes representing potential starting points for future research in the wide fields covered by the Media Panel Program (MPP).
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL POINTS OF DEPARTURE
A casual reading of the preceding chapters may give an impression of heterogeneity. A wide array of seemingly disparate phenomena have indeed been presented, but the heterogeneity is more apparent than real. Actually, the meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological homogeneity within the Media Panel Program is quite considerable, and much the same is true for the various chapters of this book.
A meta-theoretical starting point of the MPP is the conviction that in order to be even moderately successful, all scientific and scholarly activities have to be characterized by a systematic interplay between substantive theory, formal models, and empirical data. By means of logical, mathematical, and/ or statistical models the intricacies of young people's media use, its causes, consequences and effects as they develop over time may be disentangled in a way which would otherwise be impossible. In addition, when visualized as graphic models, even fairly complex statistical models – say, the systems of equations constituting a LISREL analysis of individual media use, its causes, effects and consequences – become intuitively comprehensible.
Deliberately refraining from the use of formal models may be a quite fruitful approach in an introductory phase of scientific and scholarly activities. In the long run, however, it will have devastating consequences for cumu-lativity and growth. Any tradition of research refusing to include also the use of formal models in its routine activities is doomed to remain a fad. Like all fads it will have its time, and then it will disappear and be forgotten (Rosengren 1992,1993). Only the combined use of substantive theory, formal models and empirical data will ensure cumulative growth in certified knowledge, and the MPP is characterized by just such a combination.
Theoretically, our main perspective has been outlined in Chapter 1. It is a perspective which calls for detailed micro analysis to be carried out within an overarching macro framework. More specifically, we are – and will continue to be – interested in the two basic processes of development and socialization, taking place within a framework constituted by the societal system of institutions and by the social system of action as fundamentally structured by the basic variables of age and gender, class and status. Within this overarching theoretical perspective, we focus on the mass media as increasingly important agents of socialization, today standing out as very serious rivals to more traditional agents of socialization such as priests and teachers and law agents, and perhaps even to those primordial agents of socialization, the family, the peer group and the working group. Within this perspective of socialization, again, we try to combine the two mass communication research traditions of effects studies and uses and gratification studies into what has sometimes been called a uses and effects approach. We also try to transcend this approach by means of theoretical, methodological and empirical developments of lifestyle research (see below).
Methodologically, we have tried systematically to combine so-called qualitative and quantitative methods. In the early phases of the programme, we drew heavily on essays on television and television use written by a number of children in the age-groups under study. Later, we turned to large survey studies based on classroom and mail questionnaires. Later again – in the latest phase of the programme – intensive informal interviews were carried out with a number of type-representative young adults (see Chapter 12).
Apart from this, the methodological backbone of the programme, of course, is the combined cross-sectional design presented in Chapter 3 and used in Chapter 4 and other chapters of the book. This design, applied in two geographical locations, has allowed us to disentangle in the best possible way the intricacies of young people's media use, its character, causes and consequences, as developed during the period under study, a period first characterized by relatively high structural stability of the media scene, then by a thorough-going structural change of that same scene.
Although new specific problems of research will always turn up, of course, we are convinced that much the same meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological considerations will remain the overall guidelines of the continued work within the MPP. We also believe that in future MPP research, the substantive focus will remain basically the same: the use made of mass media by young people under shifting societal conditions and within a media structure which for years to come will still be in a state of more or less continuous change. More specifically, this means that in our continued research we shall have to consider three broad areas of theoretical and empirical problems:
1The relationship between overall societal culture and other societal systems.
2The process of socialization as developing in a complex interplay between a number of socialization agents.
3The truly basic theoretical problems usually subsumed under the heading ‘agency and structure’.
In the rest of this concluding chapter, some main themes which have emerged in the previous chapters of the book will be discussed in terms of these three problematics.
CULTURE, MEDIA AND SOCIETY
Culture is the ideational system of society. As developed in Chapter 1, values are at the heart of culture, so that the main societal institutions – religion and science, art and technology, etc. - may be conceptualized as having developed around two pairs of value orientations: instrumental/expressive, and cognitive/normative value orientation (see Figure 1.1). There are innumerable horizontal relations betweens these institutions and their actors. There are also innumerable vertical relations between the macro, meso and micro levels of society, by means of which society's culture flows from the macro to the micro level and back again – never-ending processes in which societal culture and individually internalized culture incessantly interact, constitute and shape each other. In these processes, eight main types of socialization agent are always at work: family, peer group and working group; priests, teachers and law agents; social movements and the mass media. With particular regard to the mass media, the role of these processes in the lives of young people is what this book is about. The task of disentangling them is not easy. It takes a number of theoretical perspectives, implemented by means of various methodological approaches, realized within a combined cross-sectional/ longitudinal design applied for a decade or two.
No societies are closed systems, and certainly not Sweden in the late twentieth century. A strong flow of ideational, social and material impulses is incessantly crossing the borders from the outside, affecting the internal processes of change always at work in any society. Sometimes the external inflow brings about changes not only in, but of the system. Such a change was brought about, for instance, by the introduction of TV into Sweden in the 1950s. Another such change was brought about by the introduction of cable and satellite television and the video cassette recorder in the 1980s. The latter change brought about an immense increase of media output produced under a radically different reward system than that dominating the public service system which had previously enjoyed monopoly status (see Figure 1.8; see also Chapters 2 and 4 above). As it happened, the latter change fell into the mid-period of the Media Panel Program, and this both complicated and enriched our work. Since this process of change has by no means come to an end, the task of charting its future effects will remain an important one for the MPP – perhaps the most important one.
As our panels grow older, and as new panels are added to the previous ones, there will be opportunity to compare both levels and structures of media use during radically different structural conditions. One problem to monitor carefully will be the differential influence on individual media use exerted by the two positional variables of gender and social class. Two rather different MPP studies, it will be remembered, have found that the influence of gender seems to be increasing; the influence of social class, decreasing (see Chapters 4 and 11). Do these results just represent temporary flucuations, or do they forebode some more permanent change in social structure? Future MPP studies of the structural and positional determinants of individual media use will be able to provide some answers to that question.
We shall be in a position, however, to take a long look not only at the determinants of individual media use among young people, but also at the consequences and effects of that use – in both a short-term perspective and a long-term. Hopefully, we shall also have the opportunity to do so with respect to various sectors of the ‘great wheel of culture in society’ (some of which have already been given considerable attention within the MPP but will certainly call for more).
Within the normative sectors, for instance, the political life of young adults as affected by their media use in childhood and adolescence promises to become a fruitful field of research (which, incidentally, has already been opened up by Jarlbro (1988)). Similarly, in the instrumental sectors, a promising area of research will concern the relationships between the use made of mass media by MPP children and adolescents and the character of their future working lives (including, alas, also the alternative of no work at all). Future studies in this area will be in a position to build on previous MPP studies by, for instance, Hedinsson (1981) and Flodin (1986); (see also the results summarized and presented in Chapters 7 and 9). In the cognitive sectors, of course, continued education and training as affected by previous mass media use also should be looked into, as should the expressive aspects of life, such as tastes and preferences in art and literature, high culture and popular culture.
All these studies will also offer a chance to cast new light on the classic problems of temporal effects related to age, generation and situation, dealt with in Chapters 1 and 4. It has already been mentioned that they will also provide opportunities to follow in some detail the changing relations of power between various agents of socialization which the changing media structure will no doubt bring about, presumably diminishing the role of school and family, at the same time increasing the importance of mass media and the peer group as agents of socialization.
CHANGING PROCESSES OF SOCIALIZATION
During the last century or so, there has been a secular trend changing the relative importance of society's agents of socialization. The role of the primordial agents of socialization – the family, the peer group and the working group – has probably been reduced, while historically more recent agents of socialization v particularly school, the mass media and some social movements – have grown more important.
Especially during the last few decades, this secular trend has taken on a new development, in that the role of the mass media as agents of socialization has been both strengthened and changed. More time is given to mass media use, and greater proportions of that time is dedicated to entertainment. During the last few years, this tendency has been further strengthened by the advent on the media scene of cable and satellite television and the video cassette recorder. Technically, all this means that more choice has been given to the media audience. Substantively, though, diversity in media fare may actually have been reduced (see Rosengren et al. 1992; Jshikawa 1994). All this will no doubt affect the many socialization processes continuously at work in modern society. More specifically, two types of effect may be expected; in some cases, they have already been observed.
In the first place, the relative importance of different agents of socialization has changed and very probably will continue to do so. For instance, the relative importance of school as an agent of socialization will be reduced, in that substantial parts of formal and informal socialization will be taken over by the mass media – a process which has probably already started. Also, more socialization will take place at home, in the family circle. At the same time, however, the role of the family may well be reduced – in relative terms, at least – since the agent of socialization will often be television distributed by the various TV sets of the family, more or less independently used by different members and/or generations of the family.
In the final analysis, again, all this may well appear in a different light, given the simple fact that what you prefer to receive from the TV set is to a considerable extent controlled – directly and indirectly – by your family background (as manifesting itself, for instance, in the family communication climate; see Chapters 1, 8 and 10). Mutatis mutandis, much the same goes for those other two agents of socialization so important to young people: school and the peer group.
Depending upon what happens in the family, at school and in the peer group, then, the same amount of mass media use may have very different meanings and have very different effects. This has been forcefully demonstrated in several previous chapters dedicated to this or that chain of mutual influence between the individual and various agents of socialization (see Chapters 7-10). For better or for worse, you often seem to want to choose the media content which agents of socialization around you tell you to choose. We thus all of us start long chains of mutually reinforcing influences, during which we ourselves and our surroundings build a lifestyle within which we may feel more or less at home. The continued study of such chains will be an important task for future studies within the Media Panel Program.
What may well happen in a not too distant future, however, is that a historical process having been on its way for quite some time may introduce or strengthen yet another complication in the already quite complicated process of socialization. That is the second effect on patterns of socialization brought about by basic changes in societal structure, an effect which may be expected to come about some time in a not too distant future.
AGENCY AND STRUCTURE: FORMS OF LIFE, WAYS OF LIFE AND LIFESTYLES
Socialization is a process of individuation: during the process of socialization, the human being becomes an individual. Historically, the process of individuation has grown ever more important and thorough-going, so that increasingly, the individual has come to stand out as a unique actor, very much in his or her own right. Superimposed upon the billions of primordial processes of individuation, that is, there has been a secular process of individualization (see Chapters 10-12). This process has been much discussed in social science during the last decade or so; witness, for instance, the agency/structure debate (see Chapter 1).
While these discussions have been rich and subtle, they have often been characterized by a strange absence of two important components necessary for cumulative growth in science. There has been no lack of sophisticated substantive theory expressed in eloquent, if sometimes rather fuzzy, verbal formulations. Formal models and hard empirical data, however, have been less common. Among the few who have actually combined substantive theory, formal models and empirical data relevant to the agency/structure debate, Pierre Bourdieu is outstanding in the richness of his theory, the sophistication of his formal models, and the wealth of empirical data used in his studies as presented, for instance, in his Distinction (1984).
Bourdieu gives short shrift to the notion of agency. When societal structure and individual position in that structure have had their say, nothing much, if, indeed, anything at all, is left for the individual to decide. Even personal taste in a number of aesthetical and other areas of life – that individual characteristic often felt to be the very essence of the individual – is characterized by Bourdieu as nothing but ‘a virtue made of necessity which continuously transforms necessity into virtue’ (Bourdieu 1984: 175). He thus neglects the basic distinction between form of life, ways of life and lifestyles explicated, for instance, in Chapter l.1 That is his privilege, of course, but empirical data may show whether he is wise in so doing. If Bourdieu is right, individually held values should have no influence on attitudes, tastes and related patterns of action, once the influence from societal structure and individual position in that structure have been controlled for.
That individually held attitudes, tastes, etc. have an influence on individual use of mass media, is a tenet within the uses and gratifications tradition, of course. It has been shown again and again that this is actually so – most efficently, perhaps, within the branch of uses and gratifications research informed by so-called expectancy-value theory as launched by Fishbein and Aijzen (Fishbein 1963; Fishbein and Aijzen 1981) and exemplified, say, by Palmgreen and Rayburn (1985) and Swanson and Babrow (1989). Presumably, Bourdieu would have no quarrel with these results per se (had he condescended to pay any attention to them at all). He would have taken for granted only that those expectancies and values were predetermined by societal structures and individuals' positions within those structures, so that there could be no true ‘actors’, only ‘agents’ of blind structural and positional forces:
Dominated agents, who assess the value of their position and their characteristics by applying a system of schemes of perception and appreciation which is the embodiment of the objective laws whereby their value is objectively constituted, tend to attribute to themselves what the distribution attributes to them, refusing what they are refused (“That's not for the likes of us”), adjusting their expectations to their chances, defining themselves as the established order defines them, reproducing in their verdict on themselves the verdict the economy pronounces on them, in a word, condemning themselves to what is in any case their lot, ta heautou, as Plato put it, consenting to be what they have to be, “modest”, “humble” and “obscure”. (Bourdieu 1979/84: 471)
According to Bourdieu, then, beliefs, values, attitudes, tastes, etc. are just epiphenomena. Once societal structure and individuals' position within that structure have had their say, the rest is silence. That, of course, is an empirical statement which may be tested by means of empirical research. No doubt, individually held beliefs, values and attitudes are to no small extent determined by structure and position – nobody denies that. What is at stake is two other, closely related but different questions:
1;Are individually held beliefs, values, attitudes, tastes, etc. completely determined by structure and position?
2Are individual patterns of action completely determined by structure and position, so that individually held beliefs, values, attitudes, tastes, etc. have no influence of their own on such patterns?
These are hardly new questions, and when tested (be it by concrete experiences of life or by systematic research), more often than not, the answer to both of them has been ‘No’. Recent lifestyle research, however, sometimes forgetting the basic distinction between structurally, positionally and individually determined patterns of action, has not always given the same answer. To Bourdieu, as we have just seen, the answer to both questions is ‘Yes’.
Johansson and Miegel (1992: 200 ff.) have produced a wealth of data relevant to this discussion, some of which are briefly presented in Chapter 10. The reader may see that, in a number of cases, at least, individually held values do exert an influence of their own on individual patterns of activity, even after careful controls for societal structure (place of living) and positional variables (gender, class of origin, and own education). Individually encompassed basic values, as well as individually entertained tastes, are certainly influenced by structural and positional conditions. But that is not –as Bourdieu would have it – the whole story. The whole story tells us that when those basic influences are removed by means of statistical controls or in other ways, there still remains some choice. Within a given form of life, within a given way of life, you may still – sometimes to no small extent –pmake a choice of your own. All of us (especially young people, perhaps) grasp those opportunities for choice. Bourdieu may not think so, but most people, indeed, most social scientists, are convinced that structure is not everything. Individual lifestyles do exist. Agency does exist.
Once we have agreed on this, two important tasks immediately announce themselves. The first concerns the relative role of the three determinant forces: structure, position, and agency. The second concerns the more specific question about the consequences of agency for traditional effects studies in communication research.
The former question calls for comparative research on a grand scale: the effects of structure and position are certainly very different in different societies, and the strength of these effects determine the space left for agency. Such comparative studies should preferably include comparisons over both time and space (see Rosengren et al. 1992). 2 After all, a petit-bourgeois in Bourdieu's Lille of northern France in the 1960s may not be quite the same as a computer operator in, say, Copenhagen or Boston in the mid-1990s. Very probably, the differences are quite considerable, and these differences vary from time to time and from place to place. The basic model for understanding them, however, is quite clear, and the techniques of research necessary to produce the needed data are well understood.3 Most of the work remains to be done, though.
The second question calls for theoretical reconsiderations which may well affect our basic understanding of the whole tradition of effects studies. If as an individual you have some space for personal choice, and if your choice will affect your future life, then your future life – and your present life as well – may be regarded, not as a product of blind forces, the effects of behaviour mechanically following this or that position within this or that societal structure, but as a result of your own choice, an expression of your own basic values and attitudes.
This is where the difference between substantive theory and formal model enters the argument. The formal models do not recognize the difference between statistical relations arrived at through more or less well-considered personal preferences and statistical relations arrived at through brute social and societal forces. But substantive theory does. The effects of your media use may be regarded as part and parcel of your individual lifestyle, shaped by yourself within options offered by the way of life determined by your social position and also by the form of life prescribed by societal structure. Consequently, the causal perspective of effects research will have to be supplemented by the finalistic perspective of uses and gratifications research within a uses and effects design. This line of argumentation will also call for continued efforts within lifestyle-oriented research in communication studies, along the lines exemplified by Chapters 10-12 and foreboded in Chapters 7-9. In the long run, then, efforts such as these will also have to transcend the uses and effects perspective.
Such research will be able to find a platform in the wealth of data already collected within the Media Panel Program. In addition, new waves of data collection within the programme, undertaken by means of formal and informal interviews, mail and classroom questionnaires, and archival data, will hopefully be able to offer follow-ups of previous panels, and comparative data from new panels and cohorts.
The research councils willing, and other circumstances permitting, then, the needs of both a long-term uses and effects perspective and a long-term structural comparisons perspective will thus be served in future lifestyle-oriented MPP research – in the interest of that vital and basic debate about agency and structure.
NOTES
1. In addition, when explicating his theories in terms of a formal model, he chooses a very impractical and clumsy model (see Rosengren 1992).
2. For a recent temporally comparative study of media use and other habits under different societal conditions, see Werner (1993).
3. No doubt, however, considerable advances will be made in the necessarily somewhat provisional techniques of analysis sometimes used today. For instance, the series of repeated MCA analyses undertaken by Johansson and Miegel (1992) will gradually be replaced by structural modelling techniques such as LISREL.
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