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The Art of Asking Why: The “Vienna School” of Market Research and Transfers in Consumer Psychology

Jan L. Logemann

in Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism

The professionalization of marketing research and efforts in “consumer engineering” drew on new insights in fields from social psychology to communication studies, which thrived at mid-century ... More

The professionalization of marketing research and efforts in “consumer engineering” drew on new insights in fields from social psychology to communication studies, which thrived at mid-century because of transatlantic knowledge-circulation. This chapter follows the exemplary transatlantic careers of members of the “Vienna school of market research.” The group emerged from the Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle, a social research institute associated with the University of Vienna during the early 1930s. Next to Paul Lazarsfeld, the group most prominently included the sociologist Hans Zeisel as well as the motivation research specialists Herta Herzog and Ernest Dichter. Their careers suggest a more transnational understanding of midcentury American consumer capitalism with European – in this case particularly Viennese – influences shaping marketing practices, which consumer historians still often regard as a quintessentially “American” phenomenon of psychological consumer manipulation. Transfers took place on several levels and this and subsequent chapters will analyze the role of individual émigré scholars, of the professional networks they formed, as well as the research concepts and methodologies they developed between Europe and the United States.Less

Radio's Students: Media Studies and the Possibility of Mass Communication

in Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture

This chapter investigates the possibility that radio allowed at least a few speakers access to the public arena. Paul Lazarsfeld's own focus on radio evolved through the late 1930s. Researchers ... More

This chapter investigates the possibility that radio allowed at least a few speakers access to the public arena. Paul Lazarsfeld's own focus on radio evolved through the late 1930s. Researchers around the country gravitated to Lazarsfeld's Office of Radio Research and developed a form of social pragmatism. Herman Hettinger shared Lazarsfeld's hope that mass communication could amplify particular voices, enabling them to be better heard across the country, and to enhance society. Hettinger's vision of radio presented an overlapping alternative to the social pragmatism that dominated academic studies of media. Theodor Adorno suggested that even as radio came to the forefront of American mass culture, there were multiple possible interpretations of that rise and of the possibility of mass communication. To most students, radio proposed a way to enable at least a select few speakers to reach the vast audiences of the twentieth century.Less

Class, Cosmopolitanism, and Division

David Goodman

in Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s

Radio was a nationalizing and cosmopolitan force that brought Americans together in unprecedented national and international simultaneity. But it was also for those very reasons the site of a ... More

Radio was a nationalizing and cosmopolitan force that brought Americans together in unprecedented national and international simultaneity. But it was also for those very reasons the site of a sustained culture war. The audience for political commentators, such as Hans V. Kaltenborn, was by the later 1930s deeply divided along class lines. The chapter examines evidence about the class-inflected patterns of radio listening, a topic that was well investigated by 1930s radio researchers – especially by the Rockefeller Foundation-funded researchers at the Princeton Office of Radio Research, under the direction of Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Tragically, radio audience research was showing that it was the civic paradigm itself, with its values of openness and pluralism, that was proving socially divisive.Less

From Mass Persuasion to Engineered Consent: The Impact of “European” Psychology on the Cognitive Turn in Marketing Thought

Jan L. Logemann

in Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism

Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, consumers came to be seen as a diverse and socially contextualized group, which was not as easily swayed by mass media messages. Consumer behavior and attitudes ... More

Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, consumers came to be seen as a diverse and socially contextualized group, which was not as easily swayed by mass media messages. Consumer behavior and attitudes were increasingly understood as complex phenomena, which required analysis drawing on a variety of approaches from individual, and social psychology to the probing of cognitive and perception processes. This was part of a larger story of transatlantic exchanges in the social sciences. Paul Lazarsfeld and his Vienna School elaborated conceptions of consumer motivations and offered new survey methodologies. Other émigré social scientists such as Berlin-trained psychologists Kurt Lewin and George Katona were instrumental in transforming ideas about the social psychology of consumption and about the formation and impact of consumer attitudes. Leading protagonists of Gestalt psychology also fled to the United States during the 1930s where their work informed a growing interest in cognitive processes among marketing psychologists. Transatlantic knowledge transfers thus fundamentally altered midcentury consumer psychology.Less

Re-Reading Personal Influence in an Age of Social Media

Tom O’Regan

in Truth in Visual Media: Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics

This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal ... More

This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.Less

Conclusion: The Past and Future of Political Sociology

Stefan Svallfors

in The Political Sociology of the Welfare State: Institutions, Social Cleavages, and Orientations

This concluding chapter analyzes the results presented in the book in relation to the development of political sociology. It argues that the papers together represent a “fourth generation” of ... More

This concluding chapter analyzes the results presented in the book in relation to the development of political sociology. It argues that the papers together represent a “fourth generation” of scholarship in the field, where institutional feedback effects in general, and public policies in particular, are analyzed in a comparative perspective. Political sociology was born in the 1940s in New York City, at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, under the intellectual leadership of Paul Lazarsfeld. The “Columbia School” and Lazarsfeld made important contributions to the development of research in the field of political sociology. In particular, Lazarsfeld pioneered the analysis of latent structures, while the Columbia School made the first rigorous and systematic attempts to analyze the social factors that influence voting and espoused a “social determinism” in the study of political behavior, for which it came under contemporary criticism. Aside from feedback effects of institutions, other concepts such as public policies and the moral economy of welfare states have improved the conceptualization of the relation between social cleavages, political orientations, and institutions.Less

Media and Opinion Formation: Toward a New Theory of Deliberative Politics

Ronald N. Jacobs

in The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere

Chapter 3 develops a cultural sociological model of the space of opinion and its role in democratic deliberation. It analyzes three waves of media theory which have shaped thinking about news and ... More

Chapter 3 develops a cultural sociological model of the space of opinion and its role in democratic deliberation. It analyzes three waves of media theory which have shaped thinking about news and opinion. The first wave of media theory emphasized the importance of objective news and a neutral media for rational information-processing citizens. It defined much of the media scholarship produced prior to the 1960s, and it continues to resonate with broad publics because of its elective affinities with the professional project of objective journalism. The second wave of media theory had its roots at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. It offered a sociological analysis which recognized that small groups and social networks intervene between media and citizens to shape the nature of deliberation. The third wave of media theory builds on the second wave to emphasize that a wide variety of aesthetic and performative structures help citizens identify with media intellectuals, which leads to increased levels of public involvement in the political public sphere. This cultural model of media and deliberation points to the importance of a variety of communicative formats for journalism, including the innovative formats of the space of opinion.Less

“Injustices and Inhumanities”

Gareth Dale

in Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left

In which Polanyi finds himself torn between different continents and rival universities, before settling upon Columbia University where he establishes a research seminar and devotes himself to the ... More

In which Polanyi finds himself torn between different continents and rival universities, before settling upon Columbia University where he establishes a research seminar and devotes himself to the study of ancient and archaic economies.Less

Lyrical Sociology1

Andrew Abbott

in Processual Sociology

Although ecology captures the causal structure of the present, it does not capture the feel of temporality itself. Lyric is the sense of temporal passage in the present. Beginning with an analysis of ... More

Although ecology captures the causal structure of the present, it does not capture the feel of temporality itself. Lyric is the sense of temporal passage in the present. Beginning with an analysis of temporal passage in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld, this chapter uses literary and philosophical theories to discuss the role of the present in the social process and the analysis of that present by “lyrical sociology,” sociology that is deliberately non-narrative. Lyrical sociology is characterized by image rather than story, concrete emotion rather than abstract mimesis, and naturalism rather than artificiality. It is organized around location in social time and space.Less