Functionalist Explanations in Media Histories: A Historiographical Essay

Abstract

This historiographical essay examines how functionalist explanations persist in a range of media histories and examines the logic and consequences of functionalist explanations. The essay argues that paying attention to social, cultural, economic or political contexts does not necessarily move media historians substantially closer to offering explanation. Even histories that describe structural contexts can be plagued by a persistent problem: functionalist assumptions. The essay argues this undercuts the value of historical scholarship.

Notes

1 John C. Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” American Journalism 28, no. 4 (2011): 7–27.

2 Tim P. Vos, “Historical Mechanisms and Journalistic Change,” American Journalism 30, no. 1 (2013): 36–43; “Explaining the Origins of the Advertising Agency,” American Journalism 30, no. 4 (2013): 450–472; “Explaining the Origins of Public Relations: Logics of Historical Explanation,” Journal of Public Relations Research 23, no. 2 (2011): 119–140.

3 George A. Huaco, “Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 1 (1986): 34–54; Hanno Hardt, Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History, and Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 1992).

4 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 7.

5 Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris, The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000).

6 James D. Startt and W. David Sloan, Historical Methods in Mass Communication, revised ed., Communication Textbook Series. General Communication Theory and Methodology (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2003).

7 Ibid., 203, 205.

8 Robert King Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory and Research (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949); Andrew C. Janos, Politics and Paradigms: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

9 Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski, Functionalism, The Benjamin/Cummings Series in Contemporary Sociology (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979); Huaco; Martin Mahner and Mario Bunge, “Function and Functionalism: A Synthetic Perspective,” Philosophy of Science 68 (2001): 75–94.

10 Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Lang Schramm, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1973), 1, 2.

11 Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 290.

12 Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 107.

13 Ibid., 104.

14 Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Louise Margaret Benjamin, “Working It out Together: Radio Policy from Hoover to the Radio Act of 1927,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 42, no. 2 (1998): 221–236; D. E. Garvey, “Secretary Hoover and the Quest for Broadcast Regulation,” Journalism History 3, no. 1 (1976): 66–70, 85.

15 Huaco, 36.

16 Ibid.

17 Jeffery Alan Smith, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

18 Michael C. Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 9th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 310–11.

19 James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1, no. 1 (1974): 3–5, 27.

20 Emery, Emery, and Roberts, 311.

21 Ibid.

22 Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917, The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: From 1607 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006).

23 Anthony R. Fellow, American Media History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009), 371.

24 Raymond C. Watson Jr., Radar Origins Worldwide: History of Its Evolution in 13 Nations through World War II (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2009).

25 Cayce Myers, “Early US Corporate Public Relations: Understanding the ‘Publicity Agent’ in American Corporate Communications, 1902–1918,” American Journalism 32, no. 4 (2015): 413.

26 Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

27 Stephen A. Banning, “Press Clubs Champion Journalism Education,” in Journalism, 1908: Birth of a Profession, ed. Betty Houchin Winfield (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 70.

28 Jefferson Pooley, “The New History of Mass Communication Research,” in The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, ed. David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 60.

29 Vos, “Historical Mechanisms and Journalistic Change.”

30 Laurent Keller, Levels of Selection in Evolution, Monographs in Behavior and Ecology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

31 David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 38; C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy, Communication, Society, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

32 David M. Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

33 Banning.

34 David R. Meyer, The Roots of American Industrialization, Creating the North American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Rodger Streitmatter, “Origins of the American Labor Press,” Journalism History 25, no. 3 (1999): 99–106.

35 Donald L. Shaw, “Review of the Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century, by Gerald J. Baldasty,” Journalism Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1994): 462–464.

36 Banning, 70.

37 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 18.

38 Craig Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science (New York: Oxford Press, 2007), 25.

39 Pierson.

40 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

41 William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

42 Pierson, 112.

43 Vos, “Explaining the Origins of the Advertising Agency,” 471.

44 Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, 113; italics in the original.

45 Huaco, 46.

46 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.

47 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

48 Andreas Gofas and Colin Hay, “Varieties of Ideational Explanation,” in The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis: A Portrait of Contemporary Debates, edited by Andreas Gofas and Colin Hay (London: Routledge, 2010), 13.

49 Parsons, 3.

50 Ibid., 12.

51 Nerone.

52 Hanno Hardt, Interactions: Critical Studies in Communication, Media, and Journalism, Critical Media Studies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

53 Stuart Hall, Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980).