Abandoned not: media sociology as a networked transfield

ABSTRACT

The relationship between the disciplines of communication and sociology has been primarily described as being abandoned by sociologists. This article historicizes the alleged sociological abandonment of communication and media research and centers on media sociology as the key manifestation of an ongoing vibrant relationship between the two disciplines. It has two goals. First, I examine the contours of the abandonment notion since Berelson vs. Schramm, Riesman, and Bauer in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1959. I demonstrate the diversity and the depth of media sociology and argue that an US-centric positivist understanding of media sociology has led to the exaggerated and misleading notion of abandonment, which homogenizes theoretical discourse and discounts scholarly contributions from outside of the US. Personal and collective memories have also documented institutional and organizational growth of media sociology. Second, I propose to conceptualize media sociology as a networked transfield driven by questions transcending disciplinary little boxes. Rather than returning to the Lazarsfeldian media effect paradigm, media sociology as a networked transfield driven by questions will allows scholars take advantage of structural holes for synthesis and innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Media sociology
• communication and media studies
• the Columbia school
• transdiscipline

Communication, as a relatively young but fast growing discipline, has been engaging in a constant identity construction, which often involves contemplation about its relationship with significant others. For instance, Journal of Communication has published three special issues on communication as a discipline in 1983, 1993, and 2008, respectively. In all three issues, the relationship between communication and sociology was primarily described as abandoned by sociologists. This article challenges the abandonment allegation and directs attention to the revival of media sociology.

In what follows, I historicize the alleged sociological abandonment of communication and media research since the debate between Berelson, Schramm, Riesman, and Bauer in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1959. Countering the notion of abandonment, I demonstrate the diversity and the depth of media sociology. I argue that a US-centric positivist understanding of media sociology has led to the exaggerated and misleading notion of abandonment. Furthermore, I propose that conceptualizing media sociology as a networked transfield driven by questions transcending disciplinary little boxes, which allows scholars take advantage of structural holes for theoretical synthesis and innovation.

Abandoned? History remembered and contested

The notion that sociology abandoned communication is often attributed to Berelson’s (1959) ‘withering out’ charge, resonated with and reinforced by Katz (1959, 1983, 1987, 2009), Gans (1972), and Pooley and Katz (2008). The feeling of being abandoned could be subjectively real and the outcry may serve as a battle cry. However, the disciplinary relationship between communication and sociology defies easy categorization. If we examine the rise, fall, and rebound of media sociology from a sociology of knowledge perspective (McCarthy, 2005), the production, distribution, and implication of the sociological knowledge on communication and media unfold in and beyond the academe’s relationships with non-academic institutions such as the government, corporations, and foundations.

Major figures of the Chicago School such as John Dewey and Robert E. Park were interested in the interaction of communication and community. Changes in funding regimes around the Second World War (WWII) shifted the powerhouse of sociology from the Chicago School to the Columbia School, and research from communication and media in community to ‘social psychology of persuasion’ (Pooley & Katz, 2008, p. 769) manifested in the rise of the media effect paradigm developed in Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) from the late 1930s to 1950s. The paradigm was centered on ‘specific, measurable, short-term, individual, attitudinal and behavioral “effects” of media content’ (Gitlin, 1978, p. 207), in spite of the awareness that ‘power groups have adopted techniques for manipulating mass publics through propaganda’ (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1948, p. 555). By so doing, it made invisible structural forces that shaped the access to and control of media system. As importantly, empirical research from BASR arguably provided limited support to mass media effects on attitudinal and behavioral changes. In stark contrast to the increased media concentration and audience outreach since WWII, Gitlin lamented that media sociology was ‘dominated by the theme of the relative powerlessness of the broadcasters’ (1978, p. 205). Other scholars pointed out that the kind of ‘administrative research’ conducted at BASR had an inherent, structural issue: ‘a portion of it occurs in institutional settings whose economic viability depends on implicit support and approval from the media who become the employers of the students providing the support for the faculty’ (Comstock, 1983, p. 46).

A critical examination illustrates the intertwining intellectual, institutional, organizational, and financial dynamics that might have contributed to an alleged sociological abandonment of communication: shifts in research interests of prominent scholars, changes in funding regimes after the end of the WWII from foundations and corporations to national funding agencies, and the increased institutionalization of communication programs since the late 1950s (Earl, 2015; Katz, 2009; Pooley & Katz, 2008). For instance, after reviewing the four major approaches (represented by Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, Lewin, and Hovland, respectively) and six minor approaches, Berelson (1959) predicted a pessimistic future of communication research, which, paradoxically in his own assessment, just experienced its first quarter-century of growth enabled by academic attention and financial support from foundations and governments. In particular, he was concerned by Lazarsfeld’s redirection of his intellectual energy from communication to methodology. Echoing Berelson, Katz (1987, 2009) saw the disappointment in the limited media effects as the trigger of the sociological abandonment of communication research.

Abandoned not: media sociology in Annual Review of Sociology

Then and now, the alleged sociological abonnement needs empirical evidence. On the one hand, media sociology does have ebb and flow and sociology definitely should pay media ‘more attention and respect’ (Gans, 1989, p. 1; 2009). As Riesman acknowledged in his 1959 response to Berelson, media sociology had received ‘much too shadowy treatment’ (p. 10). On the other hand, sociology has developed diverse insights on communication and media since the 1970s when Gitlin (1978) criticized that American sociology had turned away from communication and media research. Indeed, communication scholars appreciated that ‘the locus of some communication research within the sociological setting of professional training for the media becomes a strength, for that reality of the media becomes harder to evade there’ (Comstock, 1983, p. 47). A quick search in Annual Review of Sociology (ARS), a flagship sociological journal whose mission is to review significant development in the discipline, demonstrates the theoretical, methodological, and topical diversity of media sociology as well as its commitment to core sociological questions such as power, institution, inequalities, identity, and social change since the 1970s. This brief, chronological review below does not include ARS articles that centered on methodology, memoirs, or only partly covered communication and media.

Holz and Wright (1979) reviewed a broad range of work on communication and media actors and processes in the 1970s such as mass communicators, mass media production, audience, interpersonal communication, communication networks, diffusion, media representation, and media effects. McQuail (1985) reported the growth of the critical cultural approach for long-term, institutional media effect, the exchange between social sciences and humanities, and the attention to feminism, global media, and new information technology in the first half of the 1980s. Mukerji and Schudson (1986) focused on popular culture, a topic once considered unworthy that had gained legitimacy in sociology since the 1970s.

Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992) reviewed sociological work on the production of media discourse and how it contributed to framing and the competing construction of social reality. Felson (1996) reviewed works on both short-term and long-term media effects on violent behavior. Wellman et al. (1996) reviewed work on distributed work, virtual communities, and social control enabled by computer-supported social networks.

In the new millennium, DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neuman, and Robinson (2001) reviewed the emerging literature on Internet implications for inequalities, social capital, political and cultural participation, and institutions and organizations. Seeing the Internet as ‘complement rather than displace existing media and patterns of behavior’ (DiMaggio et al., 2001, p. 307), their mapping and calling for sociological research that considers both micro and macro factors have profound impacts in the last 15 years. Signaling the affinity between media sociology and the sociology of culture, Griswold et al. (2005) reviewed works on reading as social practice and its relationship with television and the Internet. Confirming the vitality of multiple approaches in media sociology, Grindstaff and Turow (2006) reviewed the sociology of television from the political–economic and the cultural approaches, proposing the term ‘video cultures’ to capture changes in the media industry.

The multiple approaches to media sociology

The coverage of communication and media research in ARS since the 1970s shows that the abandonment allegation is not only exaggerated but also misleading. First, despite the abandonment notion, the Lazarsfeldian media effect paradigm has had a long reign in communication research. Second, the abandonment allegation suffers from an US-centric, positivist understanding of media sociology, giving short shrift to the work of sociologically trained or inspired scholars, especially those who work outside of the US. As a result, it runs the risk of perpetuating scientism (Gans, 1989), homogenizing theory discourse (Wang, 2011), and discounting significant developments in Europe, Asia, and Latin America (Waisbord, 2016).

Long live media effects

The Lazarsfeldian media effect paradigm is still lively and kicking. Institutionally, it has been well preserved. Wilbur Schramm innovative turned journalism programs into communication programs through embracing the social psychological approach in the 1950s, which soon diffused across the US and eventually the world (Rogers, 1994). Intellectually, influential communication theories such as use and gratification, persuasion, and the diffusion of innovation have been developed or influenced by Lazarsfeld’s associates and disciples in the effort of a more balanced theorizing of media power and audience power (Katz, 1987). For example, one of the most popular communication theories, the third-person effect theory, was developed by sociologist W. Phillips Davison in 1983.

The limited media effects identified by Lazarsfeld and his followers were cited as one of the factors leading to the alleged sociological abandonment of communication. By contrast, scholars in and outside the paradigm have increasingly been fascinated rather than frustrated by the puzzle of limited media effects, considered as the ‘the contested core of media research’ (Corner, 2000, p. 376), and how media work in multivalent, multilevel, and indirect ways. In an effort of explaining why the ‘withering away’ Berelson was so concerned in 1959 did not actualize, Comstock (1983) noted that theoretical refinement offered a more conditional understanding of media influence, besides methodological and technological advancement (and at the timing of his writing the rise of TV as the prominent mass media). More elaborated organizational, heuristic, predictive, or measurement models have been developed to capture the subtlety and variation of the elusive media effects and celebrated as a sign of sophistication rather than dismissed as ‘limited’ (Livingstone, 2002; Wright, 1960).

Technologically, the media effect paradigm may never die thanks to the endless publication opportunities of applying the above-mentioned and many other media effect theories to the examination of the effects of the next new communication and media technologies. For example, one recent article reports that core topics of communication research relatively remains stable even with the rapid expansion of digital media technologies as research subjects and methods (Günther & Domahidi, 2017).

Other approaches in American media sociology

Media sociology has been built on multiple research traditions in and outside of the US. While the Columbia School and its critiques offered the generative work during the formative period of communication research, the Lazarsfeldian paradigm even during its heydays has never represented all the theoretical approaches in media sociology, American or otherwise. Indeed, its blindspot to power and its empiricism were challenged, respectively, by the members of the Frankfurt School in exile and C. Wright Mills in his 1959 book The sociological imagination.

Beside the Lazarsfeldian paradigm, American sociology has developed some of the most influential work on communication and media. Most forcefully, Gitlin (1978) called for a media sociology liberated from the dominance of the Lazarsfeldian paradigm. Interestingly, the emergence and development of institutional, critical, and technological approaches were acknowledged by Katz, although he saw them as ‘complementary’ to the Lazarsfeldian paradigm (1987, p. S50). Since the 1970s, media sociologists such as Gans, Gitlin, Tuchman, and Schudson directed attention to media production, especially news production and its broader social and political impacts (see Gans, 1989). Goffman (1974), Gitlin (1980), and Gamson et al. (1992) shaped the framing theories, especially framing impacts on news production and ideology. Herbert Schiller’s work on cultural imperialism and global media has become canonical in the political economy approach to communication and media studies. The media system dependence theory was developed by sociologist Sandra Ball-Rokeach and social psychologist Melvin DeFleur in 1976, articulating a comprehensive understanding of media effects that took into account of social structure, media system, and audience. The abandonment allegation also ignores significant sociological work such as DiMaggio’s work on the sociology of culture, Claude Fisher’s research on the social history of telephone, James Katz’s and Rich Ling’s research on mobile phone, Heather Haveman’s work on the rise of the magazine industry and its community-building impacts in Antebellum America, just to name a few.

Beyond the American media sociology

Outside the US, a range of continental European sociologists and their work have brought back structural forces into the theorizing of communication and media, illuminating how communication and media practices contribute to the emergence, exercise, and contest of power: Adorno’s cultural industry, Habermas’ public sphere theory, Bourdieu’s theories on field, cultural and symbolic capital, Luhmann’s system theory on mass media construction of social reality, Beck’s theories of risk society and reflective modernity, Castells’ trilogy of the network society, and the list goes on.

As to the British impact, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, Thompson’s work on media and modernity, Roger Silverstone’s work on television, and Nick Couldry’s media ritual have enduring sociological relevance. Just to add a few Canadian sociologists, Barry Wellman’s theory of networked individualism, Vincent Mosco’s notion of the digital sublime, and Bonnie Erickson’s work at the intersection of social and cultural capital have informed a new wave of sociological work on the social implications of communication and media.

Recognizing such contributions allows us to broaden media sociology beyond the media effects narrowly understood at the individual levels from a functional perspective. In fact, Lazarsfeld and Merton admitted that ‘by leading toward conformism and by providing little basis for a critical appraisal of society, the commercially sponsored mass media indirectly but effectively restrain the cogent development of a genuinely critical outlook’ (1948, p. 567). In other words, media sociology must pay attention to the patterns, causes, and consequences of uneven access to and control of scarce material and cultural resources that affect media production, distribution, and consumption (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013; Waisbord, 2014).

Institutional and organizational development

Collective and personal memories narrated in journals, newsletters, and (auto)biographies demonstrate the struggle, perseverance, serendipity, and growth of media sociology and media sociologists in institutional, organizational, and biographical terms (see Castells, 2016; Gans, 1989; Wellman, 2006). First, sociology has been a major source where communication and media studies programs recruit faculty members outside the discipline. Based on research conducted by Barnett, Danowski, Feeley, and Stalker (2010), as of 2007, sociology was the largest source of tenure/tenure-tracked faculty members who received a PhD degree in disciplines other than communications. Mai, Liu, and González-Bailón (2015) show that as of 2014, sociology was the second largest source of tenure/tenure-tracked faculty members who received a PhD degree outside of communication (Table 1). It is worth noting that it has been a sociological export rather than a balanced trade between the two disciplines.

Table 1. Tenure or tenure-tracked faculty members with non-communication PhD degree in US institutions that offer PhDs in communication.

2007			2014
Discipline	N	%	Discipline	N	%
Sociology	55	16%	English and Literature	48	14%
English and Literature	54	16%	Sociology	42	13%
Library/Information Science	42	12%	History	38	11%
Education	28	8%	Library/Information Science	36	11%
Psychology	28	8%	Psychology	35	11%
History	26	7%	Political Science	34	10%
Political Science	23	7%	Computer Science	28	8%
Ethnic Studies	22	6%	Anthropology	17	5%
Linguistics	18	5%	Social Psychology	16	5%
Advertising	15	4%	Education	14	4%
Social Psychology	14	4%	Science and Technology	9	3%
Philosophy	13	4%	Linguistics	8	2%
Anthropology	10	3%	Philosophy	8	2%
	348	100%		333	100%

Source: Mai et al. (2015).

Second, several workshops or institutes, for instance, the Webshop organized by John Robinson, Meyer Kestenbaum, Alan Neustadtl and colleagues at the University of Maryland in the early 2000s or the Oxford Internet Institute’s annual summer institute since 2003, have been instrumental to bringing together top graduate students from multiple disciplines and building transdisciplinary networks.

Organizational changes in the form of new publication venues include the launch of top-ranked communication journals such as Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 1995 or New Media & Society in 1999 that are friendly to sociological perspectives. Media, Culture & Society is both communication and sociological. Poetics has been a major forum of sociology of culture. Information, Communication & Society has become a top-ranked journal in both communication and sociology and provided a forum for discussion and exchange since 1997.

Third, membership data from major scholarly associations such as American Sociological Association (ASA) or International Communication Association (ICA) illustrate the flow of talents and ideas. Influential ICA members such as ICA fellows include sociologists recognized in both fields (Meyen, 2012). The Communication, Information Technologies, & Media Sociology Section (CITAMS) of ASA has served as a strategic venue that connects sociology and communication, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2018. CITAMS has its organizational roots in ASA’s Microcomputing User Group (MUG) meetings and became the Microcomputing Section in 1988 (Anderson, 2006). Declining membership in the late 1990s pushed the section to change its name to Communication and Information Technologies in 2002, proposed by Keith Hampton, Ezster Hargittai, and Anabel Quan-Haase representing a new generation of sociologists interested in the social implications of the Internet and digital technologies (Elesh & Dowdall, 2006). As Wellman suggested, ‘The twists and turns of the section give insight into the shifting ways in which sociologists have engaged with computing and associated technologies’ (2006, p. 139). In 2016, CITAMS officially added Media to its name in order to reflect members’ growing interest in not just digital, social, mobile but also mass and popular media (Earl, 2015). A review of CITAMS members, awardees, publications, as well as its pre-conferences shows the quality and impact of sociological work on communication, technologies, and media (see www.citamas.org). These overlapping formal and informal memberships allow knowledge brokers transcend departmental or disciplinary boundaries.

Media sociology as a transfield

As a point of departure, sociology and communication as two disciplines have shared ontology, epistemology, methodology, and curiosity in understanding the role of communication and media in social life. Ontologically, communicative and social relationships are mutually constitutive, co-evolving, and both have become increasingly mediated. Epistemologically, communication and sociology have shared influence from classical theorists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, or Tarde. Methodologically, both disciplines have qualitative and quantitative traditions and now both are adapting to opportunities and challenges of big data.

Jensen and Craig (2016, p. vii) define communication as ‘the exchange of information and insight among humans for purposes of coordination as well as contestation’. They propose four ideas of communications: first, communication as text, historically and culturally situated; second, communication as information with technical and sociological connotations; third, communication over time constructing and sustaining community; fourth, communication constituting a public and a public sphere. Texts such as films, books, images, and magazines are cultural work ‘containing information that people use for identification, representation, belong, and difference’ (Deuze, 2007, p. 45). As the socially constructed reality has become mediated (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), media sociology should become a central concern for sociology and other social science disciplines.

I propose that it is time to conceptualize media sociology as a problem-driven, networked transfield driven by questions transcending disciplinary little boxes, which would allow scholars take advantage of structural holes for theoretical synthesis and innovation.

Transfield: driven by problems

Media sociology as a transfield is driven by problems. Berelson’s (1959) reading of the emergence and status of communication research had been criticized as overly pessimistic. Yet, to his credit, he discussed venues for future growth including synthesizing different approaches and conducting comparative studies across geographic and intellectual boundaries. In his response to Berelson, Schramm suggested that ‘Let’s get on with the problems!’ (1959, p. 9). In a similar vein, in the International Journal of Communication special section on Communication as Discipline, Craig Calhoun (2011) recommends communication scholars to overcome fragmentation by focusing on problems. Joseph Cappella (2011) uses the term transdisciplinary, especially because many research questions were bigger than any specific discipline.

One such problem may be the rise of digital capitalism and the reconstructing of media industry (Fuchs, 2017; Rey, 2012). For instance, the question whether social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are tech or media companies touches on fundamental issues of media industry, policies, and ethics. Related, privacy is another problem that goes beyond specific disciplinary boundaries as commercial use of private data has become the core business model of tech firms and administrative use of private data an integral part of governance and national security (Crawford, 2016; Pasquale, 2015).

Media sociology, if conceptualized as a networked transfield, can address such problems by directing theoretical and methodological attention to the structural embeddedness and performance of media actors at micro, macro, and global levels. The unique vintage point of media sociology calls for moving beyond the perspective of individual users and investigates communication and media practice as a negotiated process that involves a web of social and institutional stakeholders such as governments, entrepreneurs, and activists. A transfield can illuminate the power and the limitation of digital data from both the computational social science approach and the perspective of critical and cultural studies.

Transfield: networked

Media sociology as a transfield is networked. John Peters asked, ‘What if our disciplinary model were a network, or diaspora, or rhizome, rather than fortress, or nation, or corporation?’ (2011, p. 1471). Using the metaphor of a Jordanian oasis, Schramm (1959, 1983) saw that while many travelers ‒ carrying their own disciplinary maps – were attracted and contributed to communication problems, some eventually moved on and others settled. As Simmel’s stranger (1908 [1971]), a sociologically trained or inspired scholar working in communication programs has to engage with other intellectual traditions. The settlement may lead to assimilation as Katz (2009) lamented that most communication students of these sociologists did not do media sociology. The settlement may lead to side by side multiculturalism as different approaches co-exist with minimum interaction, which reflects the fragmentation of both communication/media studies and sociology. Yet, the settlement may create and sustain a transfield with transformative potentials for both the sending and the receiving disciplines.

A transfield allows scholars to switch between intersecting networks of diverse conversation and collaboration. A transfield can take advantage of structural holes that promise theoretical synthesis, creativity, and innovation (Burt, 2004). A transfield gives media sociologist’s greater autonomy to engage with multiple approaches on the material, institutional, and discursive nature of media (McQuail, 1985). As disciplinary boundaries ‘should be crossed freely, preferably for substantive, not imperialistic, reasons’ (Gans, 1989, p. 13), a transfield does not privilege one discipline or approach over the other. It will avoid political–economic, technological, or cultural reductionism (Livingstone, 2002). Just like border crossing is a condition and a symbol of transnational entrepreneurship, crossing disciplinary borders will contribute to the discovery and enactment of intellectual opportunities.

Transfield: added value

What would media sociology as a transfield add to the table? Most importantly, it will encourage a more reflexive dialogue concerning the strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines. First, the contribution to communication and media studies. The ongoing debate of mediatization that institutions, organizations, and individuals adapt to media production and consumption in pursuit of power and resources has the potential to upgrade and integrate various existing theories (Hjarvard, 2008; Livingstone, 2009). The shift in the understanding of communication and media technologies as the extension of the human body to the infrastructure of human society calls for a new round of theorizing on the interactions of media and society. A transfield can use communication and media process and system as the site of theoretical application and production. Switching the perspective from tinkering limited media effects to mediatization, sociological insights can help to bring the debate from within communication to a transfield that sheds Habermas, Bourdieu, or even Weber and Marx in new light.

Communication and media studies can also benefit from the sociological perspective on intersectionality (Collins, 2015; Hancock, 2007; Nash, 2017). Intersectionality refers to the overlapping, compounding inequalities due to discrimination and oppression based on multiple categories such as class, race, age, gender, sexuality, nation, or ability (Crenshaw, 1989). Similar to institutions such as family as Patricia Hill Collins shows in her early work or the legal system which inspires Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s original questioning of intersectionality, media are a critical institution of modern societies. Through the lens of intersectionality, research can illustrate the layered and intersectional inequalities in media production, representation, and consumption. Bringing in diverse and marginalized voices, it will shed light on the ways in which media empower some individuals and groups to crossover, making categories of difference and distinction more fluid, and in what circumstances they are pigeonholed by intersectional disadvantages. Intersectionality can inform a critical media sociology and pave the way of moving beyond the ‘founding fathers’ of communication studies.

Second, the contribution to sociology. Although prominent, sociology was only one of several sources of communication and media studies (Katz, 2009; McQuail, 1985). Indeed, the four founding fathers of communication research were more social psychological than sociological (Berelson, 1959, see the differences between the two in Livingstone, 2014). There have been amplified voices from within sociology that engaging with communication and media would enable the re-imagination of sociology as a discipline about key sociological concepts such as institution, inequality, and text (Brienza & Revers, 2016; Nichols, 2009; Revers & Brienza, 2017).

One example is that sociology has to take digital inequalities more seriously, not just as a manifestation of inequalities but as one underlying stratification mechanism that reshapes social structure and mobility (Robinson et al., 2015). It is important to document multidimensional, multilayered digital inequalities as causes and consequences of social inequalities. It is even more important to specify under what circumstances and for which groups digital technologies soften or stiffen old categories such as race, gender, nationality, or create new categories around which durable inequalities maintained (Tilly, 1999). For instance, how shall we understand labor relation when big techs extract a value from labors without formal employment? What are the intended and unintended algorithm discriminations that hoard or distort opportunities in a more opaque manner? How do digital media enable new ways of identity construction and performance, status competition, and attainment (Davis, 2014; 2016; Papacharissi, 2010)?

Another venue is the research on the mechanisms that link media, networks, and forms of capital, which is still at an early stage. Bourdieu’s forms of capital theory illuminates the conversion of economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital via intergenerational transfer, education institution, and labor market. For instance, a mediated network model of cultural capital illustrates that media use (including print, broadcasting, and Internet) can be a stronger predictor of cultural capital than network diversity. Moreover, media use can moderate and mediate the relationship between network diversity and cultural capital along and across ethnic boundaries (Chen, 2015).

Third, despite signs of growth, proponents of the abandonment notion see institutional and organizational hurdles that hinder a revival of media sociology (Pooley & Katz, 2008). The lack of institutional support can make interdisciplinary effort fragile, without stable faculty lines, research funding, or student enrollment. A transfield, by contrast, is more reliant on the intellectual network and less on institutional support. Such a positioning encourages media sociologists to serve as public intellectuals (Gans, 1989).

Discussion and conclusion

A part of the intellectual stewardship is to preserve and pass on communication and media scholarship for future generations, which involves documenting, interpreting, and debating a field’s origin, development, and future. Media sociology as a knowledge project has been around at least since the 1930s. The years around and after the WWII witnessed its ideas being incorporated into the emerging discipline of communication. Theories and theorists are of their times (Gans, 1989; Gitlin, 1978). The abandonment allegation seems more subjective than objective, more US centered than globally minded. In a way, it can be seen as almost a performance of scholars who truly care about sociological perspectives on communication and media, calling for follow travelers. However, not giving serious attention to diverse approaches and sites of media sociology may miss out opportunities to move the field forward, narrowly or broadly defined.

A revival of media sociology does not mean a return to the Lazarsfeldian media effect paradigm. Media effects may work more like a fish bowl rather than a hypodermic needle. Accordingly, we should examine media more as an environment than a treatment. Moving beyond a binary dystopian vs. utopian framework, media sociology as a transfield needs to explore contingencies and mechanisms, taking into account production and usage patterns, repertoires of channels and platforms, individual and network attributes, and diverse expressions of power and identity.

Historicizing media sociology, this article highlights the diversity of sociological work on communication and media and proposes a transfield agenda for future endeavor. Although sociology has not abandoned communication and media research, it is clear that sociology needs pay greater attention to communicative and media processes. The intellectual and especially the institutional growth of media sociology in the academe and beyond is not yet proportional to the growing centrality of communication and media in our mediated, networked social world. It is also critical to respect and balance the different intellectual priority of communication and sociology: the former’s relentless chase of newness and the latter’s persistent attention to structural, institutional, and durable forces (Gans, 1972).

Like entrepreneurship, scholarship is shaped by the opportunity structure at the macro level, individuals’ access to resources at the micro level, as well as community resource and resilience at the meso level. It is time to reconnect dots for media sociology as a networked transfield. Comstock saw three problems that confronted the communication field: parochialism, timidity, and rigidity (1983, p. 46). Media sociology as a networked transfield will help to mitigate the issue of parochialism by definition. It will help to connect the ‘isolated frog ponds’ (Rosengren, 1993, p. 7) for fun adventures, regardless which disciplinary lily pad we call home. By so doing, media sociologists operating in a transfield have boundless opportunities of using sociological imagination to connect personal troubles with public issues (Mills, 1959), that is, to search for the micro–macro link that illuminates the interaction of the social and the communicative.

Acknowledgements

This research benefits from students and guest speakers of the graduate seminar Theory and Literature: Social Science Approach I taught in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2016 and Fall 2017. I am also grateful to the comments from participants in the Media Sociology session at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Wenhong Chen (Ph.D. Toronto) is an associate professor of media studies and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her award-winning research has focused on digital inequalities, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement in the U.S., China, and Canada. Dr. Chen's current project examines data and privacy issues from a producer's perspective.