Putting the Management into Innovation & Media Management Studies: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

The study of management of innovation is crucial to media management research, helping explain how technology diffusion affects the communication industry and providing a glimpse into its future. This meta-analysis looks at the recent history of mass communication scholarship (1983–2008), addressing newsroom changes to determine whether a mainstream managerial theory—sociotechnical literature—garners adequate use. The researchers discovered numerous references—mostly indirect—to sociotechnical systems (STS) theory, yet found sporadic use of a true managerial emphasis as expressed through the analysis of STS theory's principles- and frames-specific theoretical framework. Implications of the findings and future, alternative directions for research are proposed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We acknowledge and thank—for thoughts encouraging the creation of this article—our friend and mentor, Wayne Danielson, professor emeritus in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Notes

1. The journals we reviewed included Journalism, Journalism Studies; Journalism Practice; Journalism History; Journalism and Communication Monographs; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Journalism & Mass Communication Educator; Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media; Critical Studies in Media Communication; International Journal of Communication; Journal of Mass Media Ethics; Journal of Media Business Studies; Journal of Media Economics; Convergence; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Southern Communication Journal; Newspaper Research Journal; New Media and Society; Nordicom Review; Media, Culture, and Society; Mass Communication & Society; International Journal on Media Management; and First Monday. These journals were selected because they represent the majority of literature on research done in the journalism and mass communication industry over the past 25 years.

2. Dibean and Garrison (2001); Dimmick, Chen, and Li (2004); Fahmy and Smith (2003); Niebauer, Abbott, Corbin, and Neibergall (2000).

3. For this study, we specifically created nodes for our coding schema of keywords. We then placed these nodes into a larger category called a “tree node,” which held all the relevant keywords to that term. Then, we ran queries on each keyword from each tree node among the 82 documents imported into the application. Each query pulled the keyword and its surrounding paragraph so we could view it in its context. When all the queries were complete, we then reviewed the specific frequencies of each keyword within its overall tree node. Then, we began to identify the patterns of the most-frequent to the least-frequent keywords that came up in the documents searched. We reviewed each keyword example and its surrounding paragraph to identify the specific uses and forms of the words by the author of that journal article. We then created memos to identify patterns of repetition and omission that helped to create the findings presented in this study.

4. This is with the exception of the “computers” and “future” categories. The former described a variety of influences, taken from such concepts as online, convergence, blogging, e-mail, electronic media, and so forth; all were manifestations of computerized technology. We used the latter term whenever a study generally claimed to examine newspapers' futures. Still, some studies (e.g., 1 studying offset printing, pagination, and digital imagery) fell into more than one category.

5. We cross-referenced the 12 managerial categories by 33 technology adoption categories, yielding only 124 total references. From there, we examined each result alluded to by two or more studies, and then closely examined such studies that carried two—a lower threshold because there were so few total mentions—or more references.