Changing Culture, Stable Structure

ABSTRACT

In this contribution we deal with the contradiction between changing culture and stable structure, i.e., the phenomenon that a social structure that developed to accommodate a certain culture may remain stable over a long period of time, even when that culture changes. We do so for the case of the Dutch public broadcasting system, that was designed in the 1920s to fit with the segmented pluralism of Dutch society, in which a number of religiously and ideologically different groups had to peacefully co-exist. In the mid-1960s, Dutch society started to change rapidly and segmented pluralism started to wane. The public broadcasting system, however, hardly changed until today. First we explain how structure and culture initially matched and how the concept of path dependency can explain how over time culture and structure can grow apart. Then, with data of six national surveys between 1979 and 2005, we explore the possible cultural grounds for the fact that the segmented public broadcasting system has outlived the segmented pluralism of Dutch society that it was originally designed to match.

Key words:

• public broadcasting
• segmented pluralism
• social structure
• culture
• correspondence analysis
• longitudinal analysis

Notes

1. The actual data reduction and construction are not reported in this manuscript because that would make this manuscript unnecessarily long. Those who are interested are most welcome to contact the first author.

2. An extended version of this contribution, in which we also interpret the second and third dimension, can be obtained from the first author.

3. Since 1995 Veronica is no longer a public broadcasting association, but people can still subscribe to Veronica Magazine, and may thus feel that they are a member of Veronica and indicate so in a questionnaire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruben P. Konig

Dr. Ruben P. Konig is an assistant professor and member of the Communication Research Programme of the Behavioral Science Institute (BSI) of the Radboud University Nijmegen. He was originally trained as a sociologist of religion and a research methodologist. He wrote his PhD thesis on the relationship between Christian religion and anti-Semitism in The Netherlands. Afterwards, he changed track to Communication Science. Currently, his main research interests are everyday media use, social embeddedness of media use, and research methodology.

Jo L. H. Bardoel

Prof. dr. Jo(hannes) L. H. Bardoel is a professor of Journalism and Media and part of the Communication Research Programme of the Behavorial Science Institute (BSI) of the Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a senior researcher working with the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. Bardoel received his MA in Sociology from Nijmegen University in 1976, worked as a policy strategist for Netherlands Public Broadcasting (NOS) for 15 years, and then returned to academia, defending his PhD thesis ‘Journalism in the Information Society’ at the University of Amsterdam in 1997. His current research interests are in the field of both national and European media and communications policies, and in journalism studies.