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Five Traditions in Search of the Audience 57

study mass-communication processes as an integrated aspect of other everyday
‘practices’. Practices may be defined briefly as meaningful social activities (Williams,
1977). The concept serves to underline a holistic perspective on social life, while
recognizing the scope for intervention by individuals and the role of meaning for
orienting social action. For cultural studies, then, the centre of mass-communication
research is located outside the media, which are embedded, along with audi-
ences, in broad social and cultural practices.
The roots of present-day cultural studies are many, including a number of
nineteenth-century classics (Durkheim, Marx, Weber), as well as modern European
and American pioneers such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1977), Hoggart (1957),
Williams (1977), Carey (1989) and Gans (1974). It is normally assumed that
a breakthrough took place when, building on these classics and pioneers, a
Birmingham–Paris axis was established and, later on, re-exported to the
American market. In other words, British cultural studies derived much of
their impetus and appeal from the assimilation of French social and psychoan-
alytic theory to the critical study of contemporary social issues (Hall et al.,
1980). In doing so, this tradition helped to redefine culture not as canonical
works, but as processes of meaning production. It further served to revaluate
popular culture as a worthy discourse and a relevant social resource, casting,
for example, television as a modern bard (Fiske and Hartley, 1978). It should be
added, perhaps, that although for some time British cultural studies domi-
nated the scene, similar ideas were developed more or less independently in
other European countries.
The tradition of cultural studies raises both theoretical and political issues
concerning the audience. With Morley (1980) representing something of a break-
through, a great deal of recent work has explored the extent to which audiences –
drawing on frames of explanation outside the dominant social order – resist
constructions of reality presented by mass media (Ang, 1985; Morley, 1986; Radway,
1984; Fiske, 1987). Theoretically, the relative power of different cultural practices
in the social production of meaning is at stake. Politically, the question is
whether this form of semiotic resistance is evidence of a long-term tendency
towards social change, which might imply new political strategies.

Reception Analysis

Cultural studies blend into reception analysis in several respects, as exemplified by
recent works such as Ang (1985), Morley (1986), or Radway (1984). Reception analy-
sis, in this context, is taken as the more inclusive term, covering various forms of
qualitative empirical audience research which, to different degrees, seek to integrate
social–scientific and humanistic perspectives on reception (Jensen, 1986).
In broad theoretical terms, the tradition builds on a variety of theoretical frame-
works ranging from symbolic interactionism to psychoanalysis. More specifically,
it has one of its roots in the two traditions of reception aesthetics and reader-
response theories mentioned above, another in the U&G research which some
current reception analysts helped found (Katz and Liebes, 1984). In empirical