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Five Traditions in Search of the Audience 63

social psychology and psychology (cf. Schmidt, 1980–2; Svensson, 1985; Groeben
and Vorderer, 1988).
While growing out of literary criticism, cultural studies perform their analysis-
cum-interpretation through methods which refer explicitly to extra-textual frame-
works of explanation. The discourses of literature and media are said to be
inscribed in broader social and cultural practices. The categories of analysis,
consequently, are grounded not only in literary theory but in theories of social
structure and subjectivity as well – granting the fact that the primary tool of
research still remains the interpreting scholar.
More specifically, a variety of cultural forms – from oral storytelling, to graf-
fiti, to particular modes of everyday conversation – may be interpreted as
the popular expression and maintenance of social and cultural identities which
are based in interpretive communities. These communities, in their turn, are
formed in processes of gendered, ethnic and sub-cultural socialization, which to
no small extent feed on the mass media. While audience publics are thus seen
as active participants in the social production of meaning, often challenging
media constructions of reality, the focus of analysis has tended to be the over-
arching discourses of culture, rather than their local, empirical producers and
recipients.
Drawing on methods of analysis-cum-interpretation from the literary tradition
and the conception of communication and cultural processes as socially situated
discourses from cultural studies, reception analysis can be said to perform a com-
parative reading of media discourses and audience discourses in order to under-
stand the processes of reception. Audience discourses are generated within
small-scale empirical designs relying particularly on in-depth interviewing and
participant observation. Comparing these discourses with the structure of media
content, reception studies have indicated how particular genres and themes may
be assimilated by specific audiences. With reference, moreover, to the social con-
text of audience background variables as well as to other cultural and political
institutions, reception analysis has explored how audiences may contribute to
social meaning production and cultural patterns generally through their member-
ship of socially specific interpretive communities. How mass-mediated meaning
comes to orient social action and cognition, however, remains a question for
more comprehensive audience studies.
One methodological difficulty of reception analysis in its current form is that,
while it offers a theoretically informed, empirical examination of communication
processes, its findings are not easily replicable. In fact they can only seldom be
generalized beyond the small groups of individuals studied. The same difficulty
besets cultural studies and literary criticism (except for most of the social science-
oriented variants already mentioned). Generalizability, of course, is a widely
accepted demand in audience research of the effects and U&G types, both of
which aim at producing replicable studies of representative samples from well
defined populations. This basic difference between effects and U&G research
and literary criticism, cultural studies and reception analysis points to a general
issue for audience research brought to the fore also in our theoretical considera-
tions. If each tradition contributes a perspective which is thought to have rele-
vance and explanatory value in itself, the question is how the field might arrive