Page 61 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

40 Mapping approaches and themes

human activities in societies or cultures can best be understood as complex,
internally interdependent functioning systems; each part ‘functions’ by serving
the successful working of the whole. Classic Parsonian functionalism has an
inherently conservative political orientation, providing an account of the inte-
gration of social functions to produce a relatively stable social ‘order’. Func-
tionalism informed sociology and anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s,
especially in the US, but is no longer influential in either field. It has, however,
had a more lingering influence within media theory, including both liberal and
radical variants.
Durkheim, in The Division of Labour in Society (1893), identifies a process of differ-
entiation, whereby societal functions are divided up and undertaken by different,
specialist social bodies. The notion that increasingly complex social systems
require the functional differentiation of social roles and institutions is central to
Parsons’s evolutionist theory, describing a process whereby social functions initially
conjoined, such as politics and religion, are separated and differentiated. Applied
to media, such differentiation reaffirms media autonomy in two main ways.
Media are differentiated both in their social function and in the maintenance of
specialist rules and behaviours through professionalism. In the terms of a radical
sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who challenged the conservativism of Parsons,
journalism constitutes a field whose rules and practices seek to maintain, in
always dynamic and unstable ways, its differentiation from other fields, such as
politics.
For liberal functionalism, the media contribute in a variety of ways to the
maintenance and reproduction of society. According to Harold Lasswell (1903–78)
three media social functions are: surveillance (gathering information from the
external environment), correlation (co-ordination between parts of society) and
transmission (of social heritage and values from one generation to the next).
Early twentieth century communication theories focused on information and
persuasion, in print media and radio broadcasting. Harnessing the power of
media and propaganda for the ‘normal’ management of complex societies was a
theme developed by Harold Lasswell and Walter Lippman. However, challenges
to the framework of strong media effects influenced what became known as the
‘uses and gratifications’ approach, focused on personal engagement with media
and social benefits, a key strand of Meyrowitz’s (2008) ‘pleasure’ narrative. This
was also, in part, a shift from news and information to entertainment and fiction.
Researchers identified various media gratifications including pleasure, relaxation,
escape, identity formation and sense of belonging. Later theorists of commu-
nication (Carey) and of ‘media events’ (Dayan and Katz) identify media as
agencies of social integration. For Dayan and Katz (1992), media events such as
national sports or ceremonial state occasions serve to affirm a common shared
identity. Similar arguments were made for the ‘national’ social integration of
public service broadcasting (Cardiff and Scannell 1991). In a benign and inclusive
formulation of liberal functionalism, Schudson (2005: 179) describes how ‘…
both public and privately owned media in liberal societies carry out a wide