Page 184 - Culture Society and the Media

174 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA
Corresponding sociological models
Each approach or paradigm corresponds with one of three major sociological
models of society. The ‘missionary’ approach develops from structural
functionalism. Functionalism tended to reify certain postulated features of
complex industrial societies as essential for their reproduction and survival. This
in turn encouraged the assumption that industrialization would be facilitated in
other societies if these essential features were in some way engendered. The media
‘missionaries’ sought to transplant western media technologies to the poorer
economies so that one day these economies would be facsimiles of the western
economies. In sociological theory, functionalism was superseded by Neo-
Weberianism which reacted against the functionalist reification of society and
against the inability of functionalism to explain social change. Neo-Weberianism
gave primacy to conflict as a driving force of change, and in particular, the
conflict between groups for income, power and status. In doing so, it
‘rediscovered’ motive, interest, and perception, and ‘redelivered’ society to
human beings. But it could also be seen to legitimate a pluralistic view of society
as made up of equally competing and bargaining groups, a society in which
belief-systems could operate independently as sources of change. There are
similarities here, therefore, with what I have called the ‘pluralist’ approach to the
study of the relationship between communication and development. While it
pays equal regard to different modes of development, this approach may
underestimate the extent to which the pattern of development in any given
economy may be determined by a stronger economy. Thus it precludes the kind
of analysis advocated by the media ‘totalists’ whose view of society derives from
neo-Marxism, in which all social relations are seen in terms of their derivation
from the mode of production.

TOTALIZATION’ AND THEORY DEVELOPMENT
The major strategic consequence of the ‘totalistic’ approach in the study of the
mass media and ‘development’ is that it greatly widens the range of phenomena
that must be considered essentially relevant. The theoretical core of analysis is
located at ever higher levels of global social structure. In Schiller’s work, as
represented in Chapter 2 of the 1979 volume, the theoretical core is located in the
relationship between the multi-national corporations and the global market
economy. (The relationship between multi-nationals and nation states, on the
other hand, is seen as relatively unproblematic: governments of parent nations
and élites of host nations simply work in support of these giant enterprises.) In this
scenario, transnational media are seen as constituting the ‘ideologically
supportive informational infrastructure for the MNC’s’ (Schiller, 1979, p. 21).
Thus in addition to the generalized informational activities in which all such
enterprises engage (e.g. generation and transmission of business data, export of
management techniques), there are various categories of trans media support