This article is a real pleasure to read. Pooley traces the history of an "invented tradition": the disciplinary origins of mass communication research. The subject of this story is a brief summary of the communication reseach field composed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Edward Shils in 1955. In the text entitled Personal Influence, Lazarsfeld and Shils proposed a clean and simple disciplinary history, which, as Pooley shows, still influences the field today. Before the Second World War, researchers assumed that propaganda was "powerful"; after 1945, they recognized that media in fact have only "limited" effects. In sketching the origins and long life of the "powerful-to-limited-effects" model, Pooley brings together a history of postwar American social theory, corporate media, government-sponsored social scientific research, Cold War liberalism, academic maneuvering and disciplinary institutionalization. Pooley does not attempt to fit all of this tale's many facets into an "origins" story as simple as the one he has set out to document. Instead, with grace and sensitivity he allows the tensions inherent in his narrative to come through. For example, he shows how Lazarsfeld used the same experimental results to many very different ends: to aid governments and corporations to improve their communications strategies, to reassure a postwar public of the benign effects of mass media, and to advance his own interests in the game of academic influence. Pooley's result is ironic: precisely by showing the limitations of mass communication's effectiveness, these social scientists maximized their own position as experts in interpreting and manipulating such limited effects. Historians love ironies.
2007 FHHS Article Prize Committee
Mitchell Ash (chair), Mark Solovey, Dana Simmons