People behind the theories
Scholars, philosophers and researchers who appear in the course: who they were, what they did and where to meet them in the lessons.
Alexis de Tocqueville
French judge and political thinker (1805–1859); in Democracy in America, written after his American journey, he described the tyranny of the majority and the way individualism isolates people.
Auguste Comte
French philosopher (1798–1857); founder of positivism, coiner of the word “sociology” and author of the law of three stages.
Benjamin Day
American printer and newspaper publisher; in 1833 he started the penny press by launching the New York Sun at one cent.
Bernard Cohen
American political scientist; the sentence about “what to think about” in The Press and Foreign Policy (1963) became the slogan of agenda-setting theory.
Bruce H. Westley
American journalism teacher. With Malcolm MacLean he wrote, in 1955–57, the mass-communication model that adds a channel (gatekeeper) role to Newcomb’s ABX.
Carroll J. Glynn
Communication researcher working on public opinion and social norms. In 1997, with Andrew Hayes and James Shanahan, wrote the meta-analysis on the spiral of silence.
Charles E. Osgood
American psychologist (1916–1991), known at Illinois for measuring meaning and the semantic differential; one of the colleagues whose ideas Schramm’s model draws on.
Charles Horton Cooley
American sociologist (1864–1929). With the “looking-glass self” he described how people build a sense of themselves through the judgments they imagine in other minds.
Claude E. Shannon
American mathematician and engineer (1916–2001). At Bell Laboratories he wrote the 1948 paper that founded information theory, with the bit and the boxed diagram of a communication system.
David K. Berlo
American communication scholar (1929–1996). His 1960 book The Process of Communication set out the lists of factors summed up as source–message–channel–receiver (SMCR).
Denis McQuail
British communication theorist (1935–2017); author of the textbook “Mass Communication Theory”.
Donald Shaw
Founder of agenda-setting research with Maxwell McCombs; professor of journalism and press historian at Chapel Hill (d. 2021).
Edward L. Bernays
Vienna-born American (1891–1995). In 1928 he wrote the book “Propaganda” and defended “public relations counsel” as a profession.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
German public opinion researcher and communication scholar (1916–2010). Founder of the Allensbach Institute; developer of the spiral of silence theory.
Émile Durkheim
French sociologist (1858–1917); known for social facts, mechanical and organic solidarity, anomie and his study of suicide; one of the founders of sociology.
Ernest W. Burgess
Canadian-born American sociologist (1886–1966); Park’s close colleague at Chicago. Known for the model in which a city grows in rings outward from its centre.
Erving Goffman
Canadian-born sociologist (1922–1982). He analysed everyday encounters in the language of theatre: front stage, back stage, impression management.
Ferdinand Tönnies
German sociologist (1855–1936); known for the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft distinction, his theory of two kinds of will and his book on public opinion.
Gabriel Tarde
French judge and sociologist (1843–1904); he developed the laws of imitation and the distinction between crowd and public, and saw the newspaper as the maker of the public.
Georg Simmel
German philosopher and sociologist (1858–1918); known for forms of sociation, the stranger and the metropolis essay; an influence on the Chicago tradition.
George Creel
American journalist (1876–1953). In 1917 he became chairman of the Committee on Public Information and told the story of its work in a book published in 1920.
George Gerbner
Hungarian-born American communication researcher (1919–2005); dean of the Annenberg School. Ran the Cultural Indicators project; known for cultivation theory and the “mean world syndrome”.
George Herbert Mead
American philosopher and social psychologist (1863–1931). He showed how the self arises in social interaction; the “I”, the “me” and the generalized other are his concepts.
Gerhard Maletzke
German communication scientist and psychologist (1922–2010). His 1963 book Psychologie der Massenkommunikation drew the “field schema” (Feldschema) of mass communication.
Gustave Le Bon
French physician and social writer (1841–1931); with Psychologie des foules (1895) he popularised the idea of an “era of crowds” and the psychology of crowds.
Hadley Cantril
American psychologist and public opinion researcher, known for The Invasion from Mars (1940) on Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play. Textbooks often present the book as a “magic bullet” example.
Harold D. Lasswell
American political scientist (1902–1978). His book on war propaganda appeared in 1927; in 1948 he described communication with five questions and three social functions.
Herbert Blumer
American sociologist (1900–1987). He coined “symbolic interactionism” in 1937 and summed the approach up in three premises in 1969.
Herbert Spencer
English philosopher and sociologist (1820–1903); the Victorian thinker who saw society as an “organic” whole and coined “survival of the fittest”.
İbrahim Müteferrika
Ottoman official of Transylvanian origin; in 1727 he received imperial permission for a Muslim-run press, and his first book appeared in 1729.
Jacques Ellul
French legal historian and sociologist (1912–1994). In Propagandes (1962) he analysed propaganda as a social phenomenon of technological society.
James W. Carey
American communication theorist and journalism educator (d. 2006). Known for Communication as Culture (1989), which proposed looking at communication through two lenses, “transmission” and “ritual”.
Johannes Gutenberg
Goldsmith-printer from Mainz, remembered as the pioneer of printing with movable metal type in Europe, though surprisingly little is documented about his life.
John Dewey
American philosopher and educator (1859–1952), a pioneer of pragmatism. His view of communication as the constitutive element of community influenced Park and the Chicago School.
José Ortega y Gasset
Spanish philosopher (1883–1955); in La rebelión de las masas he defined the “mass-man” as an attitude, not a class, and voiced an elitist concern for culture.
Karl Mannheim
Budapest-born sociologist (1893–1947); known for the sociology of knowledge; his 1935 book is counted in the democratic strand of the mass-society literature.
Karl Marx
German philosopher and social theorist (1818–1883); one of the starting points of critical approaches through his theories of history, economics and ideology.
Karl Popper
Vienna-born philosopher of science (1902–1994), known for the criterion that a scientific theory must be falsifiable.
Larry Gross
American communication researcher. Directed Cultural Indicators with Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania; co-author of the 1976 Violence Profile article. Later a school director at USC.
Louis Wirth
German-born American sociologist (1897–1952), known for his 1938 article defining the city as the way of life of a large, dense and heterogeneous population.
Malcolm S. MacLean Jr.
American journalism teacher. With Bruce Westley he wrote, in 1955–57, the conceptual model that extends Newcomb’s ABX to mass communication.
Max Weber
German sociologist and economist (1864–1920); known for Verstehen, the ideal type, rationalization and the types of legitimate domination; in 1910 he proposed a survey on the sociology of the press.
Maxwell McCombs
One of the two founders of agenda-setting research; did the 1968 Chapel Hill study with Donald Shaw and developed need for orientation and second-level agenda-setting.
Michael Morgan
US communication researcher; emeritus professor at UMass Amherst. Worked with Gerbner, co-author of the 1980 mainstreaming article; wrote cultivation meta-analyses and state-of-the-field reports.
Nancy Signorielli
American communication researcher; professor at the University of Delaware. Original member of the Cultural Indicators team; worked on television characters and cultivation analysis.
Paul Lazarsfeld
Vienna-born American sociologist; directed the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia and, with his voter studies and the two-step flow idea, became the emblem of the limited-effects era.
Paul M. Hirsch
American sociologist and organization researcher. In 1980–81 he reanalysed the Gerbner team’s cultivation findings and questioned the theory’s empirical basis.
Paul Watzlawick
Austrian-born American psychologist and communication theorist (1921–2007). Worked at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto; known for the five axioms that include “one cannot not communicate”.
Robert E. Park
American sociologist (1864–1944); first a reporter, then a pioneer of the Chicago School. He studied the immigrant press, news and the city, and saw the city as a research laboratory.
Robert K. Merton
American sociologist (1910–2003); the name behind “middle-range theory”, established terms such as the self-fulfilling prophecy and the focus group, and the Columbia research tradition.
Robert T. Craig
American communication theorist; mapped communication theory as “seven traditions” in a 1999 article.
Roman Jakobson
Moscow-born linguist (1896–1982), a pioneer of structural linguistics. His 1960 “Closing Statement” with its six factors and six functions of language also entered communication models.
Solomon Asch
Polish-born American social psychologist (1907–1996). Known for his 1950s line-length conformity experiments; in Noelle-Neumann’s theory, one of the psychological supports of fear of isolation.
Talcott Parsons
American sociologist (1902–1979). The leading name of structural functionalism, which treats society as a system; the theorist of the AGIL scheme.
Theodore M. Newcomb
American social psychologist (1903–1984). His 1953 paper proposed the model of A, B and X on which Westley and MacLean’s mass-communication model is built.
Thomas S. Kuhn
American historian and philosopher of science (1922–1996); turned “paradigm” into a central idea for how science works.
W. James Potter
American communication researcher; emeritus professor at UC Santa Barbara. Expert in media effects and media literacy; criticized cultivation theory conceptually in 1993 and 2014.
Walter Lippmann
American journalist and commentator; with the ideas of “the pictures in our heads” and the “pseudo-environment” in Public Opinion (1922) he laid the intellectual ground of agenda-setting theory.
Warren Weaver
American mathematician and science administrator (1894–1978). He ran the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences programme and wrote the essay that opened Shannon’s theory to general readers.
Wilbur Schramm
American communication scholar (1907–1987). He came from literature, founded the Institute of Communications Research at Illinois in 1947 and wrote one of the first process models in 1954.
William I. Thomas
American sociologist (1863–1947), one of the pioneers of the Chicago School. Known for the sentence “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” and for his study of immigrants’ letters.
William Kornhauser
American political sociologist (1925–2004); in The Politics of Mass Society (1959) he formulated mass society as “accessibility of elites and availability of non-elites”.