Chicago School, Functionalism
and Community
The first major American study of
Communication
Chicago School
• Loose conglomeration of significant social
thinkers with some relation to the University
of Chicago
– Concerned with the disintegration of traditional
small town communities
– Saw mid-nineteenth century American small town
as a sort of ideal community
• Democracy itself was only meaningful, workable within
such a context
Chicago School
• Community was based in a shared sentiment
among all its members
• Without a concern for fellow members of the
community, there could be no democracy
(Dewey)
Chicago School
• Massive social changes of the late nineteenth
century had undermined the basic
cornerstone of American democracy and
society—the small town community
• No habit of intercommunication (separation
into ethnic communities/no shared language),
no shared ideals or religious faith
• Social change:
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Industrialization
Urbanization
Immigration
Class/economic differentiation
• Leads to breakdown of community:
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Anomie
Self-interest
Multiple, separate ethnic, class groups
Social problems
Breakdown of democracy
The social system is ‘sick’
• Social change has acted as a disease
• How to make the system well again?
• Reconstruct the small town on a grand scale—
build the “Great Community” (Dewey).
John Dewey
• One of the greatest intellectuals in American
history
– Philosopher
– Educational psychologist
– Political theorist
– Social commentator
Dewey and communication study
• Though Dewey placed communication at the
very heart of his philosophical and social
concerns, his actual theoretical work on
communication is fragmented and, at times,
frustratingly difficult if not obscure
– “Of all things, communication is most wonderful”
– Society can be said not only to live by
transmission, by communication, but in
transmission, in communication.
Dewey’s idea of the role of communication
in society
• Societies are based on shared sentiments,
meanings, beliefs, norms, etc.
• For a society to exist, the members must have
a feeling of communion with other members
– Shared self-interest, knowledge of the law, even
agreement to rules of democracy are not enough
– Difference between the “Great Society” and the
“Great Community”
The Great Community
• In any true community, individuals have a
feeling of fellowship with all the other
members
– Concern over the fate of all members, but
especially those in greatest need, is a natural part
of the community
– All members share equally in the feeling of
fellowship even if material wealth, etc. is unequally
distributed
• The machinery of democracy is created to help carry
out the natural policy of a true community
– It cannot create a community
– It cannot substitute for a community
– In the absence of a true community, the machinery of
elections, universal suffrage, and on and on is simply an
empty husk which will only forward the interests of the
most powerful or adept at its manipulation
• Community can only be created through
communication
– Of all things communication is the most wonderful
Communities small and large
• The ideal of community is the small town
– Like Dewey’s native Burlington, Vermont
• People know each other, develop bonds of affection
and understanding, through their face-to-face
communication, shared religious experience
(communication), gossip, shared culture and all the
other myriad ways they communicate and thus come
to share a deep understanding supported by
emotional bonds
– People take on as a personal goal the good of the
community
How to recapture community?
• Political chicanery, social disintegration,
immorality and economic abuse were largely
due to a loss of the communitarian spirit that
was part of true democracy—the community
– Must construct a mass community—the “Great
community” that would replace the “Great
Society”
• Because of the society’s grand scale, communication
would need to be on an equally grand scale—harness
the mass media to provide communication widely and
relatively uniformly to the differing groups that make up
the nation (or the city)
• “Thought News” project (enlightened social intelligence)
• One is socialized into humanity through
communication
– “To learn to be human is to develop through the
give-and-take of communication an effective
sense of being an individually distinctive member
of a community; one who understands and
appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and
who contributes to a further conversion of organic
powers into human resources and values. But this
translation is never finished.”
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929)
• Received a BA (1887) and a PhD (1894) in economics from the University
of Michigan, where he taught beginning in 1892.
• Cooley used the term the "looking glass self" to convey the idea that the
self concept reflects the evaluations
of other people. In other words, we see
ourselves as others see us.
• Works
• Human Nature and Social
Order (1902)
• Social Organization (1909)
• Social Process (1918)
Four factors affecting efficiency of “the
mechanism of intercourse”
• Expressiveness, or the range of ideas and feelings it is
competent to carry.
• Permanence of record, or the overcoming of time.
• Swiftness, or the overcoming of space.
• Diffusion, or the access to all classes of men.”
– Modern communication has had its greatest effect on
swiftness and diffusion
• “It is not too much to say that these changes are
the basis, from a mechanical standpoint, of nearly
everything this is characteristic in the psychology
of modern life.
• They make it possible for society to be organized
more and more on the higher faculties of man, on
intelligence and sympathy, rather than on
authority, caste, and routine. They mean
freedom, outlook, indefinite possibility. The
public consciousness, instead of being confined as
regards its more active phases to local groups,
extends by even steps with that give-and-take of
suggestions that the new intercourse makes
possible, until wide nations, and finally the world
itself, may be included in one lively mental
whole.”
Newspapers
• “The essential function of the newspaper is, of
course, to serve as a bulleting of important news and
a medium for the interchange of ideas”
• “The bulk of its matter, however, is best described by
the ph(r)ase organized gossip. This sort of
intercourse that people formerly carried on at crossroad stores or over the back fence, has now attained
the dignity of print and an imposing system.”
Impacts of “enlargement of gossip”
• Promotes a widespread sociability and sense of
community
– People across the country are laughing at same jokes,
thrilling to same football games and “absorb a conviction
that they are good fellows much like ourselves”
• “Tends powerfully, through the fear of publicity, to
enforce a popular, somewhat vulgar, but sound and
human standard of morality.”
Public opinion
• “In politics communication makes possible public opinion,
which, when organized, is democracy. The whole growth
of this, and of the popular education and enlightenment
that go with it, is immediately dependent upon the
telegraph, the newspaper and the fast mail, for there can
be no popular mind upon questions of the day, over wide
areas, except as the people are promptly informed of such
questions and are enabled to exchange their views
regarding them.”
– U.S. government was originally a representative republic—not
intended to be a democracy
– Original colonies probably could not have remained together
without the advent of modern communication
• “The enlargement affects not only thought but
feeling, favoring the growth of a sense of common
humanity, of moral unity, between nations, races and
classes. Among members of a communicating whole
feeling may not always be friendly, but it must be, in
a sense, sympathetic, involving some consciousness
of the other’s point of view. Even the animosities of
modern nations are of a human and imaginative sort,
not the blind animal hostility of a more primitive age.
They are resentments, and resentment, as Charles
Lamb says, is of the family of love.”
Robert Park
Park
• Ecological (biotic) community
– An aggregate of individuals characterized by
symbiosis, the division of labor and competitive
cooperation
• Society
– A community of persons organized through
communication, socialization and collective
behavior
Park
• Social control is “the central fact and the
central problem of society”
– “Society is everywhere a control organization. Its
function is to organize, integrate, and direct the
energies resident in the individuals of which it is
composed.”
Park
• “What does communication do and how does
it function in the cultural process? It seems to
do several different things. Communication
creates, or makes possible at least, that
consensus and understanding among the
individual components of a social group which
eventually gives it and them the character not
merely of society but of a cultural unit.
• “It spins a web of custom and mutual
expectation which binds together social
entities as diverse as the family group, a labor
organization, or the haggling participants in a
village market. Communication maintains the
concert necessary for them to function, each
in its several ways.”
• Transmits tradition of any group over time and
from generation to generation
– “The function of communication seems to be to
maintain the unity and integrity of the social
group in two dimensions—space and time”
• Park argues that “the economic order in
society seems to be very largely a by-product
of competition”
• Human relations are to a large extent
‘symbiotic’ rather than social
– “Competition among human beings has brought
about, or at any rate helped to bring about, not
merely a territorial, but an occupational
distribution of races and peoples. Incidentally, it
has brought about that inevitable division of labor
which is fundamental to every permanent form of
society from the family to the nation.”
• Division of labor is limited by custom, and “custom is
a product of communication”
– “As a matter of fact, competition and communication
operate everywhere within the same local habitat and
within the same community, but in relative independence
of each other.
– The area of competition is inevitably wider than that of
communication
• “But the main point is that communication,
where it exists, invariably modifies and
qualifies competition, and the cultural order
imposes limitations on the symbiotic.”
Louis Wirth
Louis Wirth’s address (1948)
• “Man” had developed technical capabilities that
outstripped his ability to control them through
reason and ‘consensus’ and this was a terribly
dangerous state to be in. This condition made the
study of sociology critically important so that
man’s ability to rule with reason could control the
danger of nuclear holocaust.
• Social scientists cannot treat their topic in the
abstract or use many of the methods of physical
sciences.
• Wirth, Louis (1948). Consensus and mass communication. American
Sociological Review. 13(1) 1-15.
• Chose to discuss consensus “because I
believe it provides both an approach to the
central problem of sociology and to the
problems of the contemporary world.” (2)
– “Because the mark of any society is the
capacity of its members to understand one
another and to act in concert toward common
objectives and under common norms, the
analysis of consensus rightly constitutes the
focus of sociological investigation.” (2)
• Compared to the Roman Empire modern mass
societies are more integrated, with people
participating in common life and in democratic
societies participate in control of public policy.
Mass societies are a product of
the modern age:
• Division of labor
• Mass communication
• More or less democratically achieved
consensus
Characteristics of the mass
• Great numbers
• Aggregates of men widely dispersed over the face of
the earth
• Heterogeneous members
• Anonymous individuals
• Does not constitute an organized group
• No common customs or tradition
• Open to suggestions
– Behavior is “capricious and unpredictable”
• Consists of unattached individuals
– Do not play roles in a group
Consensus
• Consensus is to society as mind is to the individual
– “Consensus is the sign that such partial or complete understanding has been
reached on a number of issues confronting the members of a group sufficient
to entitle it to be called a society.”
• Not imposed by coercion
• Not fixed by custom
• Therefore, “always partial and developing and has constantly to be
won” (4)
– “If men of diverse experiences and interests are to have ideas and ideals in
common they must have the ability to communicate. It is precisely here,
however, that we encounter a paradox. In order to communicate effectively
with one another, we must have a common knowledge, but in a mass society
it is through communication that we must obtain this common body of
knowledge.” (4-5)
Two major aspects of modern society
• Organized groups
• Detached masses
– “held together, if at all, by the mass media of
communication”
Society has developed many ways of
inducing consent
• Force and authority
• Leadership
– Common identification with great heroes or
leaders
– Reinforced by:
• Propaganda and education
– mass communication lends itself particularly well to the
dissemination of symbols and ideals “on a scale hitherto
thought impossible” (6)
• A common history, culture and set of
traditions
– “It is this basis of common social life as patterned
by these traditions that makes it possible in the
last analysis for any group to think of itself and to
act as a society, to regard itself as a “we” group
and to counterpose this “we” experience to all
that is alien.
• Public opinion
– “formed in the course of living, acting and making
decisions on issues” (8)
– Individuals’ role is not determined by demographics.
“What counts, rather, is their power, prestige, strategic
position, their resources, their articulateness, the
effectiveness of the organization and leadership.” (8)
– “Decisive part of public opinion . . . is the organization
of views on issues that exercise an impact upon those
who are in a position to make decisions.”
• Individuals affiliated with a variety of organized groups
• Another large mass of individuals unattached to any stable
group
– unorganized masses, leave the decision-making to those who
are organized
• “The fact that the instrumentalities of mass
communication operate in situations already
prepared for them may lead to the mistaken
impression that they or the content and
symbols which they disseminate do the trick.
It is rather the consensual basis that already
exists in society which lends to mass
communication its effectiveness.” (6-7)
• Conditions that led to mass society have
combined to “disintegrate local cohesion and to
bring hitherto disparate and parochial cultures
into contact with each other. Out of this ferment
has come the disenchantment of absolute faiths.”
(7)
• --“skepticism toward all dogmas and ideologies”
• --substitution of rational grounds for believing
• where reason fails, to seek “legitimation for a belief in
personal tastes, preferences and the right to choose”
• Increasing public sophistication leads to
increased sophistication of
persuasion/propaganda
• Democracies must resort to the art of
compromise.
– “democracies rest upon the ultimate agreement
to disagree, which is the tolerance of a divergent
view” (8)
– Consensus . . . is the established habit of
intercommunication, or discussion, debate, negotiation
and compromise, and the toleration of heresies, or
even of indifference, up to the point of “clear and
present danger” which threatens the life of the society
itself. Rather than resting on unanimity, it rests upon a
sense of group identification and participation in the
life of society, upon the willingness to allow our
representatives to speak for us even though they do
not always faithfully represent our views, if indeed we
have any views at all on many of the issues under
discussion, and upon our disposition to fit ourselves
into a program that our group has adopted and to
acquiesce in group decisions unless the matter is
fundamentally incompatible with our interests and
integrity.” (9-10)
• “Mass communication is rapidly becoming, if it is not
already, the main framework of the web of social
life.”
– “we live in an era when the control over these media
constitutes perhaps the most important source of power in
the social universe” (10)
– Hitler’s use of media
Development of a formal model of
structural functionalism
• Talcott Parsons
James Carey
Carey
• Carey is reacting to the dominance of the
structural functionalist/effects paradigm
reflected in Lasswell’s and Lazarsfeld’s view of
communication over that of the Chicago
School
• “Transmission” view of communication
– “imparting, sending, transmitting or giving
information to others”
– Metaphor of geography or transportation
• “The center of this idea of communication is
the transmission of signals or messages over
distance for the purpose of control.”
– Derives from “one of the most ancient of human
dreams: the desire to increase the speed and
effect of messages as they travel in space.”
Religious roots
• Puritan movement to New World, etc. based on the
“belief that movement in space could itself be a
redemptive act”
– “The moral meaning of transportation, then, was the
establishment and extension of God’s kingdom on Earth.”
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Converting heathens
Produce a “heavenly, though still terrestrial city”
Missionary uses of new transportation systems
Bring Christians in every city together through the telegraph and
telegraph, “In effect almost bringing a nation together in one
praying intercourse” (Miller quoted in Carey)
• “Communication was viewed as a process and
as a technology that would, sometimes for
religious purposes, spread, transmit, and
disseminate knowledge, ideas information
further and faster with the end of controlling
space and people.”
• More secularized view over time, but
continues to dominate our current thinking.
Ritual view of communication
• Older of the two views
• “Sharing, participation, association, fellowship, and
the possession of a common faith”
• “A ritual view of communication is not directed
toward the extension of messages in space but the
maintenance of society in time; not the act of
imparting information but the representation of
shared beliefs.”
• “If the archetypal case of communication
under a transmission view is the extension of
messages across geography for the purpose of
control, the archetypal case under a ritual
view is the sacred ceremony which draws
persons together in fellowship and
commonality.”
• “It does not see the original or highest
manifestation of communication in the
transmission of intelligent information but in
the construction and maintenance of an
ordered, meaningful cultural world which can
serve as a control and container for human
action.”
• “This projection of community ideals and their
embodiment in material form—dance, plays,
architecture, news stories, strings of speech—creates
an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order
which operates not to provide information but
confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds
but to represent an underlying order of things, not to
perform functions but to manifest an ongoing and
fragile social process.”
• “The model here is not that of information
acquisition, though such acquisition occurs, but of
dramatic action in which the reader joins a world of
contending forces as an observer at play.”
• Does not lead to questions of functions or effects
• “a presentation of reality that gives to life an overall
form, order, and tone”
• “Under a ritual view, then, news is not
information but drama: it does not describe
the world but portrays an arena of dramatic
forces and action; it exists solely in historical
time; and it invites our participation on the
basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social
roles within it.”
Definition of communication
• “Communication is a symbolic process whereby
reality is produced, maintained, repaired and
transformed.”
• “Reality is not given, not humanly existent,
independent of language and towards which
language stands as a pale refraction. Rather reality is
brought into existence, is produced, by
communication; that is, by the construction,
apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.”