Lewis A. Coser, Guest Editor
Arien Mack, Journal Editor
The papers gathered in this issue of Social Research attempt to lay bare some of the social roots of the production and distribution of symbolic products in contemporary American society.
This paper attempts to analyze the decision-making process in publishing, and delineate the salient criteria that influence which books get published.
This article analyzes a feature of newsweek intended to produce fresh fodder for newspaper columns and television newscasts. It seeks to demonstrate how the pattern of staff deployment used by news organizations, here described as a news net, imposes order on social reality.
The growth of literacy, the success of Napoleon's Ministry of Instruction (and the consequent spread of French as a truly national language), and the ready and inexpensive availability of paper stock for printing combined with an immediate market response to authors of the day brought about the growth in popular culture in France, 1850–90.
This article discusses the interdependence of the commercial music industry and the radio broadcasting industry; describes changes in country-music radio, and how these changes affected the careers of artists, record-making, and eventually the music itself, 1950s–78.
The article addresses the interpretation of production and distribution among several long-standing disputes and distinctions concerning: mass and elite culture, mass-media organizations, and social-science “versus” humanistic perspectives on each.
Different ideas of the meaning of culture and cultural improvement and specifically about the place of culture in American social organization of the 1930s between Theodor W. Adorno (hired by Paul F. Lazarsfeld to supervise a study of music in American culture) within the Rockefeller-funded Princeton Radio Research Project led in 1939 to the demise of Adorno's project, as did Adorno's difficult personality and research methods.
Investigates the tensions between domination of the arts by elites and the notion of art as a public good; analyzes the increasing dependence of the fine arts on the federal, state, and local governments and the ramifications of that dependency.
Two types of art galleries during the 1940s and 50s (the first, characterized by Betty Parsons as fostering invention and artistic and cultural goals, and the second, characterized by Sam Kootz as fostering innovation and rational economic goals) made New York City the foremost artistic center and fostered abstract expressionism.