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Lazarsfeld, Paul
Lazarsfeld, Paul Terry Nichols Clark University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Glossary contextual analysis Comparing patterns of individuals across different contexts (such as big and small cities) to measure distinct individual and contextual effects. fourfold table/cross-tabulation Simple tabular presentations to quantify processes that have otherwise been handled casually. panel study Repeated surveys of the same persons over time, to help specify causal paths. postindustrial society A label signifying the paradigmatic revolution that Lazarsfeld and associates helped generate.
Paul Lazarsfeld and his many associates made multiple specific contributions to social science by cumulatively encouraging two paradigmatic transformations: the first was the joining of European theory with systematic empirical research, and the second was the shifting of focus from production and work to consumption and leisure, to understand postindustrial society. Lazarsfeld changed the social sciences. He might have worked on mathematically sophisticated issues with a coterie of like-minded associates, but instead collaborated with dozens of talented persons, some strongly nonquantitative. This makes his unique contribution harder to specify. Born in Vienna in 1901, he studied mathematics and social science at the University of Vienna. In America after 1933, he worked on survey research in New York and was professor of sociology at Columbia University until his death in 1976.
Research Overview Major Contributions Paul Lazarsfeld helped launch several new fields of social measurement and approaches to study them. Before
Lazarsfeld, market research was anecdotal and casual. His techniques for large empirical surveys of consumers today define market research. He developed surveys to measure the policy views of individual voters, to assess personal friendships, and to chart other processes previously handled more intuitively. His books The People’s Choice (1944) and Voting (1954) are the foundations of contemporary political behavior studies. Lazarsfeld refined survey methods for mass communications. Before him, many believed that radio and newspapers manipulated individuals and had huge impacts. These ‘‘mass society’’ arguments held sway with most intellectuals and commercial firms. He showed instead how media effects were generally more limited and operated differently. In politics, product marketing, and mass communication, Lazarsfeld showed that direct messages from elites were seldom accepted by individual citizens, as many had suggested; rather, key impacts were indirect, often via ‘‘opinion leaders’’ who would talk with their friends, thus selectively accepting, rejecting, or adapting news, advertisements, and political messages. Such processes constituted a ‘‘two-step flow of communication’’—first through the media, second through the personal contact—which Lazarsfeld documented with detailed analyses of neighbors discussing politics and women choosing groceries and clothes. He considerably strengthened social science methodology, by developing new techniques and writing about how to refine or transform older methods by more self-conscious analysis. Although his Ph.D. was in mathematics, most of his methodological work was written in very clear, simple language, and aimed to change how social scientists and policymakers thought and worked. His success was impressive. His impact came often from finding a new, creative solution to a ‘‘hot’’ problem that others had addressed more casually. Many of his solutions were so
Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, Volume 2 Ó2005, Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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elegantly clear that others could and did immediately adopt them, and extend them further. The mathematics and statistics used were the simplest possible for the task. For instance, to sort out distinct effects of media content, personal discussions, and other factors, Lazarsfeld developed the ‘‘panel study,’’ reinterviewing the same persons over time to monitor change, such as during a political or advertising campaign. He reported differences in crosstabulations, and analyzed turnover across cells. In a paper on ‘‘The Art of Asking Why?,’’ Lazarsfeld showed that simply asking ‘‘why’’ often gets a simplified response, but that a richer picture of processes often emerges if the process is studied and an accounting scheme of likely answers is developed and is used to structure probes. To analyze effects of several variables, Lazarsfeld showed how multicausal analysis was necessary. But he continually sought to transcend the simple, linear models (as in ordinary least-squares regression) by showing how to measure interaction effects (such as a third variable Z shifting the effect of X on Y) or contextual effects (such as Marx’s suggestion that low salaries generate more worker discontent in large, as compared to small, factories). The methodological treatise by Lazarsfeld, The Language of Social Research, became popular in America as a guide for practitioners and students. With a former student, Raymond Boudon, the treatise was transformed into a theoretical philosophical work in the French adaptation, Le Vocabulaire des Sciences Sociales. Lazarsfeld encouraged mathematical work in social science and developed ‘‘latent structure analysis,’’ but such approaches went beyond most of his collaborators. His creative thrust was to claim large, new terrains and analyze them in a more self-conscious and methodologically explicit manner than did his predecessors. He showed how past simplifications brought misleading results. Unhappy that most history of social science considered only theories, he helped develop the history of empirical social research as a subfield. Most contributions by Paul F. Lazarsfeld were by-products of collaborative work with Robert K. Merton and many talented students and colleagues, first in Vienna, then at Columbia University.
Father of Postindustrial Society? ‘‘In Russia the Revolution succeeded, so they need engineers; in America, the revolution failed, so we need Sociology.’’ Here is classic Lazarsfeld: self-deprecating humor, the whiff of a secret agenda, an ideological program, and an immigrant’s revolutionary commitment to build a new society. Consider one specific reading of Lazarsfeld’s slogan: that sociologists, especially at Columbia, helped chart and explain the workings of postindustrial society—even if ‘‘postindustrial society’’ was not conceptualized until years after their major contributions.
This is a broader formulation than Lazarsfeld proposed, but it clarifies his impact. The major counterinterpretation is that Columbia sociology was a handmaiden to capitalism. Lazarsfeld’s neosocialist slogan directly contradicts the simple view that Lazarsfeld and Columbia ‘‘sold out’’ to American capitalism—as argued in various ways by critics, from C. Wright Mills to Alvin Gouldner to the Frankfurt sociologists. In contrast to some critics, it can be posited that Marxism was incorporated into the Columbia amalgam of sociology from its very origins in the 1930s, and continued in ways often overlooked. For instance, Marienthal was Lazarsfeld’s 1932 study of the unemployed in a depression-devastated community, detailing how persons out of work suffered psychological damage. Merton’s 1937 Science, Technology and Society showed how modern science was driven ahead by the twin forces of technology (in a broadly Marxist manner) and the Protestant religion (broadly Weberian). Merton and Lazarsfeld’s personal involvements with left political movements in their formative years were deep and intense, as others have detailed. Columbia sociologists, led by Lazarsfeld and Merton, helped create modern sociology through a continuous dialogue, albeit often latent, with Marxist themes and concepts. This holds in many areas, on examination of their shifts from past topics chosen for study (dress shoppers in Decatur, Illinois, rather than unemployed workers), or of their shift from a top-down focus in organizations to bottom-up cooptation. Core concepts were invented or redefined (e.g., from the proletariat to student activist, from politics as part of production to part of consumption). Lazarsfeld’s contribution may be framed with the concept of postindustrial society, first by identifying sources for the concept in subfields of Columbia sociologists after the 1930s. The gradually resulting framework generated a paradigm shift away from Marxist-inspired thinking, but this shift was largely ‘‘unannounced,’’ in that elements of Marx continued in many Columbia studies. The big bang built on smaller ‘‘revolutions’’ in subparadigms, such as organization theory and mass media; together, they generated a deeper overall change. This is all the more intriguing because the label and conceptualization of ‘‘postindustrial’’ from Bell only came later, following much of the innovative Columbia work. Alternatives are charted in Table I, showing the specific concepts and their main competitors, Marxism and Individualism. More generally, Lazarsfeld and the Columbia armory of ideas have an elective affinity with postindustrial society in ways that were not recognized or scarcely mentioned in earlier years. This is in good part because the concept of the postindustrial society crystallized only after the most vibrant years of Lazarsfeld and Merton. Similarly, Hegel’s owl of Minerva took flight only as dawn neared. The label ‘‘postindustrial society’’ came
Lazarsfeld, Paul Table I
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A Core List of Elements Contrasting Columbia Sociology with Neo-Marxist and Individualistic Conceptsa
Columbia/postindustrial society concept
Individualistic conceptb
Neo-Marxist concept
Consumption Leisure Consumers
Production Jobs Workers
Home Women and their families Personal influence, social interaction Citizen focused
Workplace Men and their work Social structural characteristics (class, etc.) System focused, e.g., capitalism, aristocracy
Buying consumer products Talking with friends to form opinions Informal organization; unanticipated consequences Organizational/management structure Goal displacement; cooptation; subcultures Issue politics, issue specificity More social liberalism, e.g., new women’s roles Voluntary associations Cross-pressures, role conflict Pluralism Autonomous mass media Autonomous scientific community Students as political vanguard New class Knowledge research and development/ high technology Rising professional autonomy of workers Weak unions and parties, strong individualism Consumer-based indvidual aesthetics Democratic processes Intellectuals/cultural creation
Investing capital Organizing class consciousness Class conflict
Utility, preferences (more abstract) Work and amenities Subsets of utilities, clusters of attitudes Individual Less attention to context Interaction Individual/preferences/personality focused Maximizing utility — —
Ownership of the means of production Classe an sich to classe fuer sich Coherent party program Fiscal/economic policy positions
— — Cognitive consistency Attitude structure
Vanguard party focus False consciousness Power elites Class-controlled propaganda Science subordinated to hierarchy Proletariat moving toward revolution Fordism/regulation theory Manufacturing products
— Cognitive dissonance — — — — — —
Rising global monopolies, regulated by states Strong unions and class-based parties
— —
Historical materialism Class responsiveness Class domination, surplus value
— — —
a Source: b
A decidedly flawed memory of a former Columbia student (T. N. Clark). Individualistic theories tend not to address some more social structural items, hence the column is sometimes left blank.
from two books by Daniel Bell, published in 1973 and 1978. Overlapping ideas were elaborated by Seymour Martin Lipset, Ronald Inglehart, and the present author’s writings in The New Political Culture (Table II charts the main themes). Deeper than labels and specific studies are the prototheory, implicit hunches, and a prescient sensitivity as to how society worked—or what Weber called choosing the research topic. Lazarsfeld often operated with brilliant intuition. Later, Merton clarified the operation of identifying ‘‘strategic research sites.’’ Choosing the precise topic and angle is often the single most critical aspect of a brilliant study, as the following examples suggest. The Columbia synthesis built on elements of American society that distinctly differed from European society,
with its peasantry, class, work, and party-defined patriarchal, authoritarian social structure. Instead, the new structure was driven by consumption, not production; by the household, not the job; by leisure, not work. Thus voting was not seen as ‘‘explained’’ exclusively by men and fathers working on an assembly line, but also by women and mothers, chatting with their neighbors about whom to vote for while listening to soap operas. These new participants in the system made decisions for political candidates following rules like those for buying Campbell’s soup and, later, Mary Kay cosmetics. The core elements charted in Table I were refined in works such as those cited in Table II. These works comprise an exploration of only a few of the themes that illustrate the transformations wrought by Lazarsfeld and his collaborators.
474 Table II
Lazarsfeld, Paul Contrasting Emphases in Alternative Versions of Postindustrial Theoriesa Bell
Columbia/postindustrial society concept Consumption Leisure Consumers Home Women and their families Personal influence, social interaction Citizen focused Buying consumer products Talking with friends to form opinions Informal organization, unanticipated consequences Organizational/management structure Goal displacement, cooptation, subcultures Issue politics, issue specificity More social liberalism, e.g., new women’s roles Voluntary associations Cross-pressures, role conflict Pluralism Autonomous mass media Autonomous scientific community Students as political vanguard New class Knowledge/research and development / high technology Rising professional autonomy of workers Weak unions and parties, strong individualism Consumer-based indvidual aesthetics Democratic processes Intellectuals/cultural creation
TCPIS
CCC
Inglehart
Lipset
Clark, NPC
a
The point of this table is merely to highlight, quite roughly, major differences in emphasis among alternative formulations of postindustrial society. The main references are Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (TCPIS) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (CCC), various works by Lipset, especially Political Man and American Exceptionalism, and by Inglehart (Modernism and Post-Modernism), and The New Political Culture (NPC) by Clark et al.
Discussion of Selected Core Concepts Consumption vs. Production, Leisure vs. Jobs, Consumers vs. Workers, Home vs. Workplace, Autonomous Mass Media vs. Class-Controlled Propaganda With support and encouragement from Frank Stanton, chief researcher and then president of the new Columbia Broadcasting Company, Lazarsfeld charted the rise of the media and how it related to average citizens. Many studies were published in Radio Research, which Lazarsfeld and Stanton edited. What they found in these first-ever serious media studies did not support the Adorno/Horkheimer/ Marcuse Frankfurt Marxist view that the media organizations were capitalist tools to dominate and manipulate citizens. Lazarsfeld and Stanton instead suggested a limited, information-purveying role; citizen-shoppers used the media, but core views were seldom transformed by the media.
This ‘‘limited effects’’ interpretation of the media is considered a main finding of Lazarsfeld-inspired research. Yet it is often overdrawn. The media could have impact, in some situations. Indeed, in 1948, prefiguring a much-repeated theme, Lazarsfeld and Merton elaborated contextual characteristics that should enhance or suppress media impacts (monopoly of information, consistency with values, and personal contacts). Columbia sociology and preeminently Lazarsfeld have been criticized for being opportunistic, responding to market demands, following the money, and consequently defending capitalism. This is too simple and deterministic. It ignores the fact that much if not most money for social science in the depths of the depression came not from corporate sources, but from the federal government—as judged by prefaces of major books by W. Lloyd Warner, Stuart Chapin, and others. Lazarsfeld did work on government propaganda studies during World War II.
Lazarsfeld, Paul
The New York foundations had a long and strong tradition of supporting work on poverty, such as Lazarsfeld’s Marienthal. The media supported polls, and Life magazine even underwrote The People’s Choice. Why did Lazarsfeld not pursue such more established funding sources and research questions? The view that he ‘‘simply’’ followed the money illustrates precisely the sort of one-factor thinking that Lazarsfeld critiqued in his famous ‘‘The Art of Asking Why?,’’ the main point of which is analogous to Marx’s criticism of simple self-interest, income-maximizing interpretations, which he dismissed by labeling them Benthamismus. Clearly, Lazarsfeld’s fund-raising had a colorful and opportunistic flair—which he loved to flaunt in the right company. The simple critics were taken in by (or interpreted too literally) his double entendres and teasingly exaggerated bravado. Yet other smart persons at the time made other choices, perhaps equally opportunistic or rewarding—as the contrasts in Table I indicate. Lazarsfeld’s uncanny instinct for capturing what was new and distinctive about American society, and its driving changes (radio, advertising, marketing research, citizenoriented voting studies, etc.), led him both to propose new and innovative research on these topics and to work with foundation and corporate officials attracted by the cutting-edge quality of these concerns (including Frank Stanton at CBS, Bernard Berelson at the Ford Foundation, and Jeremiah Kaplan at the Free Press.) Merton and Lazarsfeld did not analyze Hitler’s or Roosevelt’s speeches, but did examine Kate Smith’s talk shows, her war bond sales appeals to average folks, and similar messages. This resulted in elevating Smith, a 1940s Oprah Winfrey, in a way elitist Europeans found repulsive. The media do not plead, they command, was the Frankfurt counterinterpretation. As a methodological by-product, the F(ascism) scale was generated, to capture the deep structure of authoritarianism that lay behind fascist dominance, yet that remains hidden perhaps in all of us. By contrast, Merton and Lazarsfeld developed and refined methods for recording emotion as people watched a documentary or short film, urging them, for instance, to use less meat in their cooking; a follow-up focus interview probed as to how and why people made their actual choices. Merton and Lazarsfeld sought to build a disciplined way of making researchers listen to and converse with their ‘‘subjects,’’ and genuinely learn from them, not to use them simply to test or to illustrate theories. A persistent subtheme of Lazarsfeld’s media work was a critique of simple individualism, as a simplifying aspect of American ideology and misleading ‘‘explanation.’’ For instance, Lazarsfeld wrote that ‘‘radio has so far been a conservative force in American life. . . . [In many radio stories or soap operas] all problems are of an individualistic nature. It is not social forces but the virtue and
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vices of the central characters that move the events along. People lose their jobs not for economic reasons but because their fellow men lie or are envious.’’ This general skepticism about individual explanations persists in most Columbia sociology. Lazarsfeld was criticized by some as promoting atomistic views of society by using surveys of individuals. But he and others consistently distinguished their interpretations from the more classically individualistic perspective common among many psychologists, economists, and some political scientists then and later.
Organizational/Management Structure vs. Ownership of the Means of Production; Goal Displacement; Cooptation; Subcultures vs. Classe An Sich to Classe Fuer Sich Weber studied the Prussian bureaucracy, elevating it as the ideal type of modern society. The specter that it would dominate led him to the ‘‘iron cage’’ metaphor. When he wrote Politics as a Vocation, he spoke of parties and their leaders—minimally of citizens or civic groups. Similarly, his student Robert Michels formulated the ‘‘iron law of oligarchy’’ in studying the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party. Lazarsfeld grew up in the heady air of Socialist Party political leadership and elite personal intrigue in Vienna. He not only knew the issues intimately; they drove much of his professional agenda in his early adult years. He did surveys of socialist youth groups, and sought to codify how to attract recruits and mobilize them effectively. In America, Lazarsfeld turned to the extreme nonelite—in Elmira, New York or Decatur, Illinois—to study how housewives chose to buy red shoes and vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Charting the cognitive maps and social contexts of average Americans to understand their decisions led to some revolutionary findings, contrasting with those of his Columbia colleague Robert Lynd (known for his best-sellers Middletown and Middletown in Transition). Lynd’s second book relied heavily on neo-Marxist concepts and had much in common with Lazarsfeld’s Marienthal. But in the first large-scale survey studies of voting and political behavior ever conducted, The People’s Choice and Voting, Lazarsfeld and his associates contradicted the Lynds, the Marxist organizers, and the League of Women Voters in suggesting that citizen ‘‘apathy’’ (nonvoting and low participation in civic groups and parties) could make democracies more flexible. Unlike Weber’s focus on Prussian bureaucrats and party leaders, Columbia researchers studied organizations less from the top than from the middle (where bureaucrats redefined goals and rationality) and the outside (in how organizations interfaced with their environments), leading to concepts such as Selznick’s cooptation.
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Organizational Subcultures and Their Autonomy vs. Ownership of the Means of Production The work of Lazarsfeld and colleagues led to a new paradigm for organizational theorizing. By including corporations, governments, and universities, and looking for common themes, they transcended the ‘‘capitalist worker’’ or ‘‘public private’’ divides. Rather, they reported multiple sources of change and conflicts. The Columbia synthesis moved the social psychological theorizing about organizations from Harvard and Michigan into more structural coherence, by blending it with the European institutional traditions, and added a new subtlety and complexity. Merton stressed organizational subcultures and contextual variability, whereby the subcultures and tensions inside organizations led to and explained slacking soldiers or alienated government staff, such as postal workers. The most dramatic American manifestation of the authoritarian leader in the 1950s was Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose House Un-American Activities Committee pursued labor union leaders, academics, and others suspected of ‘‘anti-Americanism.’’ Many lost their jobs, especially in Hollywood. This Cold War virulent antiCommunism was seen as a clear product of capitalism by observers such as the Frankfort sociologists. But Lazarsfeld, always the skeptic, proposed a major national study to assess the impacts of McCarthy and other political constraints on academic freedom in universities and colleges. Did McCarthy really lead people to be more cautious in what they said and wrote and taught? He showed that universities resembled other organizations studied by Columbia researchers. The American academic community was not a simple top-down structure, not a factory-like hierarchy in which a board of trustees or even Senator McCarthy could cajole students to embrace capitalist theories and consume capitalist products. Rather, in The Academic Mind, Lazarsfeld, Felix, and Thielens sought to probe empirically what Parsons and later Habermas did theoretically: contrast the authoritarian, controlling specter of a McCarthy (or Hitler) with the egalitarian/collegial/ decentralized ethos of the professional. This was a model for a new sort of workplace, one that deeply conflicts again with the Prussian/Weberian imagery. Lazarsfeld engaged David Riesman, a nationally renowned academic, skilled ethnographic observer, and openly leftist and antiMcCarthy figure, to review The Academic Mind and to reinterview some of the same academics across the country. Riesman did, and endorsed the main findings of the book: most academics were not scared of McCarthy and carried on their activities without fear. This added another piece to the picture of a paradigm change. Contextual Analysis The opposite extreme from the Prussian bureaucracy was the atomized individual of Michigan voting studies or
neo-classical economist consumers. These theories have an elective affinity with the ideological individualism of the broad Protestant majority in political science and American politics. But Lazarsfeld and the Columbia group differed in locating the individual in a strong social context. They strategically chose research sites and methodology to highlight such contextual effects. They did not use national surveys of individuals like Campbell and Converse did at Michigan, or an ecological neighborhood voting method like Gosnell did in the Chicago tradition, which submerged the individual voter into the neighborhood mass. Rather, the genius of Voting and Personal Influence was showing how networks of friendship would bring filiation and encouragement toward voting for FDR or buying dresses. These constraints and subtle influences may have had more visibility to an immigrant Jewish observer who was self-consciously marginal.
Transforming Social Science Lazarsfeld’s largest contribution is the hardest to specify: he transformed social science. Sociology, economics, and political science in the 1930s had theoretical traditions and empirical traditions, but they seldom joined. The grand theories of social science were European. Public opinion, basic values, political support, confidence in government, and even the Gross National Product were unmeasured concepts in 1930. In America, Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons continued this European tradition at Harvard. Distinctly American work was problemoriented and empirical. The center of social science was The University of Chicago in the 1920s and 30s. Its leaders in sociology, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, did not seriously join their empirical work with European theories. Sociology changed at Columbia in the 1940s and 1950s, when Lazarsfeld, Merton, and talented students set a new tone in their many publications. They seriously joined the European theories with empirical work to create a new amalgam: ‘‘middle-range theories’’ were codified and tested using fourfold contingency tables. Previously disparate activities were merged, generating far more powerful results. Students from Columbia became professors at other leading universities, and in the 1960s the social sciences changed irrevocably. The persons and organizations mentioned here all helped. Although these are large claims, they are supported by at least one slim bit of evidence. The following excerpt is from a major theoretical work of two non-Columbia centers, Harvard and Chicago (Theories of Society, 1961, by Edward Shils, edited by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and two Parsons students, pp. 1407 1408): In the 1930s, American sociology underwent a marked expansion . . . It was helped by the Great Depression, by
Lazarsfeld, Paul the influx of German and Austrian refugees . . . Research became more sophisticated through the development of a new statistical discipline, and through the improvement in interviewing techniques under the influence of psychoanalysis and the public opinion polling industry . . . Sociology—which was once an earnest, uncouth subject, a subject of the American Middle West, a dreary scholastic classificatory scheme of the German universities—has invaded the parlors of the most refined intellectuals of the United States and Europe.
Admiring the Columbia team, Parsons sought to recruit a ‘‘Lazarsfeld’’ (Sam Stouffer) and join his theory to empirical work. Chicago hired a series of Columbia graduates. In economics, econometric work increasingly joined abstract theory, encouraged by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which brought many academics to its New York headquarters. Political science was analogously revolutionized, by Robert Dahl and Gabriel Almond at Yale, V. O. Key at Harvard, Philip Converse at Michigan, and others. Lazarsfeld was a leading consultant to the Ford Foundation, which substantially funded such developments in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and internationally. Lazarsfeld and Merton proposed to Ford a new center, which became the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, fostering these approaches. In Europe, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) was launched by Stein Rokkan, who collaborated with Columbia-trained Seymour Martin Lipset. The ECPR included just a few young turks in the 1960s; by the 1980s, it was the European establishment. International professional groups such as the International Sociological Association and its research committees, the International Political Science Association, and others brought social scientists the world over into contact with analogous developments. The tone and focus of the social sciences obviously shifted. Did Lazarsfeld and Columbia play a role in this? Why and how? Paul Lazarsfeld was charming and engaging when captivated by a new idea, as well as dynamic, manipulative, original, and stimulating. He sought to have global impact, and engaged many to join the effort.
The Intellectual Machine: Research Institutes and More Columbia sociology sometimes looked more like the French model of the national clientelist university than the normal American model of departmental domination. How did Clark and Merton build such a vast intellectual empire, converting Columbia sociology into a global standard? Lazarsfeld said many times that to advance an intellectual agenda required a machine. His major
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examples were the research institutes that joined the methods of survey research, the money of government and commerce, and the intellectual ferment of the university. He delighted in recounting incidents illustrating his manipulative prowess; he would grin and laugh and tease as he cajoled others to join in. He evoked images of a political candidate, a mafia boss, a Wall Street banker, and Don Juan. He fascinated and entertained while deliberately shocking. He was a European prince who created his own court and intrigues. What precisely did he mean by a machine? And how did it influence so powerfully? Though he often discussed research institutes as examples, he surely did not intend the impersonal, bureaucratic, efficient sort of organization that thrives on many American state university campuses. His archetype was rather the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), and later Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) of the Pete Rossi era (1960s). How were they distinct? The term ‘‘machine’’ suggests an informal organization that permits exchange of resources in ways sometimes interstitial, if not illegitimate, for official organizations, such as governments or universities. Merton’s famous essay on manifest and latent functions stressed the opportunity structure that political machines provide to ambitious persons who might not succeed by following normal rules. Clientelism is a more general concept than machine, but overlaps in meaning. Clientelism refers to allocation of private goods, such as jobs or grants, by a patron to his clients, with an expected return of favors that reinforces patron leadership. In an officially universalistic context, the clientelist resource exchanges are thus quasilegitimate or illegitimate insofar as they shift decisions and reward patterns. The BASR’s clientelism was clear. Like the Sorbonne patron, Lazarsfeld would allocate jobs, grants, and favors to his subordinates in princely manner, expecting total loyalty. His classic strategy was to win large grants from corporations or foundations, then siphon off funds to aid poorer projects, illustrating what his students labeled ‘‘Robin Hooding’’ (they would be paid to work on one project, but advance a second or third or fourth as well). At the Paris conference, others noted similar patterns. Merton termed the BASR a ‘‘commune, a family, a Gemeinschaft, a youth group.’’ According to David Sills, Lazarsfeld said that ‘‘nepotism is my key to administration. Who can you trust more than your family to carry things out?’’ This dramatically self-deprecating language was more than chance. Merton noted that Lazarsfeld would say that he ‘‘overcharged clients,’’ regularly ‘‘used nepotism,’’ and ‘‘schemed and plotted’’ about future plans. But a clientelist model is too simple to explain Lazarsfeld and the BASR. It was interpenetrated by the more universalistic norms of science, stressing new ideas, creativity, original publication, and corresponding international, market-driven rewards. Lazarsfeld sometimes
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leaned over to build in checks against personal bias, to counter the particularistic tendencies. He engaged students to help refocus and rewrite even work by stars such as Nicholas Rachevsky, if it could be improved. Lazarsfeld applied the same stringent criticism to himself, even if it meant that he missed the deadlines of foundations and book publishers. More than once he said that ‘‘when the book is published, will they ask did it meet the deadline? No! People will ask, is it a good book?’’ He distrusted mere reputation; he sought independent readings, again and again, by the young, by outsiders, to cross-validate and stimulate repeatedly. These various examples illustrate his powerful commitment to scientific universalism, the Mertonian norms. Even so, they do not suffice to explain his machine. The early to mid-1960s were years of great affluence for social science research; it was much less necessary to engage in Robin Hooding. However, this also meant a shift toward more universalistic criteria for awarding grants, and put the BASR in more open, direct competition with institutes at other universities. Perhaps Lazarsfeld’s shift of interest toward Paris and Europe in the 1960s was related to this shift in the U.S. rules of the game toward universalism. In his last years, he wrote about adding his own tradition to the history of social science. His place is now secure.
See Also the Following Articles Playfair, William Survey Design Typology Construction, Methods and Issues
Further Reading Barton, A. H. (1979). Paul Lazarsfeld and the invention of the university applied social research institute. Organizing for Social Research (B. Holzner and J. Nehnevajsa, eds.). Schenkman, Cambridge. Bell, D. (1973/1999). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Basic Books, New York. (The 1999 edition includes a new foreword.) Bell, D. (1978/1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Perseus/Basic Books, New York.
Boudon, R. (1993). Paul F. Lazarsfeld: On Social Research and Its Language. The University of Chicago Press, Heritage of Sociology Series, Chicago. Clark, T. N. (1998). Paul Lazarsfeld and the Columbia sociology machine. In Paul Lazarsfeld (1901 1976) La Sociologie de Vienne a New York (J. Lautman and B.-P. Lecuyer, eds.), pp. 289 360. Editions L’Harmattan, Paris. Clark, T. N. (2001). The Construction of Post-Industrial Society: An Unannounced Paradigm Shift. Prepared for presentation to the Paul Lazarsfeld Centennial Celebration and Conference, Columbia University, September 29. Clark, T. N., and Hoffmann-Martinot, V. (eds.) (1998). The New Political Culture. Westview, Boulder. Lautman, J., and Lecuyer, B.-P. (eds.) (1998). Paul Lazarsfeld (1901 1976). La Sociologie de Vienne a New York. Editions L’Harmattan, Paris. Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1962). The sociology of empirical social research. Am. Sociol. Rev. 27(6), 757 767. Lazarsfeld, P. F., Jahoda, M., and Ziesel, H. (1932). Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Herzel, Leipzig. Lazarsfeld, P. F., and Spivak, S. S. (1961). Observations on the organization of empirical social research in the United States. Inf. Bull. Int. Social Sci. Counc. 19, 1 35. Lipset, S. M. (1981). Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Merton, R. K. (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, New York. Merton, R. K., The Sociology of Science (N. W. Storer eds.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Merton, R. K. (1995). Opportunity structure: The emergence, diffusion, and differentiation of a sociological concept, 1930s 1950s. In The Legacy of Anomie Theory, Advances in Criminological Theory (F. Adler and W. S. Laufer, eds.), Vol. 6, pp. 3 78. Transaction Publ., New Brunswick, New Jersey. Platt, J. (1986). Stouffer and Lazarsfeld: Patterns of influence. Knowl. Society 6, 99 117. Pollak, M. (1984). Projet scientifique, carriere professionelle et strategie politique. Act. Recher. Sci. Social. 55, 54 62. Shils, E. (1961). The calling of sociology. In Theories of Society (T. Parsons, E. Shils, K. D. Naegele, and J. R. Pitts, eds.), Vol. 2, pp. 1405 1451. Free Press, New York. Simonson, P., and Weimann, G. (2002). Critical research at Columbia. Canonic Texts in Media Studies (E. Katz, J. D. Peters, and T. Liebes, eds.). Polity, London.
Glossary contextual analysis Comparing patterns of individuals across different contexts (such as big and small cities) to measure distinct individual and contextual effects. fourfold table/cross-tabulation Simple tabular presentations to quantify processes that have otherwise been handled casually. panel study Repeated surveys of the same persons over time, to help specify causal paths. postindustrial society A label signifying the paradigmatic revolution that Lazarsfeld and associates helped generate.
Paul Lazarsfeld and his many associates made multiple specific contributions to social science by cumulatively encouraging two paradigmatic transformations: the first was the joining of European theory with systematic empirical research, and the second was the shifting of focus from production and work to consumption and leisure, to understand postindustrial society. Lazarsfeld changed the social sciences. He might have worked on mathematically sophisticated issues with a coterie of like-minded associates, but instead collaborated with dozens of talented persons, some strongly nonquantitative. This makes his unique contribution harder to specify. Born in Vienna in 1901, he studied mathematics and social science at the University of Vienna. In America after 1933, he worked on survey research in New York and was professor of sociology at Columbia University until his death in 1976.
Research Overview Major Contributions Paul Lazarsfeld helped launch several new fields of social measurement and approaches to study them. Before
Lazarsfeld, market research was anecdotal and casual. His techniques for large empirical surveys of consumers today define market research. He developed surveys to measure the policy views of individual voters, to assess personal friendships, and to chart other processes previously handled more intuitively. His books The People’s Choice (1944) and Voting (1954) are the foundations of contemporary political behavior studies. Lazarsfeld refined survey methods for mass communications. Before him, many believed that radio and newspapers manipulated individuals and had huge impacts. These ‘‘mass society’’ arguments held sway with most intellectuals and commercial firms. He showed instead how media effects were generally more limited and operated differently. In politics, product marketing, and mass communication, Lazarsfeld showed that direct messages from elites were seldom accepted by individual citizens, as many had suggested; rather, key impacts were indirect, often via ‘‘opinion leaders’’ who would talk with their friends, thus selectively accepting, rejecting, or adapting news, advertisements, and political messages. Such processes constituted a ‘‘two-step flow of communication’’—first through the media, second through the personal contact—which Lazarsfeld documented with detailed analyses of neighbors discussing politics and women choosing groceries and clothes. He considerably strengthened social science methodology, by developing new techniques and writing about how to refine or transform older methods by more self-conscious analysis. Although his Ph.D. was in mathematics, most of his methodological work was written in very clear, simple language, and aimed to change how social scientists and policymakers thought and worked. His success was impressive. His impact came often from finding a new, creative solution to a ‘‘hot’’ problem that others had addressed more casually. Many of his solutions were so
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elegantly clear that others could and did immediately adopt them, and extend them further. The mathematics and statistics used were the simplest possible for the task. For instance, to sort out distinct effects of media content, personal discussions, and other factors, Lazarsfeld developed the ‘‘panel study,’’ reinterviewing the same persons over time to monitor change, such as during a political or advertising campaign. He reported differences in crosstabulations, and analyzed turnover across cells. In a paper on ‘‘The Art of Asking Why?,’’ Lazarsfeld showed that simply asking ‘‘why’’ often gets a simplified response, but that a richer picture of processes often emerges if the process is studied and an accounting scheme of likely answers is developed and is used to structure probes. To analyze effects of several variables, Lazarsfeld showed how multicausal analysis was necessary. But he continually sought to transcend the simple, linear models (as in ordinary least-squares regression) by showing how to measure interaction effects (such as a third variable Z shifting the effect of X on Y) or contextual effects (such as Marx’s suggestion that low salaries generate more worker discontent in large, as compared to small, factories). The methodological treatise by Lazarsfeld, The Language of Social Research, became popular in America as a guide for practitioners and students. With a former student, Raymond Boudon, the treatise was transformed into a theoretical philosophical work in the French adaptation, Le Vocabulaire des Sciences Sociales. Lazarsfeld encouraged mathematical work in social science and developed ‘‘latent structure analysis,’’ but such approaches went beyond most of his collaborators. His creative thrust was to claim large, new terrains and analyze them in a more self-conscious and methodologically explicit manner than did his predecessors. He showed how past simplifications brought misleading results. Unhappy that most history of social science considered only theories, he helped develop the history of empirical social research as a subfield. Most contributions by Paul F. Lazarsfeld were by-products of collaborative work with Robert K. Merton and many talented students and colleagues, first in Vienna, then at Columbia University.
Father of Postindustrial Society? ‘‘In Russia the Revolution succeeded, so they need engineers; in America, the revolution failed, so we need Sociology.’’ Here is classic Lazarsfeld: self-deprecating humor, the whiff of a secret agenda, an ideological program, and an immigrant’s revolutionary commitment to build a new society. Consider one specific reading of Lazarsfeld’s slogan: that sociologists, especially at Columbia, helped chart and explain the workings of postindustrial society—even if ‘‘postindustrial society’’ was not conceptualized until years after their major contributions.
This is a broader formulation than Lazarsfeld proposed, but it clarifies his impact. The major counterinterpretation is that Columbia sociology was a handmaiden to capitalism. Lazarsfeld’s neosocialist slogan directly contradicts the simple view that Lazarsfeld and Columbia ‘‘sold out’’ to American capitalism—as argued in various ways by critics, from C. Wright Mills to Alvin Gouldner to the Frankfurt sociologists. In contrast to some critics, it can be posited that Marxism was incorporated into the Columbia amalgam of sociology from its very origins in the 1930s, and continued in ways often overlooked. For instance, Marienthal was Lazarsfeld’s 1932 study of the unemployed in a depression-devastated community, detailing how persons out of work suffered psychological damage. Merton’s 1937 Science, Technology and Society showed how modern science was driven ahead by the twin forces of technology (in a broadly Marxist manner) and the Protestant religion (broadly Weberian). Merton and Lazarsfeld’s personal involvements with left political movements in their formative years were deep and intense, as others have detailed. Columbia sociologists, led by Lazarsfeld and Merton, helped create modern sociology through a continuous dialogue, albeit often latent, with Marxist themes and concepts. This holds in many areas, on examination of their shifts from past topics chosen for study (dress shoppers in Decatur, Illinois, rather than unemployed workers), or of their shift from a top-down focus in organizations to bottom-up cooptation. Core concepts were invented or redefined (e.g., from the proletariat to student activist, from politics as part of production to part of consumption). Lazarsfeld’s contribution may be framed with the concept of postindustrial society, first by identifying sources for the concept in subfields of Columbia sociologists after the 1930s. The gradually resulting framework generated a paradigm shift away from Marxist-inspired thinking, but this shift was largely ‘‘unannounced,’’ in that elements of Marx continued in many Columbia studies. The big bang built on smaller ‘‘revolutions’’ in subparadigms, such as organization theory and mass media; together, they generated a deeper overall change. This is all the more intriguing because the label and conceptualization of ‘‘postindustrial’’ from Bell only came later, following much of the innovative Columbia work. Alternatives are charted in Table I, showing the specific concepts and their main competitors, Marxism and Individualism. More generally, Lazarsfeld and the Columbia armory of ideas have an elective affinity with postindustrial society in ways that were not recognized or scarcely mentioned in earlier years. This is in good part because the concept of the postindustrial society crystallized only after the most vibrant years of Lazarsfeld and Merton. Similarly, Hegel’s owl of Minerva took flight only as dawn neared. The label ‘‘postindustrial society’’ came
Lazarsfeld, Paul Table I
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A Core List of Elements Contrasting Columbia Sociology with Neo-Marxist and Individualistic Conceptsa
Columbia/postindustrial society concept
Individualistic conceptb
Neo-Marxist concept
Consumption Leisure Consumers
Production Jobs Workers
Home Women and their families Personal influence, social interaction Citizen focused
Workplace Men and their work Social structural characteristics (class, etc.) System focused, e.g., capitalism, aristocracy
Buying consumer products Talking with friends to form opinions Informal organization; unanticipated consequences Organizational/management structure Goal displacement; cooptation; subcultures Issue politics, issue specificity More social liberalism, e.g., new women’s roles Voluntary associations Cross-pressures, role conflict Pluralism Autonomous mass media Autonomous scientific community Students as political vanguard New class Knowledge research and development/ high technology Rising professional autonomy of workers Weak unions and parties, strong individualism Consumer-based indvidual aesthetics Democratic processes Intellectuals/cultural creation
Investing capital Organizing class consciousness Class conflict
Utility, preferences (more abstract) Work and amenities Subsets of utilities, clusters of attitudes Individual Less attention to context Interaction Individual/preferences/personality focused Maximizing utility — —
Ownership of the means of production Classe an sich to classe fuer sich Coherent party program Fiscal/economic policy positions
— — Cognitive consistency Attitude structure
Vanguard party focus False consciousness Power elites Class-controlled propaganda Science subordinated to hierarchy Proletariat moving toward revolution Fordism/regulation theory Manufacturing products
— Cognitive dissonance — — — — — —
Rising global monopolies, regulated by states Strong unions and class-based parties
— —
Historical materialism Class responsiveness Class domination, surplus value
— — —
a Source: b
A decidedly flawed memory of a former Columbia student (T. N. Clark). Individualistic theories tend not to address some more social structural items, hence the column is sometimes left blank.
from two books by Daniel Bell, published in 1973 and 1978. Overlapping ideas were elaborated by Seymour Martin Lipset, Ronald Inglehart, and the present author’s writings in The New Political Culture (Table II charts the main themes). Deeper than labels and specific studies are the prototheory, implicit hunches, and a prescient sensitivity as to how society worked—or what Weber called choosing the research topic. Lazarsfeld often operated with brilliant intuition. Later, Merton clarified the operation of identifying ‘‘strategic research sites.’’ Choosing the precise topic and angle is often the single most critical aspect of a brilliant study, as the following examples suggest. The Columbia synthesis built on elements of American society that distinctly differed from European society,
with its peasantry, class, work, and party-defined patriarchal, authoritarian social structure. Instead, the new structure was driven by consumption, not production; by the household, not the job; by leisure, not work. Thus voting was not seen as ‘‘explained’’ exclusively by men and fathers working on an assembly line, but also by women and mothers, chatting with their neighbors about whom to vote for while listening to soap operas. These new participants in the system made decisions for political candidates following rules like those for buying Campbell’s soup and, later, Mary Kay cosmetics. The core elements charted in Table I were refined in works such as those cited in Table II. These works comprise an exploration of only a few of the themes that illustrate the transformations wrought by Lazarsfeld and his collaborators.
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Lazarsfeld, Paul Contrasting Emphases in Alternative Versions of Postindustrial Theoriesa Bell
Columbia/postindustrial society concept Consumption Leisure Consumers Home Women and their families Personal influence, social interaction Citizen focused Buying consumer products Talking with friends to form opinions Informal organization, unanticipated consequences Organizational/management structure Goal displacement, cooptation, subcultures Issue politics, issue specificity More social liberalism, e.g., new women’s roles Voluntary associations Cross-pressures, role conflict Pluralism Autonomous mass media Autonomous scientific community Students as political vanguard New class Knowledge/research and development / high technology Rising professional autonomy of workers Weak unions and parties, strong individualism Consumer-based indvidual aesthetics Democratic processes Intellectuals/cultural creation
TCPIS
CCC
Inglehart
Lipset
Clark, NPC
a
The point of this table is merely to highlight, quite roughly, major differences in emphasis among alternative formulations of postindustrial society. The main references are Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (TCPIS) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (CCC), various works by Lipset, especially Political Man and American Exceptionalism, and by Inglehart (Modernism and Post-Modernism), and The New Political Culture (NPC) by Clark et al.
Discussion of Selected Core Concepts Consumption vs. Production, Leisure vs. Jobs, Consumers vs. Workers, Home vs. Workplace, Autonomous Mass Media vs. Class-Controlled Propaganda With support and encouragement from Frank Stanton, chief researcher and then president of the new Columbia Broadcasting Company, Lazarsfeld charted the rise of the media and how it related to average citizens. Many studies were published in Radio Research, which Lazarsfeld and Stanton edited. What they found in these first-ever serious media studies did not support the Adorno/Horkheimer/ Marcuse Frankfurt Marxist view that the media organizations were capitalist tools to dominate and manipulate citizens. Lazarsfeld and Stanton instead suggested a limited, information-purveying role; citizen-shoppers used the media, but core views were seldom transformed by the media.
This ‘‘limited effects’’ interpretation of the media is considered a main finding of Lazarsfeld-inspired research. Yet it is often overdrawn. The media could have impact, in some situations. Indeed, in 1948, prefiguring a much-repeated theme, Lazarsfeld and Merton elaborated contextual characteristics that should enhance or suppress media impacts (monopoly of information, consistency with values, and personal contacts). Columbia sociology and preeminently Lazarsfeld have been criticized for being opportunistic, responding to market demands, following the money, and consequently defending capitalism. This is too simple and deterministic. It ignores the fact that much if not most money for social science in the depths of the depression came not from corporate sources, but from the federal government—as judged by prefaces of major books by W. Lloyd Warner, Stuart Chapin, and others. Lazarsfeld did work on government propaganda studies during World War II.
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The New York foundations had a long and strong tradition of supporting work on poverty, such as Lazarsfeld’s Marienthal. The media supported polls, and Life magazine even underwrote The People’s Choice. Why did Lazarsfeld not pursue such more established funding sources and research questions? The view that he ‘‘simply’’ followed the money illustrates precisely the sort of one-factor thinking that Lazarsfeld critiqued in his famous ‘‘The Art of Asking Why?,’’ the main point of which is analogous to Marx’s criticism of simple self-interest, income-maximizing interpretations, which he dismissed by labeling them Benthamismus. Clearly, Lazarsfeld’s fund-raising had a colorful and opportunistic flair—which he loved to flaunt in the right company. The simple critics were taken in by (or interpreted too literally) his double entendres and teasingly exaggerated bravado. Yet other smart persons at the time made other choices, perhaps equally opportunistic or rewarding—as the contrasts in Table I indicate. Lazarsfeld’s uncanny instinct for capturing what was new and distinctive about American society, and its driving changes (radio, advertising, marketing research, citizenoriented voting studies, etc.), led him both to propose new and innovative research on these topics and to work with foundation and corporate officials attracted by the cutting-edge quality of these concerns (including Frank Stanton at CBS, Bernard Berelson at the Ford Foundation, and Jeremiah Kaplan at the Free Press.) Merton and Lazarsfeld did not analyze Hitler’s or Roosevelt’s speeches, but did examine Kate Smith’s talk shows, her war bond sales appeals to average folks, and similar messages. This resulted in elevating Smith, a 1940s Oprah Winfrey, in a way elitist Europeans found repulsive. The media do not plead, they command, was the Frankfurt counterinterpretation. As a methodological by-product, the F(ascism) scale was generated, to capture the deep structure of authoritarianism that lay behind fascist dominance, yet that remains hidden perhaps in all of us. By contrast, Merton and Lazarsfeld developed and refined methods for recording emotion as people watched a documentary or short film, urging them, for instance, to use less meat in their cooking; a follow-up focus interview probed as to how and why people made their actual choices. Merton and Lazarsfeld sought to build a disciplined way of making researchers listen to and converse with their ‘‘subjects,’’ and genuinely learn from them, not to use them simply to test or to illustrate theories. A persistent subtheme of Lazarsfeld’s media work was a critique of simple individualism, as a simplifying aspect of American ideology and misleading ‘‘explanation.’’ For instance, Lazarsfeld wrote that ‘‘radio has so far been a conservative force in American life. . . . [In many radio stories or soap operas] all problems are of an individualistic nature. It is not social forces but the virtue and
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vices of the central characters that move the events along. People lose their jobs not for economic reasons but because their fellow men lie or are envious.’’ This general skepticism about individual explanations persists in most Columbia sociology. Lazarsfeld was criticized by some as promoting atomistic views of society by using surveys of individuals. But he and others consistently distinguished their interpretations from the more classically individualistic perspective common among many psychologists, economists, and some political scientists then and later.
Organizational/Management Structure vs. Ownership of the Means of Production; Goal Displacement; Cooptation; Subcultures vs. Classe An Sich to Classe Fuer Sich Weber studied the Prussian bureaucracy, elevating it as the ideal type of modern society. The specter that it would dominate led him to the ‘‘iron cage’’ metaphor. When he wrote Politics as a Vocation, he spoke of parties and their leaders—minimally of citizens or civic groups. Similarly, his student Robert Michels formulated the ‘‘iron law of oligarchy’’ in studying the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party. Lazarsfeld grew up in the heady air of Socialist Party political leadership and elite personal intrigue in Vienna. He not only knew the issues intimately; they drove much of his professional agenda in his early adult years. He did surveys of socialist youth groups, and sought to codify how to attract recruits and mobilize them effectively. In America, Lazarsfeld turned to the extreme nonelite—in Elmira, New York or Decatur, Illinois—to study how housewives chose to buy red shoes and vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Charting the cognitive maps and social contexts of average Americans to understand their decisions led to some revolutionary findings, contrasting with those of his Columbia colleague Robert Lynd (known for his best-sellers Middletown and Middletown in Transition). Lynd’s second book relied heavily on neo-Marxist concepts and had much in common with Lazarsfeld’s Marienthal. But in the first large-scale survey studies of voting and political behavior ever conducted, The People’s Choice and Voting, Lazarsfeld and his associates contradicted the Lynds, the Marxist organizers, and the League of Women Voters in suggesting that citizen ‘‘apathy’’ (nonvoting and low participation in civic groups and parties) could make democracies more flexible. Unlike Weber’s focus on Prussian bureaucrats and party leaders, Columbia researchers studied organizations less from the top than from the middle (where bureaucrats redefined goals and rationality) and the outside (in how organizations interfaced with their environments), leading to concepts such as Selznick’s cooptation.
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Organizational Subcultures and Their Autonomy vs. Ownership of the Means of Production The work of Lazarsfeld and colleagues led to a new paradigm for organizational theorizing. By including corporations, governments, and universities, and looking for common themes, they transcended the ‘‘capitalist worker’’ or ‘‘public private’’ divides. Rather, they reported multiple sources of change and conflicts. The Columbia synthesis moved the social psychological theorizing about organizations from Harvard and Michigan into more structural coherence, by blending it with the European institutional traditions, and added a new subtlety and complexity. Merton stressed organizational subcultures and contextual variability, whereby the subcultures and tensions inside organizations led to and explained slacking soldiers or alienated government staff, such as postal workers. The most dramatic American manifestation of the authoritarian leader in the 1950s was Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose House Un-American Activities Committee pursued labor union leaders, academics, and others suspected of ‘‘anti-Americanism.’’ Many lost their jobs, especially in Hollywood. This Cold War virulent antiCommunism was seen as a clear product of capitalism by observers such as the Frankfort sociologists. But Lazarsfeld, always the skeptic, proposed a major national study to assess the impacts of McCarthy and other political constraints on academic freedom in universities and colleges. Did McCarthy really lead people to be more cautious in what they said and wrote and taught? He showed that universities resembled other organizations studied by Columbia researchers. The American academic community was not a simple top-down structure, not a factory-like hierarchy in which a board of trustees or even Senator McCarthy could cajole students to embrace capitalist theories and consume capitalist products. Rather, in The Academic Mind, Lazarsfeld, Felix, and Thielens sought to probe empirically what Parsons and later Habermas did theoretically: contrast the authoritarian, controlling specter of a McCarthy (or Hitler) with the egalitarian/collegial/ decentralized ethos of the professional. This was a model for a new sort of workplace, one that deeply conflicts again with the Prussian/Weberian imagery. Lazarsfeld engaged David Riesman, a nationally renowned academic, skilled ethnographic observer, and openly leftist and antiMcCarthy figure, to review The Academic Mind and to reinterview some of the same academics across the country. Riesman did, and endorsed the main findings of the book: most academics were not scared of McCarthy and carried on their activities without fear. This added another piece to the picture of a paradigm change. Contextual Analysis The opposite extreme from the Prussian bureaucracy was the atomized individual of Michigan voting studies or
neo-classical economist consumers. These theories have an elective affinity with the ideological individualism of the broad Protestant majority in political science and American politics. But Lazarsfeld and the Columbia group differed in locating the individual in a strong social context. They strategically chose research sites and methodology to highlight such contextual effects. They did not use national surveys of individuals like Campbell and Converse did at Michigan, or an ecological neighborhood voting method like Gosnell did in the Chicago tradition, which submerged the individual voter into the neighborhood mass. Rather, the genius of Voting and Personal Influence was showing how networks of friendship would bring filiation and encouragement toward voting for FDR or buying dresses. These constraints and subtle influences may have had more visibility to an immigrant Jewish observer who was self-consciously marginal.
Transforming Social Science Lazarsfeld’s largest contribution is the hardest to specify: he transformed social science. Sociology, economics, and political science in the 1930s had theoretical traditions and empirical traditions, but they seldom joined. The grand theories of social science were European. Public opinion, basic values, political support, confidence in government, and even the Gross National Product were unmeasured concepts in 1930. In America, Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons continued this European tradition at Harvard. Distinctly American work was problemoriented and empirical. The center of social science was The University of Chicago in the 1920s and 30s. Its leaders in sociology, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, did not seriously join their empirical work with European theories. Sociology changed at Columbia in the 1940s and 1950s, when Lazarsfeld, Merton, and talented students set a new tone in their many publications. They seriously joined the European theories with empirical work to create a new amalgam: ‘‘middle-range theories’’ were codified and tested using fourfold contingency tables. Previously disparate activities were merged, generating far more powerful results. Students from Columbia became professors at other leading universities, and in the 1960s the social sciences changed irrevocably. The persons and organizations mentioned here all helped. Although these are large claims, they are supported by at least one slim bit of evidence. The following excerpt is from a major theoretical work of two non-Columbia centers, Harvard and Chicago (Theories of Society, 1961, by Edward Shils, edited by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and two Parsons students, pp. 1407 1408): In the 1930s, American sociology underwent a marked expansion . . . It was helped by the Great Depression, by
Lazarsfeld, Paul the influx of German and Austrian refugees . . . Research became more sophisticated through the development of a new statistical discipline, and through the improvement in interviewing techniques under the influence of psychoanalysis and the public opinion polling industry . . . Sociology—which was once an earnest, uncouth subject, a subject of the American Middle West, a dreary scholastic classificatory scheme of the German universities—has invaded the parlors of the most refined intellectuals of the United States and Europe.
Admiring the Columbia team, Parsons sought to recruit a ‘‘Lazarsfeld’’ (Sam Stouffer) and join his theory to empirical work. Chicago hired a series of Columbia graduates. In economics, econometric work increasingly joined abstract theory, encouraged by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which brought many academics to its New York headquarters. Political science was analogously revolutionized, by Robert Dahl and Gabriel Almond at Yale, V. O. Key at Harvard, Philip Converse at Michigan, and others. Lazarsfeld was a leading consultant to the Ford Foundation, which substantially funded such developments in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and internationally. Lazarsfeld and Merton proposed to Ford a new center, which became the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, fostering these approaches. In Europe, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) was launched by Stein Rokkan, who collaborated with Columbia-trained Seymour Martin Lipset. The ECPR included just a few young turks in the 1960s; by the 1980s, it was the European establishment. International professional groups such as the International Sociological Association and its research committees, the International Political Science Association, and others brought social scientists the world over into contact with analogous developments. The tone and focus of the social sciences obviously shifted. Did Lazarsfeld and Columbia play a role in this? Why and how? Paul Lazarsfeld was charming and engaging when captivated by a new idea, as well as dynamic, manipulative, original, and stimulating. He sought to have global impact, and engaged many to join the effort.
The Intellectual Machine: Research Institutes and More Columbia sociology sometimes looked more like the French model of the national clientelist university than the normal American model of departmental domination. How did Clark and Merton build such a vast intellectual empire, converting Columbia sociology into a global standard? Lazarsfeld said many times that to advance an intellectual agenda required a machine. His major
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examples were the research institutes that joined the methods of survey research, the money of government and commerce, and the intellectual ferment of the university. He delighted in recounting incidents illustrating his manipulative prowess; he would grin and laugh and tease as he cajoled others to join in. He evoked images of a political candidate, a mafia boss, a Wall Street banker, and Don Juan. He fascinated and entertained while deliberately shocking. He was a European prince who created his own court and intrigues. What precisely did he mean by a machine? And how did it influence so powerfully? Though he often discussed research institutes as examples, he surely did not intend the impersonal, bureaucratic, efficient sort of organization that thrives on many American state university campuses. His archetype was rather the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), and later Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) of the Pete Rossi era (1960s). How were they distinct? The term ‘‘machine’’ suggests an informal organization that permits exchange of resources in ways sometimes interstitial, if not illegitimate, for official organizations, such as governments or universities. Merton’s famous essay on manifest and latent functions stressed the opportunity structure that political machines provide to ambitious persons who might not succeed by following normal rules. Clientelism is a more general concept than machine, but overlaps in meaning. Clientelism refers to allocation of private goods, such as jobs or grants, by a patron to his clients, with an expected return of favors that reinforces patron leadership. In an officially universalistic context, the clientelist resource exchanges are thus quasilegitimate or illegitimate insofar as they shift decisions and reward patterns. The BASR’s clientelism was clear. Like the Sorbonne patron, Lazarsfeld would allocate jobs, grants, and favors to his subordinates in princely manner, expecting total loyalty. His classic strategy was to win large grants from corporations or foundations, then siphon off funds to aid poorer projects, illustrating what his students labeled ‘‘Robin Hooding’’ (they would be paid to work on one project, but advance a second or third or fourth as well). At the Paris conference, others noted similar patterns. Merton termed the BASR a ‘‘commune, a family, a Gemeinschaft, a youth group.’’ According to David Sills, Lazarsfeld said that ‘‘nepotism is my key to administration. Who can you trust more than your family to carry things out?’’ This dramatically self-deprecating language was more than chance. Merton noted that Lazarsfeld would say that he ‘‘overcharged clients,’’ regularly ‘‘used nepotism,’’ and ‘‘schemed and plotted’’ about future plans. But a clientelist model is too simple to explain Lazarsfeld and the BASR. It was interpenetrated by the more universalistic norms of science, stressing new ideas, creativity, original publication, and corresponding international, market-driven rewards. Lazarsfeld sometimes
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leaned over to build in checks against personal bias, to counter the particularistic tendencies. He engaged students to help refocus and rewrite even work by stars such as Nicholas Rachevsky, if it could be improved. Lazarsfeld applied the same stringent criticism to himself, even if it meant that he missed the deadlines of foundations and book publishers. More than once he said that ‘‘when the book is published, will they ask did it meet the deadline? No! People will ask, is it a good book?’’ He distrusted mere reputation; he sought independent readings, again and again, by the young, by outsiders, to cross-validate and stimulate repeatedly. These various examples illustrate his powerful commitment to scientific universalism, the Mertonian norms. Even so, they do not suffice to explain his machine. The early to mid-1960s were years of great affluence for social science research; it was much less necessary to engage in Robin Hooding. However, this also meant a shift toward more universalistic criteria for awarding grants, and put the BASR in more open, direct competition with institutes at other universities. Perhaps Lazarsfeld’s shift of interest toward Paris and Europe in the 1960s was related to this shift in the U.S. rules of the game toward universalism. In his last years, he wrote about adding his own tradition to the history of social science. His place is now secure.
See Also the Following Articles Playfair, William Survey Design Typology Construction, Methods and Issues
Further Reading Barton, A. H. (1979). Paul Lazarsfeld and the invention of the university applied social research institute. Organizing for Social Research (B. Holzner and J. Nehnevajsa, eds.). Schenkman, Cambridge. Bell, D. (1973/1999). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Basic Books, New York. (The 1999 edition includes a new foreword.) Bell, D. (1978/1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Perseus/Basic Books, New York.
Boudon, R. (1993). Paul F. Lazarsfeld: On Social Research and Its Language. The University of Chicago Press, Heritage of Sociology Series, Chicago. Clark, T. N. (1998). Paul Lazarsfeld and the Columbia sociology machine. In Paul Lazarsfeld (1901 1976) La Sociologie de Vienne a New York (J. Lautman and B.-P. Lecuyer, eds.), pp. 289 360. Editions L’Harmattan, Paris. Clark, T. N. (2001). The Construction of Post-Industrial Society: An Unannounced Paradigm Shift. Prepared for presentation to the Paul Lazarsfeld Centennial Celebration and Conference, Columbia University, September 29. Clark, T. N., and Hoffmann-Martinot, V. (eds.) (1998). The New Political Culture. Westview, Boulder. Lautman, J., and Lecuyer, B.-P. (eds.) (1998). Paul Lazarsfeld (1901 1976). La Sociologie de Vienne a New York. Editions L’Harmattan, Paris. Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1962). The sociology of empirical social research. Am. Sociol. Rev. 27(6), 757 767. Lazarsfeld, P. F., Jahoda, M., and Ziesel, H. (1932). Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Herzel, Leipzig. Lazarsfeld, P. F., and Spivak, S. S. (1961). Observations on the organization of empirical social research in the United States. Inf. Bull. Int. Social Sci. Counc. 19, 1 35. Lipset, S. M. (1981). Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Merton, R. K. (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, New York. Merton, R. K., The Sociology of Science (N. W. Storer eds.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Merton, R. K. (1995). Opportunity structure: The emergence, diffusion, and differentiation of a sociological concept, 1930s 1950s. In The Legacy of Anomie Theory, Advances in Criminological Theory (F. Adler and W. S. Laufer, eds.), Vol. 6, pp. 3 78. Transaction Publ., New Brunswick, New Jersey. Platt, J. (1986). Stouffer and Lazarsfeld: Patterns of influence. Knowl. Society 6, 99 117. Pollak, M. (1984). Projet scientifique, carriere professionelle et strategie politique. Act. Recher. Sci. Social. 55, 54 62. Shils, E. (1961). The calling of sociology. In Theories of Society (T. Parsons, E. Shils, K. D. Naegele, and J. R. Pitts, eds.), Vol. 2, pp. 1405 1451. Free Press, New York. Simonson, P., and Weimann, G. (2002). Critical research at Columbia. Canonic Texts in Media Studies (E. Katz, J. D. Peters, and T. Liebes, eds.). Polity, London.