Financial Dependency and the Original Sin

Tavares (2000) argues that the technological division of labor in which the periphery
concentrates in the production of commodities for the center, while the latter produces
manufacturing goods for the former is of very limited historical relevance.
Industrialization and technical progress in the periphery was not sufficient to break the
dependency ties with the center. Financial dependency is reflected in the inability of
peripheral countries to borrow in international markets in its own currency, and
constitutes the real obstacle to development. The new interpretation of dependency
situations puts “international money – and not technical progress – as the expression of financial capital domination over the periphery in the last 150 years,” (Tavares, 2000, pp.
131-132)

The inability to borrow in international markets in its own currency reflects the inability
of the domestic currencies of peripheral countries to acquire all the functions of money,
as reserve of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange. The ability to function as
international money is a question of degree. Benjamin Cohen (1998) suggests that there is
a pyramid that reflects the geography of money, with internationalized currencies at the
top and fragile currencies, on the verge of currency substitution at the bottom. The main
problem associated with the inability to provide all the monetary functions is that
financial markets remain under-developed in peripheral countries, and the process of
capitalist accumulation is hindered.
Interestingly enough mainstream economists have also dealt with financial dependency.
Barry Eichengreen, Ricardo Hausmann and Ugo Panizza (2003), following previous
contributions by Hausmann, argue that in part under-development results from the socalled original sin, that is, the fact that the currencies of developing countries are
inconvertible in international markets. In this view, the external instabbility of domestic currencies in the periphery hinders the process of capital accumulation. While
mainstream and the dependency authors agree on the importance of currency
inconvertibility they would disagree on the solutions. Mainstream authors would
emphasize the importance of sound fiscal policies, and monetary rules that promote credibility, while dependency authors would emphasize the need for capital controls and
reduced integration with international financial markets.

Dependency Theory

Dependency theory appeared in the 1950s as a critical reaction to the conventional
approaches to economic development that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
There are two dependency theory traditions (Dos Santos, 2002). The first is the Marxist
influenced by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and developed by André Gunder Frank with
important ramifications in the works of Samir Amin, Theotônio dos Santos, Arghiri
Emmanuel, and Aníbal Quijano. The second dependency tradition is associated to the
Structuralist school that builds on the work of Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Aníbal
Pinto at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). This
Structuralist approach is best represented by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo
Faletto and by the subsequent contributions from Peter Evans, Osvaldo Sunkel and Maria
da Conceição Tavares. Other schools of thought were heavily influenced by dependency
theory and expose, in some respects, very similar views, in particular, the so-called
world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers (Topik, 1998).

Both groups would agree that at the core of the dependency relation between center and
periphery lays the inability of the periphery to develop an autonomous and dynamic
process of technological innovation. The lack of technological dynamism, and the
difficulties associated with the transfer of technological knowledge are the main cause of
the underdevelopment of the periphery with respect to the center. The main contention
between the two groups was ultimately related to the possibilities of economic
development in the periphery. Marxists would argue that development in the periphery –
meaning fundamentally catching up with the center – was impossible, while Structuralists would argue that dependent development was feasible. The vigorous process of growth in
some parts of the developing world in the 1950s and 60s seemed to justify the views of
the latter group. However, the enduring process of stagnation after the 1980s Debt Crisis
has led to a reconsideration of the relevance of dependency situations.
In particular, some authors argue that a new situation of dependency has emerged, one in
which technological backwarderness and the international division of labor are of
secondary importance, and financial dependency or the original sin hypothesis, reflected
in the inability of peripheral countries to borrow in international markets in its own
currency, is the real obstacle to development (Vernengo, 2006). The following section
discusses the main differences and similarities between the two dependency traditions,
and the last one analyzes the financial dependency literature.

External versus Internal Limits to Development
For Baran and other Marxists the origins of the center-periphery relation were strictly
technological and determined by the international division of labor. In other words, the
center produced manufactured goods for itself and the periphery while the latter produced
commodities mainly for the center, as well as maintaining a relatively large subsistence
sector. Marxist ‘dependencistas’ explained the lack of dynamism in the underdeveloped
world as being the result of its particular insertion in the world economy. In this view, the
process of development depended on capital accumulation, which, in turn, hinged on
surplus extraction. A larger surplus led to more accumulation of capital and a higher
growth rate. Further, for Marxists it was in the uses of the surplus that the differences

between developed and underdeveloped regions were most evident. In the most backward
countries, where the process of industrialization did not take hold, and agriculture was
still dominant, underdevelopment resulted from the patterns of land tenure.
The predominance of large estates in plantation societies implied that a great part of the
surplus remained in the hands of landowners, which emulated the consumption patterns
of developed countries. Excessive and superfluous consumption on luxuries would then
reduce the potential for investment and capital accumulation. Hence, conspicuous
consumption would be the cause of stagnation in the periphery. The international division
of labor that promoted the export oriented plantation system in a good part of the
developing world reinforced the need for luxury imports, then, was at the core of the
dependency relation.


If industrial development took place, then a new pattern of dependency would emerge.
Industrialization would take place with participation of foreign capital, which would tend
to control domestic markets. The periphery then would jump into the monopolistic phase
of capitalistic development. However, the surplus extracted by monopolistic capital
would not be reinvested in productive activities in the host country. Part of it would
simply be sent abroad as profit remittances, while the other part would be spent on
conspicuous consumption. Gunder Frank (1967) concluded then that the only way to
break with the circle of dependency would be a political revolutioCardoso and Faletto (1967), argued that not only was capitalist development in the
periphery possible, but also foreign capital had a tendency to be re-invested in the host
country so that foreign investment might in fact ‘crowd-in’ domestic investment. Hence,
the nature of dependency was such that partial or dependent associate development was
viable. As a result, dependency was not a relationship between commodity exporters and
industrialized countries, but one between countries with different degrees of
industrialization. Furthermore, Cardoso and Faletto distinguished between political and
economic variables in explaining dependent development.
Development and underdevelopment were economic categories related to the degree of
development of the productive structure, and to its level of technological development.
On the other hand, dependency and autonomy referred to the degree of development of
the political structure, and the ability or not of local political elites to take economic
decision-making into their own hands. As a result, dependent development in association
with foreign capital was possible and occurred in countries like Argentina, Brazil and
Mexico, and in parts of East Asia, one might add. These were the countries that
corresponded to what world-systems’ authors refer to as the semi-periphery.
Cardoso and Faletto emphasized the importance of domestic internal developments, in
contrast to the external forces of the world economy, as the main determinant of the
situation of dependency. It was the internal political process that led to outcomes that
favored foreign actors in the process of development. Further, national capitalist
development was not incompatible with the absorption of technological knowledge from multinational firms. Arguably if the goal was to achieve development, dependent
development was a reasonable road to it, even if autonomous development was politically
more interesting.
However, the Structuralist version of dependency, in refuting the Marxist emphasis on
the relevance of external factors, went to the other extreme and claimed that internal
forces were the almost exclusive determinant of development. The inability to generate a
domestic dynamic of technical progress incorporation, the domestic patterns of
consumption, and the limitations of the domestic elites that opted for political
dependency were to blame. If the successful industrialization of some parts of the
periphery showed the weakness of the Marxist tradition, then the debt crisis and the
failure to renovate the process of development in the 1990s proved that the optimism of
the Structuralist approach was not guaranteed.

The Solution

The source for the initial communication is Ms. Booker herself, with the stated purpose of developing and presenting a strategic plan to facilitate ongoing and future communication. Her message is encoded in two ways: the actual typing of this document, and the motor skills she employs (facial movements, vocal cords, kinesthetics) when she verbally presents the plan to Ms. Burns.The message is the strategic plan itself as developed by Ms. Booker. While the Shannon-Weaver model disregards, to an extent, some of the complexities of communication such as context and field of experience for both receiver and source, Ms. Booker is confident that the clear meaning and message behind her well thought out plan are not liable to be misinterpreted, and that while some of the particulars within the plan itself may be debatable, the initiative will be most welcome by the principal. Because she has always had a good relationship with Ms. Burns and cordial and constructive discussions in the past, she has no reason to believe that her message will not be received as intended, without any significant distortion.
Ms. Booker uses both visual (the plan itself) and verbal (her discussion with Ms. Burns) channels to present her message, a strategy whereby each reinforces the other. She takes care to limit the amount ofphysical noise in the communication process. She presents her document in a clean yet stylish format, with a readable font and few distracting graphics. She has proofed and edited her material to express only the most essential points to her plan and to limit any confusion or information overload. In addition, in her face to face meeting, she chooses an afterschool hour where they can meet quietly in the library without interruption. Semantic noise is also considered by Ms. Booker. Is there anything in Ms. Burns that might unduly prejudice or influence her reception of this message? By furnishing a copy of her document in advance of their meeting, Ms. Booker gives Ms. Burns a chance to familiarize herself with the plan, to be able to better focus in person, with less distraction or confusion as to its contents. She is careful to use much of the language and jargon already present in the schoolwide strategic plan, maximizing the use of a familiar, common code. She invites Ms. Burns to open the meeting with any comments to help her guide her own assumptions on how best to proceed.
Ms. Burns clearly has the decoder to translate this message, because Ms. Booker has taken into account the common jargon they share, with references to the schoolwide strategic plan, and a knowledge of and familiarity with the issues presented. As colleagues they share a similar working environment, and Ms. Booker feels confident, based upon her past dealings with Ms. Burns, a similar ethic of responsibility toward improving the operations of the school. She does not anticipate that Ms. Burns, as receiver, will have any difficulty in decoding her message, having taken pains to ensure its clarity.
Ms. Burns will provide feedback to Ms. Booker, and this message will again be encoded, sent out through channels, noise, etc. This circular communication process will continue as the plan itself takes shape. Because of the relatively uncomplicated nature of this initial step, the presentation of the plan by Ms. Booker to Ms. Burns, the Shannon-Weaver model is a good choice. Meaning is not likely to be misinterpreted (and may be of no issue whatsoever), but the emphasis on physical and semantic noise and the appropriateness of the decoder to the message, and the receiver to the source, are well considered.

The Rationale

The Shannon-Weaver Communication Model can appropriately and effectively be applied to the stated communication problem. The S-W model is a straightforward model of communication and information transmission. It is an intuitive process or system of communication. It easily connects the message from the sender to the recipient and allows for essential feedback to determine that the message was indeed understood or if further information or clarification is necessary.
Communication is a process of transmission of information in any format, in any mode of transmission, be it electronic, telephone conversation, face to face or by the written word to name the obvious.
Ms. Booker, the Librarian, has historically had a good, formal working relationship with the school Principal. This well established, cordial relationship between the Librarian and the Principal has in the past facilitated ease of communication. Understanding that the Shannon-Weaver Model is the concise transmission of an uncomplicated message to a specific receiver, Ms. Booker has taken careful and appropriate steps to present a clear message. She is confident that by using a well thought out communication model the intended message will not be misinterpreted or distorted.
The simplicity of this communication model allows the message to be easily sent or transmitted by the source via the appropriate channel and easily decoded by the receiver. This model is also adaptable for ongoing communication with other faculty and students. The S-W model provides the feedback component which validates the comprehension of the message for both the sender and receiver. The simplicity of the S-W model will prevent the breakdown of communication.
The stability of the situation and the simplicity of the textual message precludes Ms. Booker from utilizing other communication models. The David Berlo S-M-R-C Model incorporates the psychological complexities of communication such as attitudes within the source, content within the message, physiological senses within the channel and again attitudes within the receiver. Although these variables would be of value in a situation of less certainty, due to the uncomplicated communication needs of Ms. Booker, the S-W model was sufficient.

The Shannon-Weaver Model Defined

 
In 1947, Claude E. Shannon, a research mathematician working for Bell Labs, created a theory of communication designed to facilitate information transmission over telephone lines. Later, Warren Weaver added the component of feedback to Shannonís linear model, thus making it in effect circular. Although the originally intended to be used by engineers dealing with information that was void of ìmeaning,î the Shannon-Weaver Model is one of the most popular inter-personal communication models used today.

The Model
Within the Shannon-Weaver Model exist 8 key elements that are required for communication, or information transmission, to occur. These elements are:

Source Encoder Message Channel Decoder Receiver Noise Feedback

To understand how the Shannon-Weaver Model pertains to communication, it is necessary to define each individual element.
Source
The source of communication is the initiator, or origin, that puts the model into action. It is an individual or group that has a specific reason to begin the communication process. That is, there is a message that they wish another to receive.
Encoder
Once the purpose of the source has been decided, there must be a specified format for the message to take. This is what the communication encoder does; it takes the concept that the source wants sent out, and puts it into a suitable format for later interpretation.
Message
The information, idea, or concept that is being communicated from one end of the model to the other is the message. Most of the time, in human communication, the message contains a distinct meaning. When the model was created, Shannon and Weaver were not concerned whether the message had substance, but rather that it was being transmitted.
Channel
It is essential for meaningful communication that a suitable means to transmit the message be selected. The channel is the route that the message travels on, be it verbal, written, electronic, or otherwise.
Noise
It is inevitable that noise may come into play during the communication process. Noise could be considered an interference or distortion that changes the initial message; anything that can misconstrue the message may be noise. Noise can be physical, as in an actual sound that muffles the message as it is being said, or it can be semantic, like if the vocabulary used within the message is beyond the knowledge spectrum of its recipient. In order for communication to be effective, noise must be reduced.
Decoder
Before the message reaches the intended recipient, it must be decoded, or interpreted, from its original form into one that the receiver understands. This is essentially the same interaction as that of source and encoder, only in a reversed sequence.
Receiver
In order for communication to be executed, there must be a second party at the end of the channel the source has used. The receiver takes in the message that the source has sent out.
Feedback
For meaningful communication to come to fruition, it is vital that the receiver provides feedback to the source. Feedback relates to the source whether their message has been received, and most importantly, if it has been interpreted accurately. Without feedback, the source would never know if the communication was successful. Ongoing communication is made possible by the cyclical route feedback allows; if more communication between the two parties is necessary, they can follow the model indefinitely.

P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 4

RECOGNITION
Lazarsfeld received many acknowledgments of his accomplishments during his lifetime. He was president of both the American Association for Public Opinion Research (1949-50) and the American Sociological Association (1961—62), and he was an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as the National Academy of Sciences. He received honorary degrees from Chicago and Yeshiva universities
in 1966, from Columbia in 1970, from Vienna in 1971, and from the Sorbonne in 1972, the first American
sociologist ever so honored. In 1955 he was the first recipient of the Julian L. Woodward Memorial Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and in 1969 the Austrian Republic awarded him its Great Golden Cross, largely for his help in establishing the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna in 1963. He was a much sought-after consultant, speaker, and teacher. Shortly after his death, a Paul
F. Lazarsfeld Memorial Fund was established in order to sponsor a series of lectures in his honor. In 1983 a large collection of his books and papers was dedicated as the Lazarsfeld Archives at the University of Vienna.

LEGACY

Lazarsfeld's innovations in consumer research and his effect on the business and advertising communities were substantial. He was a major trainer and model for the generation of advertising and market researchers that matured in New York City in the decades following World War II. His work in communications research helped create it as a field of scholarship, and through his analyses of propaganda during
World Wrar II and his influence upon the research activities of the Voice of America, he helped create the field of inter national communications research. His model for the institutionalization
of training and research in the social sciences is embodied in dozens of thriving research organizations
around the world. He was one of the founders of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. His use of the sample survey as a tool for causal analysis helped transform opinion polling into a scientific method, and his development and use of the panel method
has enormously influenced a wide range of evaluations of the effect of educational or social reform programs.
Marginality. In spite of these achievements, Lazarsfeld felt that he was somehow an outsider in America, a marginal person, never at the center of things. Why did he feel this way? He thought that it was the result of his Jewishness, his foreignness, his heavy accent, and his interest in such a lowstatus activity as market research—but these reasons are not fully convincing. He lived his life, as he once put it, like a  bicycle rider, always compensating so as not to fall off. He left his marginal position at the University of Vienna for
equally marginal positions at Newark, Princeton, and (at least initially) Columbia. He left mathematics because he knew that he would never be in the first rank, but he never quite believed that events had transformed him into a sociologist. He approached every new research topic from a startlingly
new direction, and he took pride in the originality of studies carried out at the Columbia Bureau, in contrast to the more traditional research carried out at other university centers such as those at Chicago and Michigan. Like an expert skier, who knows that the best snow is generally at the edge of the
trail, his genius kept him carefully away from the accepted center of most problem areas. "But look," he would say with his hand raised, and then proceed to outline a highly original plan of action.

Lazarsfeld's self-perception of marginality was allied to his conception of his role in the social sciences: to be on the margin is also to be on the frontier. It can also be argued that his marginality contributed to the intellectual traffic between ideas and methods that made him a singularly influential figure in the history of social research. In a memorial article published in Le Monde shortly after Lazarsfeld's death, Raymond
Boudon noted that "his work has attained the most noble form of marginality: many of the ideas which he introduced have become so familiar that hardly anyone bothers to
attribute their paternity to him." The Search for Convergences. One consequence of Lazarsfeld's
sense of marginality for his intellectual activity was his never-ending search for convergences between different intellectual traditions—convergences that could serve to enrich both traditions. His search for convergences undoubtedly was a result of being Viennese: bold syntheses are characteristic intellectual products of Vienna. His collaboration with the theorist Merton is the most obvious of these convergences.
Other convergences that he encouraged were between disciplines: psychology and sociology; mathematics
and sociology; anthropology and media research; and sociometry and survey research. He sought both a convergence and a mutual understanding between the critical sociology of the Frankfort school (see especially the writings of T. W. Adorno) and the dominant positivistic trend in American sociology, as well as between Marxist sociology and mainline European—American sociology.
Other convergences he sought were between the social sciences and the humanities. He used his early studies of radio to build bridges between the social sciences and such fields as literary analysis and music. He sought to relate the philosophy of science and empirical social research, historical analysis and opinion research, and logic and concept forPAUL F. LAZARSFELD 275 mation. While some of his critics were accusing him of mindless quantification, he was spending time reading and talking with some of the nation's leading humanists, historians, and philosophers.
Finally, he sought convergences between different research traditions and methods. He made connections between small-group research and the use of sample surveys to study interpersonal influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) and between the use of fixed-choice questions in surveys and so-called open-ended interviewing. His work on concept formation (1966) and index construction (see Lazarsfeld, Pasanella,
and Rosenberg 1972) is a monument to interdisciplinary borrowing and to making connections. With Allen
Barton, he took a polemic of C. Wright Mills against the decline of "craftsmanship" and developed it into a scheme for studying the man-job relationship (Barton and Lazarsfeld 1955). And he encouraged the foremost qualitative researcher of the 1950s—David Riesman—to reinterview asample of the respondents during his study of American social scientists (Lazarsfeld and Thielens 1958). A volume of interdisciplinary essays edited by Mirra Komarovsky, Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (1957), was inspired by him
and prepared under his general direction. A modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, he largely ignored the traditional specialization of knowledge and sought to find new truths by bringing people and ideas together.
The convergence in the social sciences that Lazarsfeld tried hardest to effect is that between quantitative and qualitative research. In almost every field in which he worked, he tried to fuse these two productive modes of inquiry: it was the theme with which he ended his presidential address to the American Sociological Association; the journal Quality and Quantity was founded in 1967 under his direct influence;
and for all these reasons the Festschrift in his memory is titled Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research.13 In the words of James S. Coleman, he was "one of those rare sociologists who shaped the direction of the discipline for the succeeding generation."14 THE AUTHOR is PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL for the assistance and suggestions of the following friends and associates of Paul F. Lazarsfeld: Albert E. Gollin, Patricia L. Kendall, Robert K. Merton, Paul M. Neurath, and Hans Zeisel.

P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 3

OTHER INTERESTS
The History of Empirical Social Research. As early as the Marienthal study, Lazarsfeld was fascinated by the historical development of research methods. At his request, Hans Zeisel wrote an appendix for the book that traces the history of what is called "sociography"—primarily community studies.
But he did little systematic work on the topic until a 1959 interdisciplinary conference led him to prepare a paper (1961) tracing the history of quantification in sociology. In 1962—63 he gave courses and led seminars at the Sorbonne and at Columbia University on the history of quantification, which became one of his major interests during the remainder of his life." His interest in the topic made him into something of a reverse missionary during the last fifteen years of his life: he attempted to convince Europeans that Americanstyle
empirical social research had been strongly influenced by an earlier European empirical tradition. He was primarily responsible for—or exerted a strong influence on—the establishment of research institutes in Oslo and Vienna, and his visits to Paris and Warsaw greatly altered the nature of social research in these cities. He visited Paris frequently, where Columbia University's Reid Hall became almost his second home. He invited a number of Europeans to spend a year at Columbia, and in this way he enriched sociology on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died, Raymond Boudon and Jean Stoetzel, who had worked closely with him during his stays in Paris, wrote memorial articles for the Paris press, and practically every sociological journal in Western Europe published an obituary.

The Utilization of Social Research. Lazarsfeld's career began with his founding of an institute for applied social research in 1925, and he never lost his interest in the practical applications of research. When his presidency of the American Sociological Association (1962) offered him the opportunity to set the theme for the annual meeting, he chose "the uses of sociology" (Lazarsfeld, Sewell, and Wilensky 1967).

LAZARSFELD'S CIRCLE

Throughout his life, Lazarsfeld worked intensively with students and colleagues, and a full-scale intellectual biography would of necessity trace the intertwining of his career with those of his associates, his "circle." Furthermore, his early years as an organizer of socialist youth activities established a pattern of leadership that he never fully abandoned: he was skilled at telling others what they should do, and then helping them do it. As his associate Morris Rosenberg once noted, "his most obvious impact is upon his students and, of course, on his students' students. When you read Pete Rossi, you read Paul; when you read Jim Coleman, you read Paul;
when you read Charlie Glock, you read Paul; and so on and on." 12 Major Associates. Hans Zeisel, who became a professor of law and sociology at the University of Chicago, worked with Lazarsfeld in Vienna at the Forschungsstelle, with Jahoda and Lazarsfeld on the study of Marienthal, and later with Lazarsfeld at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. His Say It With Figures (1947), a textbook that is more than a textbook,
a manual that is more than a manual, now translated into six languages, is a product of their long collaboration. Zeisel's essay in the 1979 Lazarsfeld Festschrift is both a record of and a sentimental tribute to their lifelong association.
Robert S. Lynd, then professor of sociology at Columbia, befriended Lazarsfeld at the time of his first visit in 1933; for many years, the Lazarsfelds went to the Lynds' apartment on Thanksgiving Day or on Christmas Eve. Bernard Berelson, Frank Stanton, and Edward A. Suchman were early collaborators in his work on mass communications. Allen H. Barton, professor of sociology at Columbia, first studied with Lazarsfeld in 1947 and accompanied him to Norway in 1948to help establish a research institute at the University of Oslo.
They coauthored an important article on qualitative measurement (1951) and Barton was director of the Columbia Bureau from 1962 to 1977.
 In Paris (and for one year in New York), Lazarsfeld had a profound influence on Raymond Boudon; in Warsaw, where he was fascinated by the social research that was being done in the late 1950s to test the efficacy of various socialist programs, he was assisted primarily by Stefan Nowak. His collaborative relationships with his three wives were noted earlier. For years, he and the Columbia philosopher Ernest
Nagel taught a successful graduate seminar on the logic of social inquiry. He had intense and complex relationships with two sociologists whose approaches to scholarly work were sharply at variance with his own: T. W. Adorno and C. Wright Mills. Both were critical of him; while critical of much of their
work, he nevertheless went to great lengths to try to find common ground. More important than any of those named above in their effect on Lazarsfeld, and in his influence on their thinking, are two of the most eminent American sociologists of the twentieth century—Samuel A. Stouffer and Robert K. Merton.
Collaboration with Samuel A. Stouffer. Lazarsfeld and Stouffer first met in 1936. At that meeting, they agreed to collaborate on a monograph concerning the American family in the depression that was a part of a Social Science Research Council inquiry into the era directed by Stouffer (Stouffer and Lazarsfeld 1937). Thus was established what Lazarsfeld called "an alliance" that lasted until Stouffer's death in 1960.
Their most notable collaboration was on the wartime research concerning the U.S. Army that led to a four-volume series, including the two volumes entitled The American Soldier, published in 1949 and 1950. Lazarsfeld also edited and wrote the introduction to a posthumously published selection of Stouffer's papers—although Stouffer had himself selected the papers.
It was Stouffer who first introduced Lazarsfeld to the fourfold contingency table—a concise way of demonstrating the relationship between two dichotomous variables—by drawing one on a luncheon tablecloth one day in Newark in 1937. During the war years, when Lazarsfeld was a consultant to the War Department, his ideas on latent structure analysis and on the causal analysis of survey data were worked out in discussions with Stouffer. Their personal and research styles were totally different: Lazarsfeld was the somewhat flamboyant, cultured European, raised as a socialist; Stouffer was the
homespun, modest Midwesterner, raised as (and remaining) a Republican. Lazarsfeld surrounded himself with research assistants; Stouffer was famous for running his own statistical tables on the IBM counter—sorter outside his office door in Washington, and later at Harvard. Both knew how to organize research workers, and both were totally absorbed in obtaining ideas and findings—not from speculation, but the hard way, from data. Perhaps because he saw in Stouffer a more disciplined and self-effacing reflection of himself, Lazarsfeld
considered Stouffer "the most important man of all of us . . . an outstanding mind in our generation"; Stouffer's
effect upon his thinking, although subtle, was enormous.
Collaboration with Robert K. Merlon. Lazarsfeld and Merton joined the Columbia faculty at the same time; in fact, their appointments were designed to resolve an internal dispute over whether the next major appointment to the Columbia sociology faculty was to be theorist or a methodologist. With Merton and Lazarsfeld, Columbia hoped to get both. It did, and for decades Merton was known as the major "theory"
person in the department, Lazarsfeld as the chief "methods" person. To a certain extent this is true; most graduate students studied under both but aligned themselves primarily with one or the other. Hanan Selvin, like Patricia Kendall, one of the relatively few graduates of the department who worked closely with both Lazarsfeld and Merton, spoke for generations of students when he said in a 1975 Festschrift for Merton that "we were satellites, not of one sun, but of two for Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld so dominated
Columbia during these three decades that no lesser figure of speech will do." Lazarsfeld and Merton were close friends and colleagues for thirty-five years. There are few examples in the history of science of two such brilliant and accomplished colleagues developing and maintaining such a strong personal and scientific relationship for such an extended period. An attempt to explicate the relationship in brief compass is not a
digression; rather, it is central to an understanding of Lazarsfeld's accomplishments.
It was primarily a professional rather than a social relationship; Lazarsfeld entitled his account of their collaboration "Working with Merton" (1975). As noted below, they were coauthors and coeditors of a small number of important publications. Moreover, Merton was the anonymous collaborator on almost everything Lazarsfeld published. On the title page of the copy he gave Merton of a long chapter on latent structure analysis, Lazarsfeld wrote: "Bob, this is the first item in 20 years you did not have to work on. P."
Each of their six published collaborative efforts reveals something important about their relationship. They coedited Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of "The American Soldier" (1950), a brilliant attempt to enrich social theory by reappraising the wider effects of the series of attitude surveys that Stouffer had conducted among soldiers during the war. Their three coauthored articles on mass
communications deal with the social and cultural meanings of the radio research they had both carried out. In their "Friendship as Social Process" (1954), Lazarsfeld recast a number of Merton's sociological propositions about friendship into formal, deductive mathematical terms and indicated their research relevance. And in "A Professional School for Training in Social Research" (1950), they reviewed plans for a new educational institution they had talked about for many years, but which never reached fruition.
In their life at Columbia together, it was Merton whose diplomatic skills were called upon to extricate Lazarsfeld from numerous troubles with the university, his colleagues, his students, or his sponsors. It was Merton who toiled over Lazarsfeld's drafts, applying to them the brilliant editing skills that have benefited so many of his students and colleagues.
And it was Merton who established and maintained the close support with the Columbia University community that Lazarsfeld—more the outsider and much more the world traveler—only achieved toward the end of his tenure.
The substance of their professional friendship is more difficult to specify; elaborating it would be a worthy research project in itself. Certainly Merton's interest in the sociology and history of science influenced Lazarsfeld's work on the history of the empirical study of action, and on the history of methodology more generally. Lazarsfeld's concept of "global characteristics"—the characterization of groups based on characteristics that are not derived from the properties of individual members (population density is an obvious example)—influenced Merton's subsequent work in the sociology of science. Lazarsfeld had no opportunity to create a personal library during his first decade in the United States; when he first saw Merton's eclectic library, he resolved to develop his own, and did. In his article in the Merton Festschrift, "Working with Merton," Lazarsfeld provided a detailed recollection of their relationship; in the Lazarsfeld Festschrift, Merton refers to Lazarsfeld as a "brother." Their students and colleagues know that these words only hint at the depth and complexity of their intellectual and personal companionship.

P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 2

CAREER IN THE UNITED STATES
Lazarsfeld first came to the United States in September
1933 as a Rockefeller fellow; he spent the academic year
1933-34 visiting universities, New Deal agencies, and market
research firms. In most places he tried to learn by attaching
himself to one or more research projects. With the enthusiasm,
energy, hard work, and imagination that characterized
his entire career, he sent a questionnaire to the eight other
European fellows in his group to learn how they had adjusted
to life in the United States.
At the end of the second year of his fellowship, Lazarsfeld
decided to remain in the United States. The deteriorating
political situation in Austria following the defeat of the Social
Democrats in the civil war of February 1934 had made his
return to the University of Vienna impossible; the Forschungsstelle
was in the same deficit state he had left it in two
years earlier; and his marriage to Marie Jahoda—who had
remained in Vienna with their daughter—had ended. So he
accepted the job of analyzing some 10,000 questionnaires
from young people that had been collected by the New Jersey
Relief Administration. Lazarsfeld soon transformed the project
into the University of Newark Research Center, and became
the director.
The Center survived its first year by carrying out studies
for the public school system, the Works Progress Administration,
and the Frankfort Institute for Social Research—
then in exile. Located on the fringes of a small university,
with only a handful of staff, its abiding meaning is that it
was for Lazarsfeld the American rebirth of his Vienna Forschungsstelle.
The Princeton Radio Project. In 1937 the Rockefeller Foundation
granted funds to Hadley Cantril, a Princeton psychologist,
for a large-scale study of the social effects of radio.
On the recommendation of Robert Lynd, Lazarsfeld was chosen to be director. Cantril and Frank Stanton, then research
director, and later president of the Columbia Broadcasting
System, were appointed associate directors, and a broad
study of radio programming, radio audiences, and the preferences
of radio listeners was begun. The emphasis was on
the secondary analysis of existing survey data; the content
analysis of programs; and the use of the Lazarsfeld-Stanton
Program Analyzer, a jointly developed device for recording
the instantaneous likes and dislikes of experimental audiences,
following the prototype developed at the Forschungsstelle
in Vienna.
The L>.zarsfeld radio research project virtually created
the field of mass communications research. It asked why messages
are introduced into the media and why people attend
to them; that is, what gratifications or rewards people get
from the media and what functions the media serve in their
lives. Herta Herzog's studies of the audiences of daytime radio
soap operas and (with Hadley Cantril) of the radio listeners
who believed the famous 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of
an invasion from Mars are examples, as are the studies of
T. W. Adorno on the social roles of popular and serious music.
Other communications research projects carried out by
Lazarsfeld's associates are Bernard Berelson's study of "What
'Missing the Newspaper' Means," which used the occasion of
a 1945 newspaper strike in New York City to ascertain the
functions that newspapers serve in the lives of their readers,
and Leo Lowenthal's 1944 analysis of the biographies of culture
heroes published in popular magazines. Lazarsfeld's
own research (1940) on the comparative effects of radio listening
and reading was the first serious examination of this
important question. His influence on the field outlived him:
In 1983 the directors of social research of the nation's three
largest networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC—were all former
students of Lazarsfeld.The Bureau of Applied Social Research. In 1939 the Rockefeller
Foundation radio research grant was renewed but
transferred from Princeton to Columbia University, where
Lazarsfeld was first appointed a lecturer and in 1940 an associate
professor of sociology. In 1944 the Office of Radio
Research was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Bureau expanded
its program and grew steadily in terms of both revenue and
staff. By the mid-1970s, its annual budget was more than a
million dollars, and it employed at any one time more than
100 people, half of them full time. In 1977, however, a year
after Lazarsfeld's death, the university withdrew its support,
the Bureau closed its doors, and its legacy and library were
transferred to a new Center for the Social Sciences, located
on the Columbia campus.
The Bureau's offices were temporary and makeshift
throughout its life span; it never quite became the established,
university-based social research institute that Lazarsfeld
had first dreamed of in Vienna. But it survived for forty
years, generally amidst administrative chaos, and with conspicuously
little financial support from the university. The
research ideas it fostered, the leading social scientists who
were trained there, the innovative research it sheltered, and
its distinctive organizational structure have greatly influenced
the institutionalization of the social sciences throughout
the world.7
Lazarsfeld remained at Columbia from 1940 until his retirement
in 1969; in 1962, he was appointed Quetelet Professor
of Social Sciences, a chair that had been created forhim. Unwilling to give up teaching altogether after his retirement,
he traveled almost weekly to the University of Pittsburgh,
where he served as Distinguished Professor of Social
Sciences from 1969 until his death.
THE INTERACTION OF THEORY AND METHOD
During his fifty-two years of active professional life, Lazarsfeld
made important contributions to four substantive
areas in the social sciences: the social effects of unemployment,
mass communications, voting behavior, and higher
education. These contributions did not spring from a grand
design, but were largely the results of historical accidents and
opportunities seized. By his own accounts, Lazarsfeld studied
the effects of unemployment in an Austrian village in the
early 1930s because the Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer
had ridiculed his plan to study leisure during a severe economic
depression. He studied the impact of radio in the late
1930s because he was a poor immigrant in need of a job—
and Robert Lynd found this one for him. His study of the
1940 U.S. presidential election grew out of a planned evaluation
of U.S. Department of Agriculture radio programs directed
at farmers: Lazarsfeld simply wanted to do a panel
study. All his life he was interested in university organization,
but his major study of higher education came about because
in the early 1950s Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the
Fund for the Republic, asked him to do a study of how college
and university teachers reacted to McCarthyism. Throughout
his life, he insisted that serendipity was at the core of the
process of scientific discovery.
Methods of Analyzing Survey Research. When Lazarsfeld
studied the effects of radio in 1937, he realized that because
radio listening created no public records, such as circulation
data, it needed new methods of accounting and study. He
took the opinion poll—at that time used mainly for descriptive purposes, to measure such features as the popularity or
audience size of radio programs—and by the multivariate
analysis of responses developed ways to measure the impact
of radio on attitudes. This transformation of the opinion poll
into multifaceted survey research constitutes one of Lazarsfeld's
major accomplishments.
Several important procedures to follow in the analysis of
survey data are described in "Problems of Survey Analysis"
(Kendall and Lazarsfeld 1950), a pioneering codification of
techniques for avoiding spurious causal relationships in the
analysis of survey data and establishing the time sequence of
variables.
The Panel Method for the Study of Change. A major finding
of Lazarsfeld's research on radio listening is the tendency of
audiences to be self-selected; that is, to tune in to programs
that are compatible with their own tastes and attitudes. Accordingly,
in order to sort out the causal sequences of such
problems as the effect of listening upon attitudes versus the
effect of attitudes upon patterns of listening, a method of
determining the time order of variables was required. Drawing
on his research in Vienna with the Biihlers, in which
repeated observations were made of the same children over
time, as well as on the earlier research of Stuart A. Rice
among Dartmouth College students and Theodore M. Newcomb
among Bennington College students, Lazarsfeld developed
what he called the panel method, in which a sample
of respondents is reinterviewed at periodic intervals.
The panel method is a form of longitudinal research; it
is essentially a field experiment in which a "natural" rather
than an experimental population is studied. Although Lazarsfeld
cannot be said to have invented the panel method, it
was his imaginative use of it, and particularly his innovative
ways of introducing control groups into the analysis of panel
data, that made him its earliest and most effective exponent.
The Study of Interpersonal Influence. Lazarsfeld used the opportunity provided by his pioneering study of the 1940 U.S.
presidential election to test and extend the panel method as
a field technique. The study was published as The People's
Choice (1944), a spare and elegant book that has become a
true classic. The substantive findings of the study are as important
as the methodology. First, a great deal was learned
about the psychological and social processes that delay, inhibit,
reinforce, activate, and change voting decisions. People
subject to cross pressures, for example, delay making a decision
longer than do others. Second, the study uncovered
an influence process that Lazarsfeld called "opinion leadership."
It was found that there is a flow of information from
the mass media, initially to persons who serve as opinion leaders,
and then to the public. This process was termed the "twostep
flow of communication" (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955).
Techniques developed by Lazarsfeld for measuring interpersonal
influence, opinion leadership, and networks of
influence stimulated a wide variety of studies. His students
and, in turn, their students, developed variants of the
method and new fields of substantive application.8
The Analysis of Action. Throughout his long professional
life, Lazarsfeld was intrigued by the problem of how to study
"action" from the point of view of the actor. Much of his
research, as well as the work of his students, concerned the
codification of motives and conditions underlying people's
behavior—a research procedure that came to be known as
"reason analysis." At the heart of the procedure is the development
of what is called an "accounting scheme"—a model
of the action being studied that incorporates the dimensions
of the act that guide the collection of empirical data. Many
of the data in an accounting scheme are obtained by personal
interviews, and in a crucial part of the interview the interviewer
asks the questions necessary for the analyst to do whatLazarsfeld called "discerning": that is, determining not only
that a person was exposed to a given influence, but that he or
she acted in a certain way because of that exposure.
Lazarsfeld's initial article on reason analysis, "The Art of
Asking Why" (1935), was published shortly after he arrived
in the United States, and is based largely on consumer studies
that he had carried out at the Forschungsstelle in Vienna.
The article identifies three types of data that need to be obtained
by asking "why" questions in studying consumer purchases:
(1) influences that lead toward action, (2) relevant
attributes of the product, and (3) motives of the purchaser.
This formulation has a generality that goes far beyond consumer
research, and has been widely used—with adaptations
and extensions—by Lazarsfeld, his students, and others.9
The intensity of Lazarsfeld's interest in the study of action
is indicated by an important 1958 historical essay and by the
attention given to it in his two methods readers (1955, 1972),
in his autobiographical memoir (1968), and in his essay
"Working With Merton" (1975). He viewed the analysis of
action as a way of merging the study of individuals with the
study of the aggregate effects of individual actions, and thus
as a way of merging psychology and sociology.
The Relationship between Individual and Collective Properties.
Techniques for relating the characteristics of individuals to
those of collectivities were termed by Lazarsfeld "contextual
analysis." They involve characterizing individuals by some
characteristic of the group to which they belong (the context).

It is then noted how individuals who are similar in other ways
differ in their opinions or behavior in accordance with their
group. The characteristic of the group may be an aggregate
of individual characteristics (as in "climate of opinion" studies)
or it may be a so-called "global" characteristic that describes
the collectivity as a whole. Lazarsfeld first made systematic
use of the procedure in a 1955 study of social science
faculty members in American colleges and universities (Lazarsfeld
and Thielens 1958).
Mathematics in the Social Sciences. Lazarsfeld never abandoned
his early interest and training in mathematics. He
sought for many years to introduce improved mathematical
methods into the social sciences with efforts such as his work
in latent structure analysis and in dichotomous algebra. His
own work was primarily in mathematical psychology, because
he sought to model processes within the individual. His impact
on mathematical sociology was of a different kind: he
posed problems, he raised questions, and he organized the
efforts of others. James S. Coleman dedicated his Introduction
to Mathematical Sociology to him, and eight colleagues and former
students contributed mathematically based articles to the
1979 Festschrift.

P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical

PAUL F. LAZARSFELD
February 13, 1901-August 30, 1976
BY DAVID L. SILLS
PAUL FELIX LAZARSFELD was born and raised in Vienna.
In 1933 he came to the United States as a Rockefeller
Foundation fellow. He remained in America at the end of his
fellowship, became a citizen, and for three decades was a
professor of sociology at Columbia University. He died of
cancer in New York City.
Although he was trained in mathematics, Lazarsfeld
thought of himself as a psychologist; only in midlife did he
identify himself as a sociologist. His major interests were the
methodology of social research and the development of institutes
for training and research in the social sciences. Because
of the originality and diversity of his ideas, his energy
and personal magnetism, his unique style of collaboration
with colleagues and students, and the productivity of the research
institutes he established, his influence upon sociology
and social research—both in the United States and in Europe—
has been profound.
In the years since Lazarsfeld's death, a substantial number
of appraisals of his life and work have been published.1 I shallattempt to summarize his rich intellectual legacy in this article.
But first, let me convey some sense of Lazarsfeld the
person by quoting from the writings of his former students
Allen H. Barton and David L. Sills, both sociologists, and his
son-in-law, the historian Bernard Bailyn. As these witnesses
attest, neither Lazarsfeld nor his associates were able to distinguish
very clearly between the man and the scholar.
Allen Barton's attempt to capture the essence of Lazarsfeld's
personality is to be found in his-dramatic and rather
subjective account of the history of one of Lazarsfeld's major
inventions: the university-based social research institute. Barton
notes that the concept of the university-based social research
institute "was born in the mind of a social activist student
in the intellectual hothouse of Vienna between the
wars," who "created a penniless research center in a nearbankrupt
society, and found his friends jobs studying unemployment."
He calls Lazarsfeld "an intellectual Odysseus"
and "an entrepreneur of intellectual conglomerates," who
"brought new meaning to the words 'non-profit' as he used
one deficit-ridden project to support another, and pyramided
his intellectual assets from grant to grant." In the end,
Barton notes, "the Bureau was demolished and hauled away to make room for a parking lot on 115th Street, while a Center
for the Social Sciences rose on 118th Street, proclaiming
a set of purposes almost identical to Lazarsfeld's recipe for
his research institutes in Vienna, Newark, Princeton, and Columbia."
2
Bernard Bailyn had the good fortune to have been both
colleague and son-in-law; here is his recollection of a family
visit by his father-in-law:
A visit by Paul was like some wonderfully benign hurricane. There
would be premonitory squalls for days in advance. Special delivery letters
would begin to arrive long before he got there; telegrams and messages
would pile up, occasionally an embarrassed assistant would appear on the
doorstep having got the wrong day relayed through secretaries in two universities.
The day before he was due there would be a flurry of frantic,
often hilarious telephone calls rescheduling the flight, but then finally he
would arrive. The cab would pull up in the driveway and Ptul would
struggle from the door clutching a briefcase overflowing with manuscripts,
books, pipes, cigars, shirts, and some miscellaneous shoes. He would half
run to the house in his odd, stiff-kneed, sideways-swinging walk; call gaily
to his daughter; shake hands with the male members of the family with a
slight European bow, heels together; and almost invariably, as soon as he
was inside the door, say "The most amazing thing happened!," and out
would come an extraordinary episode, told with barely suppressed laughter
and high suspense—some bizarre coincidence—and the visit would be
properly launched.'
In a summary sketch of Lazarsfeld's personality, David
Sills singled out Lazarsfeld's quite remarkable capacity to
carry out his intellectual activities with, and through, other
people:
Most of his major writings are coauthored, and much of his work day
consisted of listening to, talking to, and instructing his students, colleagues,
and co-workers: in class, in his office, in taxicabs, in his apartment, in asuccession of summer houses in New Hampshire; at breakfast, at lunch,
and at dinner; at the blackboard, or pacing his office with a cigar, or seated
in the faculty club with a double Manhattan cocktail in hand, Lazarsfeld
seldom was or worked alone, and he was always working. What Allen H.
Barton termed "the hectic Lazarsfeldian life style" went on to midnight or
later; only then did he work for hours alone.1
THE VIENNA YEARS
Lazarsfeld came from a professional family, active in the
musical, cultural, and political life of turn-of-the-century Vienna.
His father, Robert, was a lawyer in private practice,
rather unsuccessful financially, who often defended young
political activists without fee. His mother, Sofie, had been
trained in individual psychology by Alfred Adler. Lazarsfeld
had three successive marriages: to Marie Jahoda, Herta Herzog,
and Patricia L. Kendall—all his students, all his coworkers,
and all accomplished social scientists. His daughter Lotte
Bailyn is a social psychologist, his son Robert a mathematician.
Socialist Youth. Austrian socialism in the early decades of
the twentieth century was not just another political movement,
particularly for the Lazarsfeld family and friends.
Long after the Vienna years, Lazarsfeld's boyhood friend
Hans Zeisel recalled that time and place and noted that "for
a brief moment in history, the humanist ideals of democratic
socialism attained reality in the city of Vienna and gave new
dignity and pride to the working class and the intellectuals
who had won it." Socialism was integral to the familial, social,
intellectual, and political environment of Lazarsfeld's early
years.
He once said that he had become a socialist the way he
had become a Viennese: by birth, and without much reflec-tion. But he was a socialist all right. When his mother's friend,
the socialist leader Friedrich Adler, was arrested for assassinating
the prime minister, Count Karl Stiirghk, in August
1916, Lazarsfeld attended the trial. He was arrested for
taking part in a courtroom demonstration when Adler was
convicted. He was active as a leader in socialist student organizations;
he created a monthly newspaper for socialist students;
and he helped found a political cabaret that was to
play a seminal role in the development of both the political
and theatrical history of Vienna. Lazarsfeld's first publication,
coauthored with Ludwig Wagner and published when
he was twenty-three, is a report on a children's summer camp
they had established according to socialist principles.
Although Lazarsfeld often stressed the importance of his
early immersion in the socialist movement, his political activism
did not survive his move to the United States. In later life
he used to say that he was still a socialist "in my heart," and
once he remarked that his intense interest in the organization
of social research is "a kind of sublimation of my frustrated
political instincts—as I can't run for office, I run institutes."
His American students and colleagues found him to be essentially
apolitical. Particularly because he studied voting behavior,
he felt strongly that politics and scholarship should
be kept apart.
The Wirtschaftpsychologische Forschungsstelle. Lazarsfeld received
his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University
of Vienna in 1925; his dissertation was an application of Einstein's
theory of gravitation to the movement of the planet
Mercury. While a student, he assisted Charlotte Biihler in her
studies of early childhood and youth development. In 1925
he established a research institute dedicated to the application
of psychology to social and economic problems—the
Wirtschaftpsychologische Forschungsstelle. Years later, he
recalled that at the time he established the Forschungsstelle,he also created a formula to explain his interest in applied
psychology: "a fighting revolution requires economics
(Marx); a victorious revolution requires engineers (Russia); a
defeated revolution calls for psychology (Vienna)."
Karl Biihler became the Forschungsstelle's first president;
a board, consisting largely of university professors and business
leaders, was recruited; Lazarsfeld became the research
director. Scores of small research projects were carried out—
chiefly for business firms, but also for trade unions and city
agencies. "[The Forschungsstelle] came to life in 1925," Hans
Zeisel later recalled, "and sustained itself mainly on ideas, all
of them more or less Paul's, on the unabated enthusiasm of
its members, and on no money worth talking about." As with
most of Lazarsfeld's projects, the participants never forgot
the experience. Use Zeisel (Hans' sister, who had been an
employee of the Forschungsstelle in the 1930s) remarked at
the time of Lazarsfeld's death that "in the end it is to the
Forschungsstelle and to Paul that we owe our existence if not
more," a comment that expresses the intense, almost familial
relationship that Lazarsfeld had with many of his associates.3
The Forschungsstelle was the first of four universityrelated,
applied social research institutes founded by Lazarsfeld.
The others were the Research Center at the University
of Newark, the Office of Radio Research at Princeton University,
and finally the Bureau of Applied Social Research at
Columbia University.
The Marienthal Study. The Forschungsstelle's most ambitious
project was a study of Marienthal, a one-industry Austrian
village twenty-four kilometers southeast of Vienna
where the labor force was nearly all unemployed as a result
of the severe economic depression in the years after World
War I. The study was directed by Marie Jahoda, Lazarsfeld,
and Hans Zeisel. The methods used were both imaginative and eclectic: interviewing, participant observation, life history
analysis, and a variety of unobtrusive measures, such as
charting the circulation of the socialist party newspaper,
which declined more during the years of widespread unemployment
than did the circulation of a sports and entertainment
newspaper. This lack of interest was interpreted as a
measure of withdrawal from participation in political affairs.
The circulation of books from the workers' library was also
examined: although the borrowing fee was abolished during
the years 1929—31, the circulation declined by almost half—
a decline that was interpreted as an indication of apathy.
The Forschungsstelle carried out a great deal of innovative
consumer research, and it contributed importantly to the
development of this field by making the study of consumer
decisions and radio audiences academically respectable.
Nevertheless, it is Marienthal, a slim, clearly written volume,
that remains the Forschungsstelle's most memorable product
(Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 1933). The study has impressed
generations of social scientists by its integrated use
of quantitative and qualitative observations. Robert and
Helen Lynd, for example, in their Middletown in Transition
(1937), repeatedly refer to the methods and findings of Marienthal.
It contributed substantially to the methodology of
community studies, and its major finding, that the prolonged
unemployment of workers leads to apathy rather than to revolution,
foreshadowed the widespread lack of resistance to
Hitler. Marienthal was banned by the Nazis soon after it was
published, and most of the copies were burned, but by 1978
it had become part of the sociology curriculum in German
and Austrian universities. In 1979, a group of young Europeans
undertook a restudy of the village.6

Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 — December 18, 1978)

Harold Dwight Lasswell, the American political scientist states that a convenient way to describe an act of communication is to answer the following questions

• Who

• Says What

• In Which Channel

• To Whom

• With what effect?

This model is about process of communication and its function to society, According to Lasswell there are three functions for communication:

1. Surveillance of the environment
2. Correlation of components of society
3. Cultural transmission between generation

Lasswell model suggests the message flow in a multicultural society with multiple audiences. The flow of message is through various channels. And also this communication model is similar to Aristotle’s communication model.

In this model, the communication component who refers the research area called “Control Analysis”,

Says what is refers to “Content Analysis”,

In which channel is refers to “Media Analysis”,

To Whom is refers to “Audience Analysis”

With What Effect is refers to “Effect Analysis”

Example:

CNN NEWS – A water leak from Japan’s tsunami-crippled nuclear power station resulted in about 100 times the permitted level of radioactive material flowing into the sea, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Saturday.

Who – TEPC Operator

What – Radioactive material flowing into sea

Channel – CNN NEWS (Television medium)

Whom – Public

Effect – Alert the people of japan from the radiation.

Advantage of lasswell model:

• It is Easy and Simple
• It suits for almost all types of communication
• The concept of effect

Disadvantage of lasswell model:

• Feedback not mentioned
• Noise not mentioned
• Linear Model