German Publizistikwissenschaft and its Shift from a Humanistic to an Empirical Social Scientific Discipline

Abstract

German mass communication research today describes itself as an empirical social scientific discipline, but it has not always been so defined. For several decades Publizistikwissenschaft had considered itself as one of the humanities. But at the beginning of the 1960s, a scientific debate started about the discipline’s subjects, its methods and tasks. The forum for this debate was in the scholarly journal Publizistik. This article identifies the arguments and rhetorical repertoires employed by two scholars from opposite sides of the debate, Emil Dovifat and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, to convince the scientific community to side respectively with either the social science or the humanities camp. It is shown that an array of arguments were utilized, from the political meanings and ethical aspects of media, to epistemological reasoning. Furthermore, it is surprising to see how dramatic and emotional the rhetorical repertoires were. The article also presents the biographical, historical and political context of the development of Germany’s Publizistikwissenschaft.

Socialist and Post-socialist Communication Research: a Longitudinal Analysis

“…While in Europe the change of orientation to social science brought by the infl uence of American communication studies and general empirical trends in sociology and behavioral sciences were evident already in the 60s (Löblich, Scheu 2011;Pietilä, Malmberg, Nordenstreng 1990), in Croatia they became visible in published research in communication at least one decade later. Löblich (2007) in the analysis of the German disciplinary development post WWII, shows the rise of the positivistic current, inspired by the American social scientifi c mainstream, in the sixties, which pushed out and marginalized earlier humanistic and descriptive normative approaches of the "journalism and publizistik science". 64% of the International Communication Association (ICA) members (half of whom are from the USA) identifi ed their research practices strongly with social sciences and 22% with the humanities; (Donsbach 2006, p. 441).…”

Writing the History of Communication Studies: A Sociology of Science Approach

“…They had worked as journalists, politicians, or opinion researchers before and therefore brought with them quite diverse understandings of the discipline when they became professors. But the discipline's miserable institutional situation after 1945, the changes within the media system, and the expectations of the political leaders got all of them to mobilize resources in order to forward empirical research (Löblich, 2007). The case of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University demonstrates how the course of an individual actor's life can influence an institution: The Bureau was closed after Paul F. Lazarsfeld's death in 1976 (Lepenies, 1981, p. XIII).…”

Teoria e filosofia da comunicação

“…Por um lado, as disciplinas acadêmicas especializadas se tornaram a ordem do dia, operacionalizando idéias intelectuais em conceitos explanatórios para a pesquisa empírica, enquanto cuidava das necessidades das profissões e burocracias na sociedade moderna. Considerando que a cultura nacional e a cultura acadêmica são diferentes (sobre o caso da Alemanha, ver Löblich, 2007), a autêntica e reconhecida história dos estudos em comunicação nos Estados Unidos (Dennis & Wartella, 1996) é indicativa de uma visão abrangente de que a pesquisa em comunicação se sustenta de disciplinas científico-sociais específicas (para uma crítica ver Hardt, 1999). Embora Schramm (1997) descreva o seu desenvolvimento em referência aos seus «antepassados» (Lewin, Kurt; Lasswell, Harold D.; Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Hovland, Carl I.…”