mass-communication-theory

Chapter 9 Audience Theories: Uses, Reception, and Effects 259
(Brunsdon and Morley, 1978). Moreover, it was produced in a way designed
to appeal to lower- and middle-class audiences. Thus the researchers expected
that the program would be able to communicate status quo perspectives to those
audiences.
Morley tape-recorded the group discussions and analyzed them, placing
them into one of three categories: (1) dominant, (2) negotiated, or (3) oppositional
decoding. He found that although an upper-class group of business managers
dismissed the program as mere entertainment, they had no complaints about the
views it offered. Morley labeled their decoding as a dominant reading. At the
other extreme, a group of union shop stewards liked the format of the program
but objected to its message. They saw it as too sympathetic to middle management
and failing to address fundamental economic issues. Morley labeled their decoding
as oppositional. In the negotiated decoding category were groups of teacher trainees
and liberal arts students. Very few groups articulated only a dominant reading
of the program. Aside from managers, only a group of apprentices was found to
merely repeat the views offered by the program. Most offered a negotiated reading,
and several provided oppositional readings.
As the reception studies approach has developed in cultural studies, researchers
have been careful to differentiate their empirical audience research from that conducted
by postpositive researchers. They stress their effort to combine macroscopic
encoding research with microscopic decoding studies. They also point to their reliance
on qualitative rather than quantitative research methods. Reception studies
are often conducted with focus groups. For example, people who frequently use
certain types of content (fans) are sometimes brought together to discuss how they
make sense of the content. In other cases, groups of people who belong to certain
racial or ethnic groups are chosen so that the researcher can assess how these
groups are routinely interpreting media content. In some cases, researchers undertake
in-depth interviews to probe how individuals engage in “meaning making.”
In others, the researcher tries to assess how a focus group reaches a consensus
concerning the meaning of content.
Sociologist Pertti Alasuutari (1999) has argued that reception research has
entered a third stage. The first stage was centered on Hall’s encoding-and-decoding
approach. The second stage was dominated by Morley’s pioneering audience
ethnography work. Alasuutari wrote:
The third generation entails a broadened frame within which one conceives of the
media and media use. One does not necessarily abandon ethnographic case studies of
audiences or analyses of individual programmes, but the main focus is not restricted to
finding out about the reception or “reading” of a programme by a particular audience.
Rather the objective is to get a grasp of our contemporary “media culture,” particularly
as it can be seen in the role of the media in everyday life, both as a topic and as
an activity structured by and structuring the discourses within which it is discussed….
The big picture that one wants to shed light on, or the big question to pursue, is the
cultural place of the media in the contemporary world. It may entail questions about
the meaning and use of particular programmes to particular groups of people, but it also
includes questions about the frames within which we conceive of the media and their
contents as reality and as representations—or distortions—of reality…. The big research
programme also includes questioning the role of media research itself. (pp. 6–7)
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