Heather Haveman University of California-Berkeley
Organizations are the basic building blocks of modern societies. They wield tremendous power and distribute innumerable benefits. All interests -- economic, political, and cultural -- are pursued through organizations. Therefore, to understand the development and evolution of modern societies, we must understand organizations. Broadcast media are particularly powerful organizations. By transmitting facts, opinions, and entertainment, broadcast media connect geographically dispersed individuals into cohesive communities. Among broadcast media, social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to newspapers and books, but far less to magazines, which are worthy of greater attention. Compared to newspapers, magazines' contents are quite varied and they are distributed more widely. And unlike books, magazines are serial publications, which allow them to interact dynamically with their readers. In combination, magazines' diverse contents, broad geographic reach, and serial nature endow them with the power to influence many aspects of social life.
The research has two major goals. The first is to study how the American magazine industry evolved over the 120 years after its inception in 1741 -- not only in terms of numbers and size, but also in terms of variety, location, and influence. The second is to demonstrate how magazines helped build a coherent, distinctively American society and, at the same time, helped sustain many separate and often opposing communities. The research will make three contributions to our understanding of American society and the organizations that are integral to it: (1) trace the evolving diversity of magazines and reveal the interplay between forces driving variation and forces driving similarity; (2) connect the evolution of magazines to their historical context, thus making the study of organizations more sensitive to time and place; and (3) demonstrate how media organizations shape society, thus redirecting the attention of organizational scholars to power and inequality.
The investigator has gathered detailed data on virtually all magazines published between 1741 and 1860 -- over 5,000 as well as state-level data on the economy and population, printing technology, 24 religions and antislavery societies, and some data on the largest arm of the state -- the post office. The grant will support the collection of other state-level data from widely scattered archives: on temperance, peace, and other social movement societies; on schools; and more data on the post office.
Broader impacts. Studying magazines before the Civil War offers insight into the contemporary magazine industry, which faces significant technological and social challenges. Questions about the origins of the industry are relevant today as industry participants experiment with novel organizational and technological forms (e.g., internet publishing) in the 21st century. The project will yield a state-level data base and make it accessible on the web. It will contain data on magazines, printing, the economy, the post office, churches, reform associations, and schools. Before 1870, state-level data on many aspects of American society are scarce, so this data base will fill a huge gap in our knowledge of America. This data base will be a valuable resource for many researchers, including historical sociologists, social-movement scholars, sociologists of religion, and economic and social historians.
