The Comparative Turn in Media and Communication Research

Hamburg.
The second keynote speaker this opening morning at ECREA 2010 is Paolo Mancini, whose focus is on cross-national comparative research. This builds on two main assumptions: that comparative research is crucial to media studies, but also that such comparative work is often delayed. The latter may apply more to some forms of comparative research than others.

Any observations about specific national systems ultimately build on comparisons with other countries (even if such comparisons are mainly implicit rather than explicit); most scientific statements in social science and related fields are relativistic: researchers who know only one country know none. Media studies have often been only implicitly comparative, however; there is a delay in the move towards cross-national comparative work, as acceptance of the comparative approach has taken some time to take hold.

Over the past 50 years, for example, political science has moved through a focus on civic culture through the comparison of political systems, comparative government studies, and finally to comparative social inquiry; complex and mature comparative approaches have gradually emerged.

Media studies development has lagged behind this. Reasons for such delays include the media effects research tradition in media studies, which for some time was the only research approach able to attract significant funding, but also the changeable nature of the media (compared to the relatively stable institutions of government), as well as influences by the behavioural approach, the Frankfurt School, and the vocational attitude in media studies research and teaching. As a result, this field has focussed for most of the time on individual persons rather than on the underlying system – due in good part to its focus on media production and consumption, rather than on the wider structure of the media industries.

At the same time, media studies has often been at least implicitly comparative. And more recently, the shift from the single-person focus to a more aggregate level, and finally to the systemic dimension has begun to take place; this has also made comparative aspects more explicit. This has run alongside the paradigm shifts in cultural studies, semiotics, and cultural science; the growing influence of structuralism; the study of professions; and not least the substantial dissatisfaction with the inability of media effects research to actually document the processes of media effects.

Some of this is driven by even more fundamental trends in globalisation, the internationalisation of the scholarly community, and shifts in available funding. All of this is driving the comparative turn in media and communication research.