Audience Research: Reception Analysis
Audience Research: Reception Analysis
Despite the (implicit) nominal link of “reception analysis,” as defined in media studies, to the work on what is called “reception theory” within the field of literary studies, the body of recent work on media audiences commonly referred to by this name has, on the whole, a different origin than the work in literary theory—although there are some theoretical links between the two fields (see, for example, the work of Stanley Fish). In practice, the term “reception analysis” has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research that occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a “culturalist” perspective, has tended to use qualitative (and often ethnographic) methods of research, and has been concerned primarily with exploring the active choices, uses, and interpretations made of media materials by their consumers.
Bio
The single most important point of origin for this work lies with the development of cultural studies in the writings of Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, in the early 1970s, and, in particular, Hall’s widely influential “encoding/decoding” model of communications. Hall’s model provided the inspiration, and much of the conceptual framework, for a number of the center’s explorations of the process of media consumption, notably David Morley’s widely cited study of the cultural patterning of differential interpretations of media messages among The Nationwide’s audience and Dorothy Hobson’s work on women viewers of the soap opera Crossroads. These works were the forerunners of a blossoming, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, of cultural studies analyses focusing on the media audience, including the influential feminist studies of Tania Modleski and Janice Radway on women consumers of soap opera and romance, and the work of Ien Ang, Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, Kim Schroder, and Jostein Gripsrud on international, cross-cultural consumption of American drama series such as Dallas and Dynasty.
Much of this work has been effectively summarized and popularized, especially in the United States, by John Fiske, who has drawn on the theoretical work of Michel de Certeau to develop a particular emphasis on the “active audience,” operating within what Fiske terms the “semiotic democracy” of postmodern pluralistic culture. Fiske’s work has subsequently been the object of some critique, in which a number of authors, among them B. Budd, Celeste Condit, W. Evans, Jostein Gripsrud, and William Seaman, have argued that reception analysts’ emphasis on the openness (or “polysemy”) of the message and on the activity (and the implied “empowerment”) of the audience has been taken too far, to the extent that the original issue—the extent of media power—has been lost sight of, as if the “text” had been theoretically “dissolved” into the audience’s (supposedly) multiple “readings” of (and “resistances” to) it.
In the late 1980s, many called for scholars to recognize a possible “convergence” of previously disparate approaches under the general banner of “reception analysis” (see, for example, Jensen and Rosengren), whereas Jay Blumler and his coauthors claimed that the work of a scholar such as Radway is little more than a “re-invention” of the “uses and gratifications” tradition—a claim hotly contested by K. Schroder. More recently, both James Curran and J. Corner have offered substantial critiques of “reception analysis”—the former accusing many reception analysts of ignorance of the earlier traditions of media audience research, and the latter accusing them of retreating away from important issues of macropolitics and power into inconsequential microethnographies of domestic television consumption. For a reply to these criticisms, see Morley, 1992.