This research illuminates struggles over cultural definitions of femininity by examining how cultural gatekeepers respond to girls' vocal critique of inauthentic media images. Interviews with 10 editors at two national girls' magazine organizations provide a rare glimpse into their contradictory responses to requests for depicting “real girls.” Editors legitimate and share in the critique, claiming they should change images but cannot. In these accounts, they reveal struggles over altering narrow images of femininity at the organizational and institutional levels. Editors also (...) delegitimate girls' critique as misguided by calling on the media organizations' norms and schemas about how the reader is supposed to understand the images. Paradoxically, here, editors claim that they can change images but should not. Ultimately, the power of girls' resistance is tempered, as both sets of responses lead to the girls' critique being inefficacious in redefining femininity. The study contributes to an understanding of how femininity-defining cultural institutions operate to create and sustain gender stratification. (shrink)

This article examines the way advertising was rationalized in the early twentieth-century United States. Drawing on a targeted archival comparison with the United Kingdom, I show how the extensive mobilization undertaken to legitimate and rationalize advertising, rather than changes in the techniques employed in the content of ads themselves, were seen by actors in the mid-1920s to explain most of the extraordinary advances made by American advertising. Building on that comparison, I show how American advertising was transformed, particularly around World (...) War I, into a legitimate profession situated at the center of a network of expertise about consumers and their media. Under the banner of “truth in advertising” ads came to be regarded as a legitimate, rational, and sustained business investment, leading to an enormous increase in aggregate expenditures. I argue that future research should examine how this process fuelled mass media and contributed to the conditions for modern consumerism. (shrink)

The article raises the question whether communication and information sciences should be considered a part of social sciences. Two answers to this question are analyzed. First answer claims that the problems of communication and information exceed the boundaries of a particular research discipline, therefore the science that deals with this subject should be considered a metascience that is examining and structuring general human knowledge. The second, however the more popular answer, argues that communication sciences are a part of social sciences, (...) based on the interpretive approach to social reality. The article aims at reconstructing theoretical, philosophical and methodological premises of this position. (shrink)

Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized world. The principal aim of the (...) article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures. (shrink)