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The Consumer and the Citizen in Personal Influence Lawrence B. Glickman The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2006; 608; 205 DOI: 10.1177/0002716206292366 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/608/1/205

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The Consumer and the Citizen in Personal Influence By LAWRENCE B. GLICKMAN

This article analyzes the relationship between citizenship and consumption posited by the Decatur Study and developed in the influential book Personal Influence by Katz and Lazarsfeld. It shows that they understood a close relationship between the two. It also contrasts the Katz/Lazarsfeld understanding of the relationship between citizenship and consumption with that of contemporary consumer activists to show that, for scholars of “effects,” Katz and Lazarsfeld, who focused exclusively on the “inputs” of consumer choice, paid surprisingly little attention to the social impact of consumption.

Keywords: citizenship; consumption; activism; Decatur Study

consumer

I Personal Influence makes a number of fascinating claims about consumption and citizenship in the mid-twentieth-century United States. By suggesting that there was a relationship between the two, the book was part of a postwar discourse that highlighted consumption as a form of citizenship. But Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) treated this relationship differently than many of the celebrants of what Lizabeth Cohen (2004) called the “Consumers’ Republic” of postwar America. In the first part of this article, I will take up the nouns in the title, focusing on the nature of the seeming equivalence between consumers and citizens raised by the book; and in the second part, I will deal with the definite articles and ask who exactly are the consumer and the citizen treated in Personal Influence.

Lawrence B. Glickman teaches American history at the University of South Carolina. He has published A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Cornell University Press, 1997) and Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (Cornell University Press, 1999). He is currently writing Buying Power: Consumer Activism in American History from the Boston Tea Party to the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

DOI: 10.1177/0002716206292366

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As a scholar of American consumer society, in general, and of the history of political consumerism, in particular, I was struck by the many parallels and overlaps between the Katz/Lazarsfeld model of communication and theories of the meaning and power of consumption held by contemporary consumer activists.

(Equally significant, we will see, are the differences between these models of consumption and communication.) To make this claim is not to impose an alien or anachronistic framework onto Lazarsfeld’s research agenda or onto Personal Influence. Throughout his career, Lazarsfeld posited homologies between consumption and communication, between marketing and politics, and between choice and freedom. In his memoir, for example, Lazarsfeld described the “origin” of his “market research studies” in the “methodological equivalence of socialist voting and the buying of soap” (Lazarsfeld 1969, 279). In Personal Influence, too, political topics and items of consumption are tantalizingly, sometimes jarringly, juxtaposed, as in the mention of “nail polish/price control, etc” on page 153; the book also treats “campaigns” of all sorts—from rolling out new candidates to rolling out new products—as analogous processes. The “advertiser, or the radio executive, or the propagandist, or the educator,” Katz noted in part I, are all “interested in the effect of their message upon the public” (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955, 18). The book establishes a similarity in the interactions among the message, the media, and people in these and other realms.

To say that politics and consumption are related or even homologous processes, however, is not automatically to reduce the one to the other, or to demean the political.

Such equivalences between electoral politics and quotidian consumption may seem at first glance to be flip and/or politically suspect, and critics, at least since Todd Gitlin in 1978, have been wary of this linkage. To say that politics and consumption are related or even homologous processes, however, is not automatically to reduce the one to the other, or to demean the political. To link consumption and politics is not necessarily to lament the degradation of politics as another site of passive, therapeutic meaninglessness, as Christopher Lasch and his followers would have it. Nor is it necessarily to accept the view that all acts of consumption are potentially subversive, as some cultural studies scholars assume (Glickman 1999). Indeed, scholars and consumer activists have noticed similarities in the structure of the two at least since the Progressive Era, and the normative

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valence assigned to this relationship has varied a good deal. For the pundit Walter Lippmann, both consumers and citizens were ignorant of the complex workings of the world: hence the need for scientifically trained experts to provide what he called a “map” of this world. Though she shared his concerns about the analogous complexities of the two, Lippmann’s contemporary, Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League (NCL), saw consumption as a site for the exercise of citizenship, particularly by women, who until 1920 were excluded from the franchise. Kelley and other members of the NCL believed that consumers held the key to ensuring both that workers were treated well and that products sold in stores were not only safe but in accord with the promises of their marketing and packaging. Kelley was concerned that most consumers did not take their responsibilities as consumers seriously but held out hope that through the leadership of the NCL Americans would understand the causal impact of consumption and would gain information about the true content of their purchases as well as the working conditions of those who grew and made the foods they ate and the clothing they wore (Glickman 2004). Activists ever since, whatever their ideological inclinations, have traded on the assumption of overlap between politics and consumption. In his memoir, we should remember, Lazarsfeld (1969) claimed that his interest in the study of consumption came about as a result of his youthful interest in left politics, which, he believed, needed better advertising and marketing to succeed.

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues located the links between consumption and politics, and indeed other social practices, along a number of axes. An underlying assumption of Lazarsfeld’s studies is that people make choices, not autonomously, but in the context of a variety of networks. In this view, communication and consumption networks, while distinct, operate in analogous ways. Notwithstanding the ubiquity and power of these networks, Katz and Lazarsfeld sought to show that individual agency was central to what they called the “flow of mass communications” and also to what we can call the flow of mass production and consumption.

A key challenge posited by Katz and Lazarsfeld—indeed it is the first claim in chapter 1 (p. 15)—is to question conventional wisdom about the supposed relative powerlessness of shoppers in the web of consumption and of individuals in the web of communication. Less explicitly argued but, nonetheless, assumed is the significance of citizens in the web of political discourse. In both cases, “opinion leaders” serve as important nodes on these information and material circuits, not only passing on but interpreting and shaping the meaning of information and goods.

Lazarsfeld claimed that the pivot of his research agenda—the reason for the convergence of marketing and politics in his work—was his interest in handlung or action, which the intellectual historian Daniel Czitrom defined as “how people make choices between available alternatives” (see Lazarsfeld 1969, 281; Czitrom 1982, 127). Commercial markets and a communications infrastructure provide those alternatives and are thus a crucial aspect of handlung. But it is people’s choices within those networks that Katz and Lazarsfeld sought to emphasize. An unstated element of their argument is that choice is an essential part of what characterizes a free society.

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In comparison with propaganda and the command economy that were the dominant forces in totalitarian societies, the fact of choice is a symbol of freedom in democracies. Moreover, in showing that the media were only part of the “twostep” flow of communication, they argued against the prevailing “inoculation” thesis, in which media propaganda shaped popular consciousness. As John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson (2004, 266) summarized, for Katz and Lazarsfeld “interpersonal relations offer evidence for the ongoing health of American society against the influence of the media.” It is interesting to note that Ernest Dichter, another founder of motivation research, was, like Lazarsfeld, raised in Vienna and trained in that city’s school of socially oriented psychology, which placed a special emphasis on handlung. Dichter too was intrigued by the structures of choice, albeit from a more individualistic psychological angle than from Lazarsfeld’s socially inflected understanding of handlung (Horowitz 2004, chap. 2).

In the book, Katz and Lazarsfeld carefully, indeed brilliantly, analyze factors in decision making, with a special emphasis on changes in fashion, shopping trends, political beliefs, and movie selections. Despite the manifold ways in which Lazarsfeld and his group considered the meaning of consumption, there were a few blind spots in their approach. Sociologist Andrew Abbott has called consumption “the most studied single phenomenon in American life,” and many scholars have traced the source of this interest to the midcentury social research of Lazarsfeld (quoted in Easton 2001). But too often scholars have focused on the question of, as in the article in which Abbott is quoted, “Why people buy stuff?” Of course, the answers to this seemingly straightforward question are extraordinarily complex; furthermore, it would be reductionist to claim that this is the research question at the heart of Personal Influence. However, it is true that the book, for all its typologizing of the process of decision making, focuses only on certain aspects of choice. The same is true for Lazarsfeld’s pioneering studies of working-class consumption: he examined what workers like to buy and what attracts them; he focused on the social causes, as opposed to the social impact, of their consumption (Lazarsfeld 1969, 280). Unasked and therefore unstudied is the question, What are the effects— moral, political, economic, and ecological—of these choices?

The reason for this blind spot, I believe, is that Lazarsfeld and his collaborators were interested in determining the inputs, if you will, of choice making, the forces and processes that led people to make particular decisions about fashion, taste, and public affairs. Lazarsfeld believed it was essential to diagram the “structure of the act of purchasing.” He noted that this was a complex process and that “the action of a purchase is markedly articulated and that different phrases and elements can be distinguished in it.” Among the elements he singled out are time of deliberation, anticipated features of purchase, relation to previous purchases, and the psychological coordinates of a purchase (Lazarsfeld 1969, 280). The output, or what happens after the choice was made, was outside his purview.

What is interesting here is that the question about output was exactly the one that consumer activists were asking. Students of influence and consumer activists were considering two sides of the same coin, hence their shared interests in the relationship between people and markets. Both posited that, notwithstanding the forces of markets, consumer choice was a form of power in modern society. But Downloaded from http://ann.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2006 American Academy of Political & Social Science. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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they understood the meaning and exercise of that power in different ways.

Consumer activists have not only questioned the significance of the different choices available to us as consumer and citizens, they have also called attention to the moral and social aftermath of choice. Their focus was not so much on why people made a particular choice, although they were interested in this to the extent that false advertising and an insufficiently critical media may have played a role. Instead, they explored the causal impact of consumption. Like the scholars of influence, they described consumption and communication as fundamentally social acts, envisioned a similar networked world, and had similar ideas about webs of influence. However, consumer activists believed that the act of consumption set off an irrevocable causal chain. Indeed, the raison d’etre of consumer activism was to announce that personal influence need not only be interpersonal.

Consumption decisions affected far more than one’s peer group or one’s neighbors.

In a market society, consumers exercised enormous influence every time they purchased a good, even if they were generally unaware of this power. “Did your stockings kill babies?” asked a pamphlet for a Boston organization promoting a boycott of Japanese-made goods in the late 1930s. The answer for these boycotters was “yes” (Glickman 2005). For consumer activists, the effects of consumption were far reaching and therefore needed to be harnessed for socially useful causes. For these activists, face-to-face contact was one part of a much broader picture that considered the effects of shopping on people we could never see.

Both motivation research and consumer activism took consumption to be a fundamentally social activity. But the two approaches understood the social in different ways. For example, Personal Influence discusses fashion as socially oriented largely by focusing on the crucial role of peer group approval (p. 249).

Consumer activists tended to emphasize the social costs or benefits of fashion: Was an article of clothing made by sweatshop labor? Was it produced in a fascist country? Did the production of it degrade the environment? One approach focuses on the process of how decisions are made, the other on the consequences of those decisions. For the former, personal influence could be understood as a mediating force; for the latter, personal influence was, once exercised, fundamentally impersonal in the sense that the outcome was determined at the act of purchase. The consummation of a purchase was, in effect, the ratification of the social conditions of production that gave rise to the good purchased. Neither the intentions of the purchaser nor the shopper’s interpersonal position as an “influencer” or “influencee” mattered anymore since the outcome was determined by the act of purchase, not the motivations of the purchaser. In both cases, interpersonal relations were crucial, but in the former case, these relations were face to face and local; in the latter, they were anonymous and far reaching.

II Personal Influence makes what it calls “everyday matters” a topic of social research. And it does so, on the model of Middletown, by taking residents of a typical city to stand in for Americans more generally. The specific choices of Downloaded from http://ann.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2006 American Academy of Political & Social Science. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Decatur’s women at a specific and momentous time are adduced as evidence supporting the theory of influence. The “part played by people” in the title refers not only to the specific people of Decatur but to the role of any comparable congeries of persons in a nationwide (and perhaps even global, at least in “modern” societies) process, “the two-step flow of mass communications.”

To the extent that the authors recognized that not all academics accepted the legitimacy of the study of the everyday—or at least the aspects of the everyday relating to consumption and politics that they analyzed—they felt the need to defend this choice. As they noted, many scholars at the time made a “distinction between dignified and undignified topics of research” and “the study of the effect of advertising on purchases is frowned upon” in some circles (pp. 6-7). Yet the authors argued that “the empirical study of human action could hardly find better material than this to develop systematic knowledge” (p. 7). Throughout the book, what struck me was the confident tone that they were discussing something important and had found a way to advance knowledge about how choices were made.

This confidence owes to their conviction that the local and specific information they collected contributed to what they call “systematic,” as opposed to particularistic, knowledge. If Personal Influence was a case study, it was one that its authors took to have broad implications. In reading the book—published by a trade press, well written, unabashedly concerned with everyday matters—I was reminded of Lionel Trilling’s comment that sociology in the 1950s did what the novel had done previously: provided a picture of American society as a whole (Peters and Simonson 2004, 293). Indeed, what they provide is a highly specific portrait of a town and its people, a portrait whose coordinates are not the political leaders of Decatur or momentous historical events but its ordinary residents describing everyday conversations and decisions.

At the same time, Personal Influence steps back from this specific town at a moment in time. What makes Decatur as a specific place most useful is its typicality; similarly, the decision making of its citizens are seen as examples of generalizable processes—indeed, before we meet the residents of Decatur in part II, we are given in part I an exhaustive literature review that establishes the validation in many studies of the “two-step flow of communications.” As Todd Gitlin (1978, 221) has noted, “Katz and Lazarsfeld did not intend simply to make assertions about the relations between more and less media-exposed women in Decatur, Illinois in 1945; they intended general statements, valid across the boundaries of time.” Accordingly, the book highlights not only citizens and consumers of Decatur but what I have called in the title of this article “the citizen” and “the consumer.”

And this relates, I think, to a third intriguing element of Personal Influence: the things that go unmentioned. For all of the exhaustive explanation of methods, the development of the “two-step” model and the justifications of the city choice and survey questions, two aspects of the study are insufficiently explained. One is the decision to interview women only, and the other is the relative lack of discussion of the fact that the Decatur study occurred in 1945 when America was

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still fighting the war with Japan. Early in part II, the authors noted that “we began by interviewing a cross-sectional sample of some 800 women in Decatur, Illinois” (p. 138). Were they mirroring the adage of the advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink that “the proper study of mankind is man . . . but the proper study of markets is women”?1 Similarly, the book does not sufficiently discuss how the wartime atmosphere of rationing and shortages might have affected consumption decisions in the summer of 1945. If the war years were a time of what historian Daniel Horowitz (2004, chap. 1) called “chastened consumption”—a chastening that was both voluntary and forced—what impact might this have had on individual consumption decisions? Moreover, how might this have affected how women would talk with researchers about their consumption choices?

Some of these silences may be explained by the fact that the Decatur study was completed ten years before the book was written and because, as I understand it, the people who carried out the study were not involved in the writing of the book. These decisions seem to be part of the universalizing tendencies of midcentury sociology. And here I wonder whether we might apply David Hollinger’s (1975) writings on the cosmopolitan vision of mid-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals and social scientists to Lazarsfeld. Lazarsfeld had experienced anti-Semitism of the political kind as a young man in Vienna but also of the academic kind in the United States. In his memoir, he quotes from a letter responding to Robert Lynd’s recommendation of him, which, demurring from Lynd’s view, asserted that “Lazarsfeld clearly shows the marks of his race.”

Lazarsfeld claimed that he was not “seriously hampered, because it never occurred to me to aspire to a major University job” (Lazarsfeld 1969, 300-301).

Whatever the motivation, Lazarsfeld sought in his work to recognize individual difference within a framework of generalizable social principles. To be sure, Katz and Lazarsfeld emphasized difference in the book, particularly class difference.

Indeed, “opinion leaders” only made sense in the context of having a special sphere of influence. Katz and Lazarsfeld also noted degrees of influence of women with large families and that “highly gregarious women . . . are more likely to be opinion leaders.”

By saying little about the decision to interview only women and the timing of the study, the authors also seem to be implying a certain kind of universalism. Their study is not so much of specific people in a specific time and place (to the extent that Decatur is a specific place, it was chosen, as a lengthy appendix painstakingly explains, precisely because of its typicality) as of a process common in midcentury America. In this sense, the book participates in the process that critic Leslie Fiedler described as “dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole American people” and that Fieldler attributed to Jewish-American writers of midcentury but that we could equally attribute to midcentury social research of the sort spearheaded by Lazarsfeld (Hollinger 1975, 66-67). That is perhaps why they do not dwell on the details of who they interviewed or the times and places of the interviews.

Personal Influence is an extraordinary achievement of mid-twentieth-century American social science, which repays our attention in the early twenty-first century. The book was a timely work of social science and moral inquiry whose

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historical context my remarks have aimed to elucidate. In this work, Katz and Lazarsfeld offered intriguing reasons to analogize consumption and citizenship.

If their approach paid too little attention to the aftermath of consumption decisions, it offered scholars important reasons to understand consumption as a multidimensional political activity.

Note 1. Printer’s Ink 7 (November 1929): 113.

References Cohen, Lizabeth. 2004. A consumers’ republic: The politics of mass consumption in postwar America. New York: Knopf.

Czitrom, Daniel J. 1982. Media and the American mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Easton, John. 2001. Consuming interests. University of Chicago Magazine 93 (August). http://magazine .uchicago.edu/0108/features/index.htm#Top. Gitlin, Todd. 1978. Media sociology: The dominant paradigm. Theory and Society 6:205-53.

Glickman, Lawrence B. 1999. Born to shop: Consumer history and American history. In Consumer society in American history, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman, 1-14. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

———. 2004. Consommer pour rééformer le capitalisme américain: Le citoyen et le consommateur au début du XXe siècle. Sciences de la Société 62:17-43.

———. 2005. “Make lisle the style”: The politics of fashion in the Japanese silk boycott, 1937-1940.

Journal of Social History 38:573-608.

Hollinger, David. 1975. Ethnic diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the emergence of the American liberal intelligentsia. In The American province: Studies in the history and historiography of ideas, 56-73.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Horowitz, Daniel. 2004. The anxieties of affluence: Critiques of American consumer culture, 1939-1979.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications. New York: Free Press.

Lazarsfeld, Paul. 1969. An episode in the history of social research: A memoir. In The intellectual migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, 270-337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Peters, John Durham, and Peter Simonson. 2004. Mass communication and American social thought: Key texts, 1919-1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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