We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass-Culture Debate, 1941–61.
- Authors
Malherek, Joseph
- Abstract
Paul Lazarsfeld’s social research organizations, as centres for cosmopolitan refugees who pioneered communications studies, were instrumental in producing some of the most prominent mass-culture critics in the post-war US—both native and émigré—including C. Wright Mills, Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Adorno, and David Riesman. But among Lazarsfeld’s fellow Viennese colleagues, perhaps the most prominent in the contemporary popular mind was Ernest Dichter, a psychological consultant to marketers who probed the unconscious of consumer subjects in an effort to reveal their hidden motivations. Dichter was not a critic of mass culture but rather a celebrant who was embraced by the American business class. He entered into the public sphere, however, as the subject of criticism in journalist Vance Packard’s exposé The Hidden Persuaders. Lazarsfeld saw no essential contradiction between the critics of mass culture and its industrial purveyors; instead, he saw these forces existing in a dialectical relationship with one another. In this sense, it was no accident that his research institutes nurtured both cultural critics and the agents of industrial mass society.
- Subjects
HISTORY of advertising; CONSUMER culture theory; CONSUMER culture; DICHTER, Ernest; LAZARSFELD, Paul Felix; CONSUMER psychology
- Publication
Canadian Review of American Studies, 2017, Vol 47, Issue 2, p261
- ISSN
0007-7720
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/cras.2016.018