The Radio Project and the Bureau

Years

1937 into the 1940s

Location

Princeton, then Columbia University, New York

Funder

Rockefeller Foundation

Institution

Princeton Radio Research Project, then the Bureau of Applied Social Research

This cluster matters more than any single person in it, because it is the cleanest case in the whole field of a funding structure deciding what a discipline was able to find.

The climate

Radio was the first medium suspected of being able to move an entire population at once, and the people paying for the research wanted measurement rather than critique. Audience research, the focus group, the panel study and the two-step flow model all start here.

Who was in the room

Paul Lazarsfeld ran it. He hired Theodor Adorno, freshly arrived from Frankfurt by way of exile, to run the music section.

The collaboration failed inside two years. Adorno would not convert listening into countable preference data, because his entire argument was that the standardization of the music and the standardization of the listener were the same process. Lazarsfeld could not fund what could not be measured, because the money came with a purpose attached.

What came out of it

Lazarsfeld named the split himself, in English, in a 1941 paper: administrative research, done for an institution to improve how it operates, against critical research, which asks what the institution is for and whom it serves. That paper is the single most useful primary document in this cluster and it is short.

Administrative research won, comprehensively, and it is what most communications research still is.

The People's Choice (1944) and Personal Influence (1955) produced the two-step flow model, which found media effects to be weaker and more socially mediated than the propaganda theorists had assumed. Note how convenient that finding was for the sponsors, and then argue with it seriously rather than dismissing it, because it has held up better than the alternatives in several respects.

Adorno's own account of the collision, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America" (1969), is worth reading next to Lazarsfeld's paper. Both men are describing the same two years and neither is lying.

What it adds

The four questions this site puts to every source came from cases like this one. Who paid, what was the institution's actual job, what crisis was in the room, and what could not be said there. Here you can answer all four from the documents, and the answers explain the shape of an entire discipline.

Institutional history

Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion (1994), on how American communication research was shaped by psychological-warfare funding between 1945 and 1960. It is the key text here and it is underread. David Morrison's work on the Radio Project covers the earlier period.