Katz, Elihu
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Publication Some Sociological Observations on the Response of Israeli Organizations to New Immigrants(1960-06-01) Katz, Elihu; Eisenstadt, S NPreliminary observation suggests that the contact between Israeli officials and newly arrived immigrants from traditional societies is considerably less "bureaucratic" than might have been predicted. For example, analysis of several cases of such bureaucrat-client relationships indicates that officials often add the role of teacher to their relatively specific roles as bureaucrats by teaching newcomers how to perform in the role. Moreover, the official often becomes not only a teacher but also a kind of informal leader. This indicates that under certain conditions, formal organizations may give birth to incipient social movements, a direction of organizational change wholly unanticipated in the theoretical literature. The case material is analyzed in terms of (1) a theory of role impingement in which bureaucratic roles are seen to become intertwined with roles that are bureaucratically irrelevant to the conduct of formal organization and (2) a theory of socialization where the official serves as socializing agent for his clients.Publication Once Upon a Time, in Dallas(1984-05-01) Katz, Elihu; Liebes, TamarAmerican television programmes manage to cross cultural and linguistic frontiers with great ease. This phenomenon is so taken for granted that hardly any systematic research has been done to explain the reasons why these programmes are successful or, even more fundamentally, whether and how such quintessentially American products are understood. The often heard assertion that this phenomenon is part of a process of cultural imperialism presumes, first, that there is an American message in the content or the form; second, that this message is somehow perceived by viewers; and, third, that it is perceived in the same way by viewers in different cultures.Publication Media Multiplication and Social Segmentation(2000-06-01) Katz, ElihuBy now, everybody has heard of the `bourgeois public sphere,' that moment in history when a rising merchant class felt empowered enough to deliberate public policy rationally and universalistically, and to transmit its conclusions to the powers-that-were with the expectation of being taken seriously. By academic standards Habermas's (1962/1989) thesis has become a household word, perhaps because it offers a nostalgic reminder of a lost utopia of participatory democracy, or because it offers hope of what yet might be — if we could only learn to translate the seventeenth century into the ostensibly compatible conditions of a modernity in which widespread education, universal suffrage and the new communications technologies would seem to invite such translation. But this is not the whole of Habermas's thesis, nor its most original part. The rest of it revolves around the `representative public sphere' which refers both to the period that preceded, and the period that followed, that of the newly autonomous bourgeoisie. In the earlier period, it refers to the person of the monarch, to the dazzle and charisma of his regalia, symbols of the legitimacy of his rule and the unity of his realm. That's not such a new idea either. What is new is Habermas's suggestion that the period following the `bourgeois public sphere' — that is, our here and now — is essentially a return to the charisma of the `representative public sphere,' not that of the absolute monarch to be sure, but of a political and economic establishment that has armed itself with image makers and spin doctors who dazzle and charm in the name of the legitimacy and prerogatives of their clients. As Calhoun (1992) puts it, summarizing Habermas, “By means of these transformations, the public sphere has become more an arena for advertising than a setting for rational/critical debate.Publication Two Virtual Debates Between Lazarsfeld and McLuhan on Radio(1999) Katz, ElihuThe honor of this invitation to write an editorial foreword to this issue of the Journal of Radio Studies led me to invent two debates between Paul Lazarsfeld, the empiricist and functionalist, and Marshall McLuhan, the technological theorist. The first debate has to do with the beginnings of radio; the second with radio in an age dominated by television. Lazarsfeld and his troops at Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research did their work in the 1940s and 1950s. McLuhan erupted in the 1960s.Publication On Commuting Between Television Fiction and Real Life(1992) Katz, Elihu; Liebes, Tamar; Berko, LiliPublication McLuhan: Where Did He Come From, Where Did He Disappear?(1998) Katz, Ruth; Katz, ElihuWritings by and about McLuhan trace his interest in the comparative study of media to his literary training at Cambridge in the 1930s which was occupied with the aesthetics of sight and sound and the predominance of representational forms over the content represented. This paper puzzles over the lack of reference -- by McLuhan, his mentors, and his critics -- to an earlier group of British thinkers (from Shaftesbury to Adam Smith) who deliberated over the differences among the arts. Their treatises on how the mind processes visual and auditory information remarkably foreshadow McLuhan's assertion that the media constrain how we think and feel. Present-day debate over the effects of new media technology, as well as current theories of reception, reflect McLuhan's stimulating (though exasperating) insights. His footprints also point to cognitive science and, of course, to globalism.Publication The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis(1957) Katz, ElihuThe hypothesis that "ideas often flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to the less active sections of the population" has been tested in several successive studies. Each study has attempted a different solution to the problem of how to take account of interpersonal relations in the traditional design of survey research. As a result, the original hypothesis is largely corroborated and considerably refined. A former staff member of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the author is now on leave from his post as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and is currently guest lecturer in sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.Publication Mass Communications Research and the Study of Popular Culture: An Editorial Note on a Possible Future for This Journal(1959) Katz, ElihuIn the Spring 1959 issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly, Bernard Berelson explains why he thinks that communication research may be dead. The pioneers in this field, he says, have abandoned their original interests and those who have followed neither measure up to the pioneers nor have they anything very new to contribute. In passing, he cites the demise of the Committee on Communication at the University of Chicago as symbolic of this state of affairs. In their replies, Berelson's critics say, in effect, that it is uncomfortable but challenging to have to protest their own obituary. They cite numerous areas of inquiry and a variety of studies which, for them, are indicative of a continued vitality in the field of communication research. In the proliferation of examples, however, I think that the critics missed a chance to point out to Mr. Berelson exactly what is and what is not dead. By granting that something has happened to the pioneering type of communication research, it becomes possible to point out more clearly what is alive.Publication Louis Guttman, 1916-1987(1988) Katz, ElihuThe development of scaling theory by Louis Guttman at Cornell and by Clyde Coombs at Michigan is one of 62 "major advances in social science" identified and analyzed in Science by Deutsch, Platt, and Senghaas (1971) for the period 1900-1965. Observing that these achievements were increasingly likely to be the products of teamwork (teams account for more than half of the advances since the 1930s, and less than one quarter in the earlier period), Deutsch et al. emphasize that these team workers "were not colorless cogs in an anonymous machine." Rather, say the authors,Publication Interacting With "Dallas": Cross Cultural Readings of American TV(1990) Katz, Elihu; Liebes, TamarDecoding by overseas audiences of the American hit program, "Dallas," shows that viewers use the program as a "forum" to reflect on their identities. They become involved morally (comparing "them" and "us"), playfully (trying on unfamiliar roles), ideologically (searching for manipulative messages), and aesthetically (discerning the formulae from which the program is constructed).