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Personal Influence and the End of the Masses

Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan

This article offers an exogenous historical analysis of Personal Influence, arguing that it offers an engaged response to a fundamental change taking place at that time in the world economy as it moved from scarcity to abundance. The ten year delay in the publication of the book after the original field work was done in Decatur, Illinois, in 1945 suggests that the sociology of mass communication had difficulty in making sense of the data that work produced. It needed the new sociology of interpersonal communication to interpret it. In accounting for the fusion of these two different sociologies in the work that was finally published, this article indicates the passing of the time of the masses and the coming of the time of everyday life.

Key Words: history • sociology • the end of the masses • everyday life • sociability

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 608, No. 1, 115-129 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0002716206292528


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