| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1994: ¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This research centers on whether society is becoming more or less similar in its form, structures, ideas, and activities. It studies communication, specifically television advertising, comparing two post-industrial societies : America and Japan. Advertising was selected because, in a world moving toward greater capitalist/consumption organization, advertising is one of the most important and wide-spread communication vehicles, central to social reproduction.
Four weeks of advertising were recorded from seven television stations (4 in Japan and 3 in the U.S.) in two cities with similar features. Over 670 hours of programming was recorded (336 hours per country). From this, oveer 7,000 CMs were collected. Using "theoretical sampling" a hypothetical broadcast week was constructed with a total number of 3059 CMs (1927 in Japan ; 1132 in America). Teams of 3 evaluators then content analyzed each commercial, using a coding sheet with over 50 measures.
Findings suggests that : (1) general similarity between commercial cultures can be found, yet (2) areas of difference distinguish the societies from one another. After identifying 5 factors which promote uniformity, we look at specific cases of similarity and difference. We find content convergence in the body, formatic convergence in color, formatic divergence in logos, and content divergence in political values. In a final chapter we glean lessons from these case studies. We outline a theory of convergence in the modern world and a set of concepts which can be applied to understand when convergence is at work, and what mitigating factors exist to challenge it.
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