Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The public engagement with the financial crisis sparked in 2008 is a process of (re)discussing, (re)negotiating and communicatively (re)constructing norms, values and ethics. Several studies show that debates on causes and solutions are often related to explicit and implicit references to norms and values. However, the concrete way in which norms and values are communicatively constructed is mostly neglected in research. Integrating approaches of deliberation and moralization research, the chapter provides a detailed discussion of moral debates, communicative practices and mechanisms of constructions of norms and values in financial blog communication. The findings reveal two central aspects: First, the actors’ engagement with the crisis is not limited to the financial crisis itself but also deals with norms of public communication. Second, they show the interplay of commingled practices of moralizing and deliberating. The chapter underlines that research on (moral) public debates requires the consideration of both moralization and deliberation as crucial concepts for a comprehensive analysis of public social negotiations and their dynamics of interaction.

The chapter analyzes religious authorities in Catholicism in times of deep mediatization. Like few other organizations, the Catholic Church seems to be caught between the general tendency of deep mediatization and its own reluctance to adapt to a mediatized world and society. One topic that is directly connected to media change is the construction of religious authority. Unlike earlier perspectives on the relation of religious authority and media, the figurational perspective offers the possibility to look at changes in the construction of religious authority and their interrelation with media change on different levels. Those different levels refer to different actor constellations and different media ensembles, as well as to different levels of authority, in other words local and translocal authority. In this chapter, we will explore how official religious authorities in the Catholic Church, namely priests in different positions, deal with deep mediatization. This includes the question concerning how they use media themselves, in which situations they use or don’t use media, how and why they are reluctant; but also how they define their own and other’s authority in a mediatized society and how all of this effects the organization as a whole. We will find out that there are different scopes in which authority is constructed differently: while the degree of mediatization is relatively low on the local scope, religious authorities are expected to go with mediatization in a translocal and global scope.

Why do decision interactions within the field of politics still rely on face-to-face communication? While vast areas of day-to-day political practices and routines are backed up or substituted by electronically mediated forms of communication, face-to-face communication manifests itself as the core medium of political decision-making. In a time of ‘deep mediatization’, figurations of political decision-making seem to resist transformation, although they are surrounded by a changing media environment. Moreover, within the field of politics, face-to-face interactions even seem to gain importance as core elements of decision processes. Following the concept of communicative figurations, this chapter takes a closer look at the construction of relations within actor constellations involved in decision-making processes. Based on a micro-analysis of face-to-face group experiments and a series of computer-mediated chat experiments, typical sequences of face-to-face interaction are identified as significant elements of successful decision-making processes. The aim of this chapter is to show that these sequences or patterns of interaction produce and reproduce forms of relatedness within figurations of political decision-making.

The chapter focuses on a cross-national comparison of mediatized schools in Germany and England. Based on the assumption that both school systems follow the same goal of providing good school education, the question arises as to why the mediatized equipment is so different. Our empirical results show that English schools are far more mediatized, exhibiting a higher number of computers, notebooks and tablets in schools as well as digital systems and services. Non-mediatized communication forms dominate in German schools with a high usage of pen and paper or pigeon holes. The different mediatized practices also affect communication with pupils and parents, following the same characteristics as inter-teacher communication. On the other hand, teachers in both countries emphasize the importance of face-to-face contact and direct personal communication. One reason for the differences may be founded in the different educational governance of both countries.

The chapter considers how the concept of communicative figurations can be employed in researching communities and collectivities in today’s deeply mediatized world. It does so by providing specific examples from previous projects and by mapping out different perspectives of thinking about empirical challenges. In a first step, we introduce the concept of communicative figurations and consider how this concept can be fruitful with regard to the necessities and challenges that pertain to two central steps of the research process: (1) approaching and conducting cross-media research and (2) defining the field of research and its limits. We consider both of these central steps as necessities as well as challenges when researching the life worlds of individuals and collectivites in today’s media environment empirically, and we argue that the concept of communicative figurations can provide a useful tool when dealing with some of the challenges. At the same time, it comes along with a set of necessities, which we address along the way. In the final section of the chapter, we then illustrate our considerations by giving the example of an ‘ideal’ study design that employs the concept of communicative figurations for a research project on the communicative construction of family memory. Again, we explain our conceptualization of this project along the lines of the necessities and the challenges of conducting cross-media research and delineating the boundaries of the research field.

Researching individuals’ media repertoires is challenged by the problem that respondents are often unaware of their media use because it is part of their daily routines. In an exploratory study, we consider different interviewing strategies that represent varying degrees of explicitness when stating our media-related research interest, different levels of detail in interview questions targeted at individuals’ changing media repertoires and different points in the course of the interview when we state the respective questions. We compare four different strategies based on ten semi-structured interviews with members of the middle class. An interviewing strategy which implicitly states the interest in the respondents’ media repertoires and follows up on this with the help of related enquiries at the end of each sub-theme appears to be the strategy that best suits the purposes. The set stimulus is subtle and, thus, does not dominate the interviewees’ response behaviour; yet it is strong enough to contain the presence of the media topic throughout the interview. Most importantly, this interviewing strategy allows us to capture the respondents’ individual relevance structures with respect to media and media use as part of their daily routines.

This chapter deepens the discussion on the problem of contextualizing digital traces. First, digital traces are reflected as a phenomenon of media-related complexity more generally. Secondly, the example of data from learning management systems is taken to discuss possible strategies of how to put such automatically generated data into context by the use of qualitative methods that become triangulated. On such a basis, some conclusions are drawn about the future challenges of this kind of research. Overall, this chapter can only argue in an exemplary way, taking a specific and thus limited case of analysis. But such detailed discussion makes it possible to outline different options for future methodological developments in media and communication research.

Inspired by the contributions to this volume, and anchored in recent theories of mediatization, this postscript reflects on the achievements and potentials of the figurational approach in cross-media communication studies. Seeing the volume as a demonstration of the development of the figurational approach from a helpful heuristic lens to a mature operational theoretical framework, the postscript exemplifies this development through a description of three of the book’s case studies. It is suggested that the figurational approach may benefit from building a more precise consensus about what constitutes a core research agenda for cross-media research under conditions of mediatization. Finally, based on a chapter which is purely methodological, the postscript discusses the validity of different qualitative interview designs for the non-mediacentric study of cross-media use.

This chapter discusses the theoretical contributions made in this volume, asking three questions. First, does the figurational approach introduced here allow us to see things that we previously did not? Secondly, how does the new figurational approach relate to the figurational approach as developed by Elias and his followers? Thirdly, is this the beginning of a new paradigm that bridges media and social theory? The chapter concludes that the ‘communicative figurations’ approach shows great promise as this paradigm successfully integrates media studies and social theory. It coins a number of useful concepts, and provides a coherent methodological framework. Compared with current figurational approaches in sociology, its theorization of power is rather weak; but the notions of mediation, frames of relevance and nested figurations are important innovations.