The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications

On the Ethnic Utopia of Personal Influence

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9748783
AutoresJohn Durham Peters (0000-0002-4474-1543, University of Iowa, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen608
Número1
Páginas97-114
Fecha de publicación2006-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-7162 • E-ISSN: 1552-3349
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0002716206292425
OpenAlexW2146333459
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas31

Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from Gentile-style status toward Jewish-style connectivity as the basis of social power; defends socially grounded conceptions of mental life against Gentile individualism; insists in its notion of the two-step flow on the rabbinic principle that a text without a commentary is meaningless; and performs some amazing intellectual-moral-historical footwork with the most inconspicuous of all its central terms, “people.” In all these things, it can be read as a “Jewish” text in some sense

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