Abstract
Professor Karl Erik Rosengren was one of Europe’s leading communications scholars in recent decades and a founding editor of the European Journal of Communication. He died in 2013, aged 81, and the current editors asked another of the founding editors, Professor Jay Blumler, to collate and introduce the following tribute from colleagues who knew Karl Erik and his work well.
We have come together, gladly but sadly, to express our appreciation of the scholarship and comradeship of Karl Erik Rosengren. Most of his academic achievements (which were formidable) are mentioned below. He played a formative part in the development of Nordic communication science and in gaining international recognition of it. Along the way, the International Communication Association designated him its ‘European Scholar’ at its Berlin conference in 1977 and later awarded him the select status of organizational Fellow. He conducted major pieces of empirical research in audience uses and gratifications, media roles in socialization, cultural indicators of social change, news diffusion, news depictions of social realities, the measurement of media quality and the comparative analysis of media systems across space and time.
Thus, in substantive and geographical respects, Karl Erik was certainly a ‘traveller’, and in that best remembered as our travelling companion. But a more fundamental issue underpinned almost all his thinking and work, namely (in his words), how could communication studies ‘push further along the road to scientific explanation?’ How could its findings achieve an ever greater ‘cumulativity’ and ‘generalizability’? Obstacles to such an advance included a tendency to produce enquiry-specific findings, resulting only in what Karl Erik scathingly called ‘lists’, even merely ‘lists of concepts’; as well as unproductive ideological debates between fixed positions. Evaluations too, he maintained, should be kept out of the argument for as long as possible, ‘so that they may be made with greater precision, and perhaps greater weight, when at last they are made’.
Four ways of making scientific progress in his sense seemed to occur to Karl Erik. One was to design research projects to shed light so far as possible on broader phenomena as well as on institutional specificities. An outstanding example is how fruitfully he combined ‘extra-media’ data with ‘intra-media’ data in his study of international news flows. Second, he urged that conferences and workshops be organized more often around cross-cutting themes rather than on subject singularities. Third, Karl Erik was noted for his devotion to the manipulation of typologies. This could involve a certain communication phenomenon, examined along two dimensions, resulting in a table of four cells, each with a defined and different view of it. In Karl Erik’s view, such an approach could serve as a springboard for identifying questions that a given paradigm raises but cannot answer though they might be answered by another; could lead to the formulation of fresh and better questions or variables; and should enlarge understanding of the subject concerned overall. Finally, Karl Erik saw great promise in the delivery of enhanced cumulativity and generalizability alike through comparative communication research.
Karl Erik realized, however, that, failing such advances, communication studies could face serious risks of fragmentation. With the increased specialization in recent decades of sub-sectors of our field and of the pursuit of distinct lines of research within them, a fragmented future appears yet more likely. The question arises: should the issue that Karl Erik wrestled with be posed again (albeit in different terms, perhaps)? Or are we now beyond the point of no return so far as cumulativity and generalizability in his sense are concerned?
Whatever the answer, Karl Erik was certainly a deep, as well as a broad traveller. He also exemplified Dr Johnson’s conviction that, ‘a man must carry knowledge with him if he would carry knowledge home’.
Sven Windahl and Lennart Weibull write:
Karl Erik Rosengren was one of the leading pioneers of Swedish mass media research. Starting his academic career in literary science, he soon went over to sociology, where his doctoral thesis ‘Sociological Aspects of the Literary System’ (1968) became both widely praised and criticized. Several representatives of the literary field became appalled by Karl Erik’s innovative, and at that time daring, use of quantitative methods.
After presenting his doctoral thesis Karl Erik Rosengren was appointed associate professor in sociology at the University of Lund. In 1970 he received a senior lectureship. Between 1975 and 1982 he was senior researcher in communication sociology at the Swedish National Research Council. In 1982 he was appointed professor of mass communication research at the University of Gothenburg, the first Swedish chair in the field of media and communication studies. In 1986 he moved back to the University of Lund as a professor in sociology specialized in media research. In 1991 he was appointed the first professor of mass media research at the University of Lund until his retirement in 1997.
Karl Erik Rosengren’s research profile was from early on based on a deep interest in quantitative methods. His first main research effort was an international programme of research into cultural indicators with a wide scope, demonstrating societal change with data from fields as diverse as advertising and literature. He went on with studies of international news reporting including comparative analyses of news diffusion.
His interest in methodology was also reflected in a Swedish textbook in sociological methods. It is one of the most used textbooks in sociology, first published in 1971 and the latest edition dates from 2002.
His most ambitious academic undertaking was probably the unique long time research programme Media Panel. In the mid-1970s he gathered a group of young and engaged mass media students and researchers, who as a team studied the media use of children and adolescents. The panel included preschool and lower grade school children who were followed and studied over time, some until the age of 33 years. Also, in many cases, the parents of the children were interviewed. Originally, the scope was one of uses and gratifications theory, but by and by the programme dealt more with questions of consequences and effects of the use, such as aggression and school performance. The programme went on for more than 20 years with a huge outcome in the form of reports, books and doctoral theses.
An extremely important aspect of Karl Erik Rosengren’s work is that he early on connected and presented Swedish media research internationally. Over the years he developed an impressive network of media researchers and he gave us younger scholars courage to try to have our papers published in international journals and presented at international conferences.
The international orientation of Karl Erik Rosengren did not prevent him from being engaged in the Swedish debate and in the public life. He was an expert in several public commissions both in the area of research policy and in the media field.
Karl Erik was indefatigably hardworking and disciplined, at the same time as he was innovative and had a sense for theoretical playfulness. He was extremely supportive to his students and colleagues. Several dissertations would not have been brought to an end had it not been for Karl Erik’s trust in and support of his doctoral students. We are many who today feel the loss of a mentor, a colleague and friend and are deeply thankful for having had the privilege of knowing him.
Jack McLeod writes:
Karl Erik Rosengren’s unique contributions to several areas of communication deserve special recognition: cultural indicators, youth socialization to media and comparative communication research. In 1985, it was my good fortune to visit Lund University and the Media Planning Programme designed and carried out by Karl Erik and his former student, Sven Windahl. In terms of its scope, the study of the life course events and media use behaviours of children, adolescents and young adults across a decade stands as a landmark in the history of youth socialization research. I welcomed the opportunity to work with Karl Erik in 1989 when Jay Blumler, as ICA President-elect and Convention Programme Planner, asked him and myself to assist him with selecting conference papers for the theme: ‘Comparatively Speaking: Communication and Culture Across Time and Space’. Research comparing media and interpersonal communication across nations and cultures (space) had a long history, but parallel formal comparisons across time periods, generations and the life cycle were less common. Karl Erik had the unenviable task of making the theoretical case for time comparisons and selecting appropriate papers from those submitted, but he did an admirable job nonetheless. Three years later, Sage published a collection of the papers under the same title, edited by Blumler, McLeod and Rosengren, with Karl Erik as lead author of the summary chapter.
My appreciation of Karl Erik grew even stronger during the semester he spent with us as a visiting faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1990s. Our graduate students, with widely varying research interests and methodological approaches, reported learning much from the discussions in his seminar and enjoying his quiet sense of humour. They also tried out their often premature and sometimes muddled ideas on him, during his office hours. He listened to them carefully, then summarized the ideas in a more systematic way, and then he would point out the implicit model: ‘Once more we see the problem as yet another outcome of a two-by-two design!’
I too felt like I always learned something in conversations with him. I once accompanied him to a faculty-grad student party of the agricultural journalism department that featured a pot-luck dinner with international food and signing, folk and western songs and story-telling. I was afraid he might be bored but he genuinely enjoyed the whole party. When he discovered that after the party some of the guests were going to a club to hear jazz, he was eager to go and we managed to stay until the 1 a.m. closing time. He later claimed to have learned much about American life from the experience. He was indeed a careful listener.
Denis McQuail writes:
I first met Karl Erik Rosengren in about 1970 at a conference held at the Centre for Mass Communication Research in Leicester, drawn together at first by a common interest in the potential for research into the uses and gratifications of mass media. He was then preparing for his major longitudinal study of the part played by television especially in the long-term development of young people. I spent some time with him at Lund in 1973 discussing these issues and learning much. Through this first contact, I developed a long-term relationship with, and great respect for, both the country and its impressive variant of the emerging field of communication research, possibly the leading European example, owing no little part to him.
The main results of his long-term study of television and young people, published as Media Matter (along with Sven Windahl, in 1989), must count as the most well-founded and convincing set of answers to the pressing issues concerning the social effects of media during the ‘television era’. Karl Erik remained faithful to the promise and practice of empirical research methods, theoretical open-mindedness and imaginative analysis. This was at a time when, elsewhere, ideological disputes and the pursuit of new fashionable theories were too often diverting attention from the hard work of finding out what was actually going on.
At a personal level, Karl Erik was a modest and generous man, of endless good humour and a sense of fun, with many interests. He was a most hospitable host in his own home and a good friend to many. Our last spell of active collaboration, as founding co-editors of The European Journal of Communication, was a time of great satisfaction, because of these personal virtues as much as for his diligence and good ideas in the editorial role. It has been a cause of great sadness that we have all been deprived of his company in these last years.