Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Structural Pluralism And The Community Context: How And When Does The Environment Matter?, Leo Wayne Jeffres, Edward Horowitz, Cheryl Campanella Bracken, Guowei Jian, Kimberly Neuendorf, Sukki Yoon

Communication Faculty Publications

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity …