How Shall We Measure Our Progress? On Paradigms, Metaphors, and Meetings in Audience Research

Abstract

This article (which began life as a presentation to the closing CEDAR Conference in Lisbon, 2017) interrogates the state of the “field” of audience research, by looking back to Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigms in science, and the institutional conditions necessary for their operation. It then looks forward to recent work in the sociology of expectations, to consider the role of future predictions. The article concludes that audience research is perhaps not a field or a discipline, although the aspiration to be so is not altogether a bad thing. The article suggests that the best destiny for the field is to be a rogue element within the broader media, communication, and cultural studies domain, demanding—and providing—empirical evidence in the face of normatively charged claims.