超越“人际影响”：米尔斯的迪凯特研究与传播想像
More than Personal In?uence: C. Wright Mills’s Decatur Study and His Ideas on Communication

摘要 迪凯特研究并非拉扎斯菲尔德偶然的知识生产，而是一项范式下的解谜活动。作为 迪凯特调查早期的研究主管，米尔斯由于不符合拉扎斯菲尔德的范式承诺与知识目标而 被半路解雇。米尔斯与拉扎斯菲尔德这段并不愉快的传播研究“往事”产生了两个意外 结果。首先，源于此次亲身合作，米尔斯在《社会学的想象力》中将拉扎斯菲尔德的传 播研究知识判定为“贫乏的”，并着重从学理层面对这一判断进行了论证。其次，米尔 斯将迪凯特调查的经验材料运用到了《权力精英》等著作中，并形成了与《人际影响》 截然不同的传播想象。从迪凯特调查重新出发，文章认为米尔斯所说的方法论的抑制正 是拉扎斯菲尔德等无法完成概化知识生产的根源；超越《人际影响》，米尔斯为大众传 播研究提供了一条历史-比较的研究路径，大众传播时代的民主建构问题成为其传播想 象的核心。
Decatur Study is basically a puzzle-solving activity under Lazarsfeld’s communication research paradigm. Due to this reason, C. Wright Mills, the research manager of Decatur Study, was fred because he did not satisfy Lazarsfeld’s paradigm promises and knowledge production goals. This unsuccessful cooperation experience has generated two unintended consequences. Basing on this experience, Mills judged Lazarsfeld’s communication research as trivial and offered a very insightful explanation of this conclusion in his well known book The Sociological Imagination; Using the empirical materials of Decatur Study, Mills developed his own ideas on communication in Power Elite which are very different from Personal In?uence. Restarting from the Decatur Study, this paper claims that methodological inhibition is a main reason for the dominant paradigm’s failure of constructing generalized knowledge; Surpassing Personal In?uence, Mills offered a comparative-historical mass communication research approach with the construction of democracy in the mass communication era as its focus