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This paper traces the development of the functionalist position chronologically through its major permutations, from the defining contributions of Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in its anthropological phase through its development in American sociology by Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton to its explicit formulation in communication studies by Charles R. Wright. Although necessarily cursory, this historical review highlights significant philosophical and conceptual differences within the tradition that have been effaced from recent discussions in the communication context, including an initial theoretical coupling of culture and praxis, as located by Durkheim in the collective moral code, as well as an aborted culturalist orientation in the works of Malinowski. A concluding section identifies the distinguishing characteristics of the tradition and points to the emergence of functionalist assumptions in cultural studies and cultural indicators research as the possible harbinger of a new cultural functionalism that synthesizes the strengths of various earlier functionalisms while addressing major weaknesses of the tradition, notably problems of logic (i. e., tautology and an inappropriate appeal to teleological explanations), political conservatism, and a tendency to impose psychological and sociological analyses upon specifically cultural materials. (Contains 83 references.) (Author)

While the notion of "cultural imperialism" has received significant attention in communication studies since the early 1970s, researchers have ignored analyses of message systems and audience cultivation in favor of institutional analysis. Likewise, researchers have concentrated on the technologies, media products and processes of Western exporting countries with little concomitant concern for importing countries. These biases stem from a mechanistic model of social processes along with a non-symbolic, materialist conception of culture, viewed as synonymous with technologies, ideologies, or commodities. Previous critics have also failed to question the radicalism of scholars who would preserve the Third World cultures from Western encroachment. Furthermore, the cultural imperialism paradigm presents some serious problems in terms of data measurement and research design models. In brief, the cultural imperialism model, while yielding extensive and often useful analyses, so far has explicated little on the specifically cultural dimensions of relations between nations or between media and their audiences. An examination of popular music in one Third World country, Jamaica, shows how human creativity, exercised even by politically powerless people, can wreak havoc with facile assumptions held by proponents and opponents of imperialism. The current debate revolves largely around moral questions, and unless significant methodological shifts occur, this debate is unlikely to be settled on an empirical basis. (Sixty references are attached.) (HB)