Social Scientific Approaches to Magazine Research

This chapter surveys methodological and theoretical approaches that sociologists, critical scholars, historians, and other social scientists have used to study the magazine form. It provides a discussion on the historical and literary approaches to magazine research. Much research points to the role of magazines as guardians of various social hierarchies of power; political economy theorists viewed magazines as vehicles of power. Most critical research on magazines has explored the gendered status quo. The chapter explores the sociological and cultural approaches to the research. Media sociology now “situates communication and media research within the dynamics of social forces and links them to questions about order, conflict, identity, institutions, stratification, authority, community, and power”. Much research has also focused on magazines’ neoliberal discourses about health and fitness, which emphasize readers’ individual responsibility for their well-being.