British cultural studies and the return of the ‘critical’ In American mass communication research

Communication and media studies in the United States throughout the 1980s have come under the influence of a body of British literature identified with the intellectual traditions of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, notably under the leadership of Stuart Hall. Indeed, the writings of the British cultural studies group constitute a significant contribution to the field of mass communication research, and they begin to represent the most decisive theoretical ‘break’ that has captured the attention of scholarly journals since the domination of traditional sociology in the field of communication and media studies in the United States a generation ago.