ABSTRACT
One theme that runs through sociological studies of social control in a stratified community or in a hierarchical institution is that communications directed from the top of an organization downwards will be most effective when they are funneled through the informal leaders of the informal groups which emerge on every level of the structure. The new field of research which has developed from the vigorous programs in international communications allows us, among many other things, to return from our preoccupation with modern society to the kind of folk community so often described in the classical sociological writings and in the work of anthropologists. In this chapter, the authors point to two ingredients of interpersonal relations which help to explain what there is about an individual’s relatedness-to-others that might have bearing on the effectiveness of mass media influence-attempts. The first ingredient singled out was group norms. The second ingredient singled out was person-to-person transmission.
