From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: October 31, 2020 at 9:31:33 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-TGS]:  Frizzell on Fernandez, 'Zoar: The Story of an Intentional Community'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Kathleen M. Fernandez.  Zoar: The Story of an Intentional Community.  
Kent  Kent State University Press, 2019.  313 pp.  $29.95 (cloth),
ISBN 978-1-63101-156-6.

Reviewed by Robert W. Frizzell (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-TGS (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Alison C. Efford

In 1817, in the southwest German kingdom of Württemberg, a group of
some 150 radical pietist adults plus accompanying children from some
36 villages decided to emigrate to the United States. They had been
persecuted for years for refusing to conform to the requirements of
the state Lutheran Church. Some had endured prison. Soldiers had been
quartered in their homes. Property had been confiscated. Receiving
permission to emigrate, they were aided financially by Quakers in
both England and America. On board ship and even more so in
Philadelphia, they came under the leadership both spiritually and
otherwise of a shoemaker named Joseph Bäumler who used the surname
Bimeler in America. The group was offered a tract of more than 5,500
acres in northeastern Ohio, which Bimeler purchased in his name. They
named the spot Zoar.

Kathleen M. Fernandez's book narrates the history of the utopian
socialist community that survived until the end of the nineteenth
century. New immigrants from Germany were admitted to membership
until about 1850, but membership peaked just before the cholera
outbreak of 1834. Originally each family had its own tract of land,
but in April, 1819, after a hard winter, and having to support a
number of older women, the group decided to pool its property and
work under the direction of three elected leaders, or directors. Each
person, male and female, was assigned a permanent task or work for
the day. Buildings were built, land was cleared and cultivated, craft
or industrial work was done. Each person was given food, clothing,
and shelter. Much work was done for outsiders for money including the
milling of grain. Departing members sometimes sued for what they felt
they had contributed, but all such suits were rejected by the courts.

When the Ohio and Erie Canal was planned to come by Zoar, the
community contracted with the state of Ohio to dig by hand several
miles of canal along their property, by which they earned the money
to retire their mortgage on the land. The canal allowed them to ship
pig iron from their foundry as well as agricultural produce to
Cleveland, from whence it could be shipped to New York City. Partly
as an economic measure, the community practiced celibacy from 1822 to
1829. The community owned about one hundred horses, one hundred dairy
cows, and even pigs, although they did not eat pork. Pork was served
to visitors of the Zoar Hotel, popular with canal travelers. Much of
the farm work was done by women while the men did more artisanal and
industrial work. As the community became more prosperous, it hired
outside agricultural laborers.

Bimeler read a sermon each Sunday at the Zoar Meeting House which
kept alive the religious belief shared by community members. After he
died in 1853, others read his old sermons to the faithful, but
gradually the common beliefs that held the community together
disappeared. Although the Separatists, as they called themselves,
taught pacifism, when the Civil War came, some two dozen of their
young men--some full members of the community and some only
employees--joined the Union Army. One of the Zoar men, who all served
in the 11th Corps, wrote home about dropping his pack and running at
the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fernandez fails to note the
historical controversy about the supposed flight of the mostly German
11th Corps at Chancellorsville and the disdain for Germans within the
Union Army thus engendered.  

Although the community had money to lend to Tuscarawas County and to
buy exemptions for drafted men who chose not to serve, over the
course of the late nineteenth century, it lost money in bad
investments until it could not afford to keep its industrial
enterprises technologically current. A turn toward tourism brought
more strangers to Zoar, whose cash and tips to young people weakened
members' desire to maintain their property in common. At last, in
March 1898, a decision was made to divide the community's assets,
including over seven thousand acres of farmland, among its members.
Many stayed on for years farming their portion of land or running the
craft shops.

The author, although not a fully trained professional historian and
unable to read German, began working at the Zoar historical site in
1975 and served as site manager of the Zoar Village State Memorial
from 1989 through 2004. Her book tries to answer the kinds of
questions visitors asked. The reviewer suspects that the author has
done about as good a job as could be done with the available
English-language materials. Although she pays considerable attention
to Zoar's relations with George Rapp's Harmony Society, and other
utopian communities, the reviewer would have liked to read more about
other radical pietists and others in Württemberg and their attempts
to emigrate. Still, this is a book one is proud to recommend to any
interested reader.

Citation: Robert W. Frizzell. Review of Fernandez, Kathleen M.,
_Zoar: The Story of an Intentional Community_. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55431

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: October 31, 2020 at 11:16:59 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [Jhistory]: Oromaner on Hanitzsch and Hanusch and Ramaprasad and De Beer, 'Worlds of Journalism: Journalistic Cultures around the Globe'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Thomas Hanitzsch, Folker Hanusch, Jyotika Ramaprasad, A. S. De Beer,
eds.  Worlds of Journalism: Journalistic Cultures around the Globe.  
New York, 2019.  448 pp.  $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-54663-8.

Reviewed by Mark Oromaner (Independent Scholar)
Published on Jhistory (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe

_Worlds of Journalism: Journalistic Cultures around the Globe_ is an
exemplar of large-scale, long-term, comparative survey research. More
specifically, the book's editors and contributors successfully detail
"how journalists in countries around the globe experience their
profession in different ways, even as they retain a shared commitment
to some basic, common, professional norms and practices" (p. 1). It
therefore should be required reading for all scholars, practitioners,
and graduate students of journalism. Readers will gain a better
understanding of the diversity among journalists throughout the
world, and will find enough data to explore their own hypotheses.

Any study of journalists must first define who qualifies as a
journalist. Is the title limited to hard-news reporters? Are bloggers
journalists? Are producers at media corporations and TV programs
journalists? The editors take an operational approach and state that
"journalists are individuals who contribute journalistic content to
outlets as either employees or freelancers and who earn at least half
their income from their work for news organizations" (pp. 9-10). In
terms of the use of the nation-state as the case unit, they argue
that "the forces of globalization notwithstanding, journalistic
culture is still articulated and enacted within national spaces" (pp.
10-11). This is probably truer today than it was a few years ago when
the survey was conducted and the forces of globalization were
stronger.

Data collection and a description of the journalists who responded to
the survey are presented in chapters 3 and 4. Although journalists
were identified by field workers covering seven worldwide regions,
the sampling prioritized regions that had been neglected in prior
research--that is, the global South--in an attempt to balance the
overrepresentation of European and North American nations. However,
in general, the imbalance remained. Chapter 2 is highly recommended
for readers who wish to understand the immense challenges and
limitations of conducting cross-cultural studies. For example, think
of the problem of ensuring that the questions have the same meaning
in different cultures, or the posing of political or religious
questions in a number of cultures. The survey instrument was
administered through one or more of the following methods:
face-to-face, phone, e-mail, online. In over half of the nations a
response rate of 50 percent was achieved, while in approximately
one-fifth of the nations the response rate was lower than 30 percent
(table 3.1, pp. 55-57).

There is no room here to analyze the regional or national variations
among journalists. However, the following statistics describe the
sample: 57 percent male; mean age of 38; mean years of experience,
13; college degree, 56 percent; graduate degree, 29 percent; 61
percent specialized in journalism/communications at college; 62
percent identified as generalists and 23 percent as hard-news beat
journalists; 47 percent were members of a professional association;
57 percent were rank and file; 80 percent worked full-time; and 50
percent worked in print, 23 percent in television, 17 percent in
radio, and 16 percent online (table 4.1, pp. 73-74). Finally,
although just under half of the journalists were union members, "it
appears that union membership is declining around the world" (p. 74).
I would suggest that this phenomenon is not unique to journalism and
is related to technological changes and to the influence of
neoliberal politics such as deregulation.

A comprehensive presentation of a large-scale (more than 27,500
journalists), multinational (67 countries), collaborative project
such of this requires more than a traditional book structure. The
editors prefer the term "edited research monograph." Although this
monograph is composed of 434 pages, the text comprises only 307
pages. There are almost 50 pages of additional tables. The text can
be thought of as comprising two sections: the first (chapters 1-3)
provides the conceptual roadmap and methodological framework for the
data, and the second (chapters 4-11) provides the results and
interpretations. Given the wealth of data and the nuanced discussion
of methodology and theory, it would be valuable for interested
readers who are not research-oriented if a less technical version of
this monograph were available.

The word "worlds" in the title is meant to challenge the assumption
of a universal understanding of how journalism is practiced. The
cultures of journalism must be understood within the context of the
nation-state. For too long Western scholars, especially Americans,
have taken an ethnocentric position and assumed that journalism as
practiced in the West is the norm and the standard by which
journalism as practiced in other societies is deemed defective or
incomplete in some ways. Related to this is the fact that
English-language scholarship, particularly American, occupies a
commanding position in communications and media research, and in
associated institutions. "Consequently," the editors write,
"journalistic cultures in some, mostly developing and transitional,
countries are sometimes portrayed as needing to 'catch up' with the
norms and practices celebrated by the West" (p. 6). In addition, the
political and economic conditions in the United States and the
cultural history and mythology of American journalism "make the
American media system very different, if not exceptional, when
compared with media systems in other Western nations" (pp. 6-7). The
book makes clear that one form of journalism is not better than
another; they are merely different from one another.

Each journalistic culture contains flexible resources that
journalists use as they make their work meaningful to themselves and
to external stakeholders. An example would be the conception of their
role as neutral disseminator, watchdog, or change agent. It is this
ongoing process of fashioning a self-identity that makes for the
existence of "worlds of journalism." These cultures may exist as
subcultures, organizational cultures, or, as in this study, national
cultures (see p. 34). On their understanding of the nature of
journalistic cultures, the authors of chapter 2 identified five
dimensions through which each culture is articulated and enacted. Two
of these dimensions are perceived influences and editorial autonomy
(extrinsic), and the remaining three are roles, ethics, and trust
(intrinsic) (fig. 2.1, pp. 36-39). Relevant data concerning these
dimensions form the core of the analysis and are presented in
chapters 5-9. Ultimately, the journalistic cultures function within
the broader political, socioeconomic, and value systems of the
societies in which they exist.  

The first extrinsic dimension, perceived influences, refers to
subjective perceptions about external forces that shape the news
production process. Five major areas of influence were identified:
economic, political, organizational, procedural, and personal
networks (chapter 5). While perceived influences differed across
cultures, procedural and organizational influences are seen as the
most significant. However, the editors are cautious about any
suggestion that the economic and political forces are not
significant. For instance, these may be mediated through management
and transformed into organizational and procedural influences. The
second extrinsic dimension, perceived editorial autonomy, needs
little discussion here (see chapter 6). Journalists throughout the
world express support "for editorial autonomy as a protection against
state and other forms of outside intrusion or interference in the
editorial news-making process" (p. 133). The major exceptions come
from journalists in a small number of closed, authoritarian political
systems, for example, China, Qatar, Tanzania. The two Koreas are
interesting cases. North Korea is not represented in the survey, and
South Korea is the fifth-lowest in terms of perceived autonomy. I
wonder if, in a current survey, South Korea would move up in this
ranking. Also. what impact have populists and authoritarian leaders
in the United States and Europe had on perceptions about autonomy in
those countries? It is good to read that the next wave of the study
is in the planning stages.

The first intrinsic dimension, roles, is concerned with the ways in
which journalists think about their societal roles. Although the
monitorial role, reporting things as they are, is the most highly
regarded by journalists worldwide, "even when confronted with similar
challenges, journalists might think about their roles in ways that
are situated within local, historical contexts" (p. 162). While the
monitorial role has strong support in Western societies, the
collaborative role, to help authorities bring about harmony and
stability, is the least likely to be supported. This role is most
likely to be valued in less developed and changing non-Western
societies (chapter 7). The second intrinsic dimension, ethics, refers
to a situation in which the actions could have potential harmful
effects, for example, the public's right to know versus privacy,
payment for confidential information, the public's right to know
versus national security (chapter 8). Absolutism, adherence to
ethical codes at all times, receives the greatest support, and
subjectivism, the setting aside of ethics if extraordinary
circumstances require it, the least support. In terms of cultural
differences, in general, the United States, western Europe, and
Australia showed the greatest support for absolutism, and countries
of the Middle East and North Africa demonstrated the greatest support
for subjectivism. The final intrinsic dimension is trust and concerns
the expectations that institutions such as the government, the
legislature, and the judiciary will meet expectations held by
journalists (chapter 9). The erosion of trust in the US is a familiar
topic; however, "the United States is a notable exception to the
pattern of high levels of trust among developed nations" (p. 241). In
terms of institutional trust, on a global basis more confidence is
given to the judiciary, military, and police than to parliaments,
governments, political parties, and politicians.  

The authors of the penultimate chapter are concerned with the
perceived impact of digitalization and the lack of a profitable
business model on the work situation of journalists. These include
cutbacks in editorial resources, increases in workloads, and greater
emphasis on profit. This has often led to a "crisis in journalism"
framework. While the perceived crisis is particularly prominent in
the West and developed countries, at present, it is less prominent in
other parts of the world. Another finding that reinforces the
importance of "worlds" rather than "world" of journalism is that
although globally the greatest perceived changes of influence on
journalism were social media and user-generated content such as blogs
(table 10.1, p. 265), "journalists in many African countries and in
South Asia ... did not indicate as large an increase in the influence
of these technologies as their Western counterparts" (p. 268). In the
final chapter, "Modeling Journalistic Cultures," Folker Hanusch and
Thomas Hanitzsch review broad similarities and differences found
among journalistic cultures and propose four models of such cultures:
monitorial, advocative, development, and collaborative (table 11.1,
p. 296). These are ideal types; "in reality, a country may fit a
given model more or less perfectly" (p. 304). Still, these and other
typologies will aid in the systematic mapping of comparative data
about journalistic cultures.  

_Worlds of Journalism_ presents a sophisticated report on
journalistic cultures. The contributors have done an excellent job of
analyzing a massive amount of survey data and have stayed quite close
to the data in these analyses. Whether they were involved with data
collection, presentation, or interpretation, they always presented
limitations of their work, and frequently presented ideas for future
work. My only regret is that the authors have not written a less
data-packed and less technical book for undergraduate students and
for nontechnical readers interested in learning about the diverse
"worlds of journalism."  

Citation: Mark Oromaner. Review of Hanitzsch, Thomas; Hanusch,
Folker; Ramaprasad, Jyotika; De Beer, A. S., eds., _Worlds of
Journalism: Journalistic Cultures around the Globe_. Jhistory, H-Net
Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55340

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.