After Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld presented their ground breaking efforts to the world in the 1940s and 1950s, other social scientists and theorists began writing on the subject of functional theory, and thus the evolution of the communication model was underway. Melvin De Fleur, in his 1966 book Theories of Mass Communication, was one of those who furthered the conceptualization of functional theory.
De Fleur states that individual behavior can not be predicted on the basis of psychology alone, and that "sociocultural processes present in a given individual's situation of action ... are important determiners of the directions that such actions will take" (1966, p.134-135). De Fleur makes the distinction that an individual may have predisposed psychological tendencies or feelings toward a particular object or decision at hand, and that there is an interplay between an individual's psychology and messages received from opinion leaders as a member of a small group. Therefore groups, in considering human communication, provide "reality principles," in which groups have shared norms against which they hold up new ideas for comparison and judgment (De Fleur 1966, p.136).
This point plays an important role in the arenas of advertising and marketing, and De Fleur is shrewd to point this out. He notes that, say, advertisers can create "persuasive messages via the mass media [that] provide the appearance of consensus within a given object or goal of persuasion," and therefore audiences can be made to believe that such a message is an accepted one before, in actuality, it is (De Fleur 1966, p.136). In essence, De Fleur is illustrating the concept of peer pressure. Advertisers can create the appearance that everyone else is buying, or thinking, or doing X, Y, and Z, so the individual receiver must do so as well, lest that individual become an outcast of the group. De Fleur calls these individuals that ignore the message as "deviants" and may likely face "social disapproval", with the goal "of the communicator [being] to provide social realities where none currently exist" (1966, p.137-138). This is most easily accomplished when the communicated message deviates only slightly (or not at all) from the "reality principle" of a given group, or if there is no social norm at all for a given behavior or object within the particular group (De Fleur 1966, p.136).
De Fleur takes the sociocultural model of Katz and Lazarsfeld and moves it a few steps farther, taking into account the interplay between individual psychologies and social norms within societal groups. He also illustrates ways in which communicators can use mass media to play on the existence of social groups and transcend social norms for their own benefit, and, potentially, monetary or political gain. De Fleur tends to blur the opinion leader into the all-encompassing umbrella of group norm, which creates as many questions about both his work, and that of Katz and Lazarsfeld, as he attempts to answer. What is the role of the opinion leader in De Fleur's model? Does a group exist from which opinion leaders emerge, or do opinion leaders tend to create clusters of like-minded individuals? Is the presence of opinion leaders implied when he writes of societal norms? Probably so. Clearly, in reality it is extremely difficult to trace the exact path of the flow of information from the message source to the individual. De Fleur notes these shortcomings and warns of oversimplifications, calling for a more precise scientific approach to social research (1966, p.139-140). And thus communications theories continue to evolve.
To see the relationship between functional theory and gratifications studies, click here.
