Disney Offers a Case Study for Sociologists
Assemble 4,000 social scientists in Anaheim to speechify, criticize, theorize and network, and what do you expect? That they would ignore one of consumer society’s most potent forces, whose gated grounds are right across the street?
Does Dumbo have a doctorate?
“Disney’s America and the World” was a featured session Saturday at the American Sociological Assn.’s annual meeting, held this year, aptly enough, next to a theme park.
At the session, two scholars analyzed the impact of the $25-billion-a-year company’s products worldwide, with one expert presenting new research on reactions to Disney products in 18 nations, from Slovenia to South Africa.
The study, called the Global Disney Audiences Project, found that the company’s products had such universal appeal that people all over viewed some characters as home-grown. For instance, “Donald Duck seems Danish to people in Denmark,” said Janet Wasko, a communications studies professor at the University of Oregon (and former Disney employee), who co-wrote the study.
The theme of the four-day conference, which is expected to hold 550 sessions, is “Cities of the Future.” It is keyed to the projection that, within a few years, more than half the world’s population will for the first time live in communities of 5,000 people or more. Sessions touching on that theme include “The Ecology of Inequality” and “The Multicultural Metropolis.”
Douglas Massey, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and president of the 12,000-member organization sponsoring the meeting, said the location was auspicious.
“Anaheim is a model city for the future,” he said in an interview, neglecting to mention that to academics the word “model” is neutral. “Increasingly, as we’ve shifted from an industrial economy like Chicago to a service economy like L.A., entertainment has become one of the most important things a city has to offer.”
The upside of this emerging social order, he said, is that urban centers are more fluid, diverse and tolerant. The downside may be a tendency to rely on retailers and entertainment companies to provide a sense of place, he suggested.
“Places like Disneyland present different facets of public life to a mass public--an imaginary main street in a small town even as small towns increasingly do not exist.”
Phone messages Saturday requesting comment from Disney officials were not returned.
The scholars acknowledged that academics have long been unable to resist jabbing a company with the chutzpah to call its flagship amusement park “the happiest place on Earth.” John Van Maanen, an organizational behavior expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and a former Disneyland employee) said there remains a great deal to understand about a company that he has referred to as “the Sistine Chapel of fakery.”
The study of Disney’s global cultural penetration was conducted by two dozen researchers and was based on questionnaires given to 1,200 college students. They found that 98% had seen a Disney film and 82% had read a book featuring characters owned by the company.
Also, people tended to feel the same about the products, whether they lived in Japan or Greece, with 93% associating them with “fun and fantasy” and 83% “happiness, magic and good over evil,” said Wasko, author of the newly published book “Dazzled by Disney?”
Still, some respondents bucked the trend. “Disney resisters,” as Wasko called them, were most common in France, where Disneyland Paris has been met with harsh criticism. Most significant, she said, many people surveyed embraced Disney products even as they lamented the company’s role in the homogenization of world culture.
That ambivalence was apparent in Van Maanen, author of a critical article seminal in the Disney studies field, 1992’s “The Smile Factory.”
“I’m as disenchanted as you can get with this park,” he said, “but I still go to it.” He has planned his family visit to Disneyland for Tuesday, the conference’s last day.
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Times staff writer Solomon Moore contributed to this story.
