Study On The Institutionalization Of American Advertising Research

The progress of human society, in a sense, is the result of the constant adjustment and progress of knowledge production mode for human being.In history, the mode of human knowledge production mainly experienced three main stages of development, among which the "self-reflective based" and "trial and fail based" mode of production are the foremost popular ways of knowledge production."Self-reflective" mode usually refers to people producing knowledge just by sobering alone all day without much practical action, while the latter one preferring to put trials into practice first without reflecting much. With the development of natural science and the revival of the modern universities,"discipline" become the basic and foremost mode of knowledge production, and it marks man’s entering into the third stage of knowledge production.The "institutionalization of discipline" of Immanuel Wallenstein’s theory reveals to us a whole picture of the history for human social science development since the18th century to1945. Whereas,"institutionalizing the discipline" become the essential way to develop social science for people. Advertising research in the United States, as one of the most influential advertising researching academic in the world today, profoundly influenced the world of advertising education and researches and it essentially, a product of "Institutionalizing the discipline" in accordance with the Wallenstein theory. Its institutionalization experienced not only one hundred years of wind and rain, passing through the difficult road of "institutionalized education" and "institutionalized research" but also at the same time being fully participated in the game of "knowledge and power"; and finally, it itself build a unique American advertising research paradigm, and thus has constructed the controlling of the discourse power of the world for the American advertising research arena.In China, due to various historical reasons, the American advertising research has long been shadowed for China’s advertising industry knowledge production. Now, reducing and analyzing the institutionalization process of advertising in the United States, to get the insight of its institutionalization process and to reflect upon the success or failure, it would surely promote the advertising institutionalization process in China, and at the mean time, to promote the advertising communication between American and China. We believe, that in a long run, it will improve the academic level for Chinese advertising researching, which will certainly helpful to the construction of its discourse system.