Personal Influence nella storia del Bureau

The volume in which the paper is contained proposes a series of reflections on the contributions of Elihu Katz to communication studies, reconstructing the history and highlighting the modernitiy of his thought The paper proposes an historiographical analysis of the famous book Personal Influence and theories contained in it. In the paper it is argued that the approach to the influence process developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (the so-called theory of the limited effects) is part of a broader program of research: the empirical study of the action. This is the main reason why this approach has established itself at the Bureau of applied social research (The research center directed by Merton and Lazarsfeld and the heart of the sociological school of Columbia), to the detriment of other theories about mass media communication.