McQuail, Denis (1935–)

Denis McQuail studied history and administration at the University of Oxford in the U.K. He received his PhD at Leeds University. While working for the newly founded Granada Television Research Unit at Leeds University, he participated in the early British election studies (1959, 1964) and was a coauthor of the classical books that emerged from these projects, Television and the Political Image (1961, with Joseph Trenaman) and Television in Politics (1968, with Jay G. Blumler). In 1965, he started teaching sociology at the University of Southampton. From 1977 until his retirement in 1997, McQuail held the chair of mass communication at the University of Amsterdam/Netherlands. Over the years, he was visiting professor or fellow at universities all over the world, including the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, New York; and Seijo University, Tokyo.

Together with Jay Blumler, Denis McQuail was one of the early proponents of the uses and gratifications approach, a perspective that they first applied in their 1964 election study. The authors thus initiated the reorientation of European media effects research and contributed to a significant change in paradigms. Likewise, in his early career McQuail brought his sociological background into the study of mass communication, [Page 433]from which followed his book Towards a Sociology of Mass Communications (1969). This and his book Communication in 1975 laid the ground for his well-known Mass Communication Theory, which was first published in 1983. This book became a true best-seller and was finally so much associated with his name that the title was changed to McQuail's Mass Communication Theory. It is presently on the market in its fifth edition and has been translated into several other languages. Linking theory with empirical research on media content and the media audience, McQuail discusses the contribution of the mass media to the public interest in his work on Media Performance.

Since its establishment in 1982, McQuail was a pillar and a driving force of the Euromedia Research Group, a network of European scientists who continuously analyzed the development of the media and of media policy, first only in the West European countries and later in the whole of Europe. This engagement resulted in several publications, the latest being The Media in Europe: The Euromedia Handbook, of which McQuail was one of the editors. When the European Journal of Communication was founded in 1986, Denis McQuail was one of the three founding editors and the only one who is still an active editor of the journal today.