Manufacturing visions of society and history in textbooks

Interviews with personnel involved in designing secondary-school social-science textbooks, and the findings of previous research in the sociology of work in mass media organizations, reveal three, often complementary, domains of control that influence textbook visual content: (a) industrial - the meaning, relevance, and historical or social significance of an image directed through captioning and accuracy guidelines; (b) commercial - marketing pressures that make aesthetic appeal of great importance to the textbook's production success; and social - interest groups that influence the visual components of the textbook, but because of space limitations the game is zero-sum. This study finds that, in all, the textbook vision of society is homogenized and sanitized to reduce the risk of controversy.