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Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research

Series Editor: Annabelle Sreberny (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)


The Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research series is co-published by Wiley-Blackwell and the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). The series offers definitive, state-of-the-art handbooks that bring a global perspective to their subjects. These volumes are designed to define an intellectual terrain: its historic emergence; its key theoretical paradigms; its transnational evolution; key empirical research and case study exemplars; and possible future directions.

Already published

The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications edited by Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa

The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy edited by Robin Mansell and Marc Raboy

The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale

About the IAMCR

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) (http://iamcr.org) was established in Paris in 1957. It is an accredited NGO attached to UNESCO. It is a truly international association, with a membership representing over 80 countries around the world and conferences held in different regions that address the most pressing issues in media and communication research. Its members promote global inclusiveness and excellence within the best traditions of critical research in the field. The current president of the IAMCR is Annabelle Sreberny.

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Political Economy of Communications: Core Concerns and Issues

What is Critical Political Economy?

Why Political Economy? Why Now?

Political Economy and Other Approaches

Organization of the Handbook

IAMCR/Political Economy Section

Part I Legacies and Debates

1 Political Economies as Moral Economies

Goods and the Good Life

Putting the “Political” into Political Economy

Competing Moral Economies

Commodities: Possessions, and Dispossessions

Public Goods: Reclaiming the Commons

Gifts: In Search of Generosity

Digital Enclosures

Creativity, Convergence, and Exploitation

Digitalizing the Commons

2 The Political Economy of Communication Revisited

The Development of the Political Economy of Culture

The Culture Industries, Cultural Labor, and the Cultural Commodity

The Cultural Commodity and Cultural Demand

From the Political Economy of Culture to the Political Economy of Information

The Political Economy of the Information Society (PEIS)

Telecommunications and the Culture Industries

Information Economics

Technologies of Freedom and the “Third Wave”

The Information/Copyright/Creative Industries as the New Growth Sector

Conclusion

3 Markets in Theory and Markets in Television

Markets and the Liberal Market Model

Defining Markets: Legal Basis

Defining Markets: Economic Relationships and Capable Entities

Defining Markets: Institutional Structures

Measuring Audiences for National Networks: The US Market for Ratings

The Right to Reproduction: The Global Market for Television Formats

Conclusion

4 Theorizing the Cultural Industries

The Origins of “Cultural Industries” Theory

Defining the “Cultural Industries”: Five Propositions

Mutations and Reconsiderations

The “Creative Industries” and the Cultural Industries

Conclusion

5 Communication Economy Paths

Introduction

Muraro’s Memorandum

Debating the Memorandum

Final Words

Part II Modalities of Power

6 The Media Amid Enterprises, the Public, and the State

The Media and Society

Media Enterprises

Media Access and Consumption

The Media and the State

Conclusion

7 Media Ownership, Concentration, and Control

Introduction

The Hutchins Commission Report (1947)

Herbert Schiller: Worldwide US Media Monopoly? (1969–2000)

Murdock and Golding, “For a Political Economy of Mass Communications” (1973)

Ithiel de Sola Pool: Technologies of Freedom (1983)

Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988/2002)

Benjamin Compaine and Douglas Gomery, Who Owns The Media? (2000)

Gillian Doyle, Media Ownership (2002)

Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983–2004)

C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (2007)

International Dimensions and a Provisional Conclusion

8 Maximizing Value

Conceptualizing Synergy

Economic Synergy: At the Level of the Firm and the Industry

Cultural Synergy

Synergy as a Transindustrial Process

Conclusion

9 Economy, Ideology, and Advertising

Economy

Ideology

Advertising

General Interaction

Conclusions

10 Branding and Culture

Introduction

Branding and Value

Marxist Political Economy and Branding

From Political Economy to Cultural Economy

Branding and National Cultures

Branding and Global Culture

11 Liberal Fictions

Introduction

Privatization of Media

The Public–Private Dichotomy: A Western Fantasy?

Media–Government Symbiosis in the United States

Case Study: The Rights of the Corporate Person

Conclusions

12 The Militarization of US Communications

Introduction

From Continental Conquest to Global Power

System Stress and Elite Response

Co-ordination of Network Infrastructure

Networks: Society as Target

Contracting for Net-Centric War

Strategic International Communications

Empire as American Ideology

13 Journalism Regulation

Regulation for What?

Moving Regulation Forward

Journalism Regulation and the Pervasive State

The Blurred Domain of Self-Regulation

Looking for an (Im)possible Balance

Part III Conditions of Creativity

14 The Death of Hollywood

What’s Changing About Hollywood?

What’s Not Changing: Hollywood and Continuity

The Future?

15 The Political Economy of the Recorded Music Industry

Introduction

The Study of the Recorded Music Industry

The History of the Recorded Music Industry

Conclusion

16 The Political Economy of Labor

The Labor Blind Spot

Organizational Communication and Labor

The Laboring of Culture

Labor Enters the Political Economy of Communication

The History of Communication from a Political Economy Perspective

Labor Union Convergence

Social Movement Worker Organizations

Toward a Global Labor Movement: Will Communication Workers of the World Unite?

17 Toward a Political Economy of Labor in the Media Industries

Thinking About Work and Organizations

Studies of Cultural Production

Labor in the Political Economy of Culture

Cultural Studies Approaches to Creative Cultural Labor

Concluding Comments: Toward an Adequate Normative Conception of Creative Labor

Part IV Dynamics of Consumption

18 From the “Work of Consumption” to the “Work of Prosumers”

What Does “Consumer” Mean?

The Different Levels of the “Work of Consumption”

The Productivity of the “Work of Consumption”

The Problems of Access

The Fallacy of Technological Determinism

From “Consumer” to “Prosumer”?

19 The Political Economy of Audiences

Introduction

Revisiting the Debates: Schisms, Collaboration, Interconnectedness

Audiences from a Political Economy Perspective

Conclusion

20 The Political Economy of Personal Information.

Introduction

Theories of Value

Unpaid Labor

The Labor of Consumption

The Valuation and Pricing of Intangibles

The Valuation of Personal Information

Estimating the Value of PI at its Origin

Negative Value, or Consumer Sensitivity

Willingness to Pay as a Source of Valuation

The Capture of PI

Markets in Personal Information

Tomorrow’s Market

21 The Political Economy of Political Ignorance

Introduction

Civic Knowledge and Ignorance

Political Ignorance in the EU

Intensified Production Modes of Political Ignorance

The Political Economy of Active Knowledge Seeking

Concluding Remarks

Part V Emerging Issues and Directions

22 Media and Communication Studies Going Global

Introduction

Media and the Development of Underdevelopment

Postmodern Poverty

Dewesternizing as Dedisciplining

Difference and Change in Media Modernities

Conclusion

23 New International Debates on Culture, Information, and Communication

The UNESCO Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions

The New Sociopolitical Actors’ Philosophy of Life and Action

24 Global Capitalism, Temporality, and the Political Economy of Communication

Time, Space, and Globalization

Global Capitalism, ICTs, and Temporal Acceleration

Global Mediations of Real Time: Reification and Critique

Depicting Global Capitalism: Coevality and Critique

25 Global Media Capital and Local Media Policy

The Logic of Accumulation

Trajectories of Creative Migration

Contours of Sociocultural Variation

Policy Implications

26 The Challenge of China

The West, the Rest, and the Centrality of the Chinese State

Class, Nation, and Empire: Chinese and Global Dimensions

History, Culture, and Chinese “Soft Power”: Between a New “Renaissance” and a Second “Cultural Revolution”?

After Socialist Defeatism, What? Or, Begin from the Beginning?

Name Index

Subject Index

Wiley End User License Agreement

Notes on Contributors


Sarah Baker is lecturer in cultural sociology at Griffith University, Australia. She has previously held research fellowships at The Open University and University of Leeds, UK, and the University of South Australia. She is the author of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (with David Hesmondhalgh, 2010).


Martín Becerra is Professor at the Social Sciences Department, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (UNQ, Argentina). He received his PhD from the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, where he studied communication policies. He is Associate Researcher at the CONICET (Argentina), where he teaches courses in Political Economy of Communications and Media History. Dr Becerra also teaches postgraduate courses at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentine) and the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile). He has written books and articles on media policy.


Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Department of Communication Science, Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies. His research on film and screen culture as sites of public controversy has been published in many journals, readers, and collections. He is preparing a book on film censorship in Europe and with Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers, he is currently editing two books (The New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, and Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives of Film Cultures and Cinema-going, forthcoming).


Andrew Calabrese is Professor of Media Studies and Associate Dean, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado. His research and publishing focuses on media and citizenship, and the public policies that govern the media industries. He edits the Rowman & Littlefield and Lexington book series, “Critical Media Studies,” and the book series “Global Media Studies” (with Paula Chakravartty) for Paradigm Publishers.


Giovanni Cesareo is a member of the reference commission of the Faculty of Design, Milan Polytechnic. He is a member of Euricom, East-West European Institute of Research, the World Future Society, and the cultural committee of the Courmayeur Noir in Festival. He has acted as a consultant to the Italian Authority of Guarantee in Communication. He published La contraddizione femminile in 1979. He was editor of Ikon, a monthly review on communication processes and media, from 1978 to 1982; editor of Sapere, a science monthly review, from 1976 to 1982; and founded and edited Se, Scienza Esperienza, another science monthly, from 1982 to 1988. He was a member of the academic committee of the School of Journalism in Milan from 1985 to 1990. He also writes for the public radio and television networks.


Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Media, and Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, The American Television Industry (with Jane Shattuc), and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders (with Hemant Shah). He is coeditor (with Paul McDonald) of the “International Screen Industries” book series for the British Film Institute and coeditor (with Paul S. N. Lee) of the Chinese Journal of Communication.


John D. H. Downing is an emeritus faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he founded the Global Media Research Center in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts. His research interests are international communication, alternative media and social movements, and racism, ethnicity, and media. In addition to numerous publications in these areas, he is one of the Vice-Presidents of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.


Jan Ekecrantz was Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University from the mid-1970s until his death in July 2007. His work dealt with such diverse areas as journalism’s construction of reality and the media situation in contemporary China. In later years, his primary interest was in processes of globalization.


Roque Faraone is a professor of Communication Theory at the University of the Republic of Uruguay and a founding member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research in 1957. He is also a Uruguayan lawyer, who, before going into exile in 1974, wrote the first book on the Uruguayan media. He spent 15 years in Paris as a correspondent for Agency France Press and consultant to UNESCO. He has numerous publications on the media and politics in Latin America.


Joaquim Fidalgo is Assistant Professor at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, working in the Social Sciences Department/Social Sciences Institute. He is also a senior researcher at the Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, a research center belonging to the Institute of Social Sciences of the same university. He has published several books, book chapters, and articles in scientific journals, mainly regarding the press and journalism (journalists’ professional identity, journalists’ ethics, media accountability systems and regulation). He is an active member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, being presently the Deputy Head of its Journalism Research and Education section. He is also a member of the European Communication Research and Education Association, as well as a founding member of the Portuguese Communication Sciences Association.


Oscar H. Gandy, Jr is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously the Herbert I. Schiller Term Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. His research and writing has emphasized privacy, surveillance, race, and discrimination as aspects of the political economy of communication and information. His forthcoming book, Coming to Terms with Chance, brings those elements together in a critical assessment of the ways in which statistical analysis and rational discrimination contribute to cumulative disadvantage. His previous works include The Panoptic Sort, Communication and Race, Beyond Agenda Setting, and more than 100 articles and chapters. He was a founding member of the Union for Democratic Communications, Board Chairman of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and is currently working within the local movement for sustainability in Tucson, Arizona.


Nicholas Garnham worked as a TV filmmaker from 1962 to 1972, and then from 1972 to 2002 was Head of Communications Studies and Professor of Media Studies at the University of Westminster, UK, where he also directed the Centre for Communication and Information Studies. He was a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society. Garnham is now Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at the University of Westminster. He is the author of Samuel Fuller, The Structures of Television, Capitalism and Communication, and Emancipation, the Media and Modernity.


David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media and Music Industries at the University of Leeds, UK, where he is Head of the Institute of Communications Studies and Director of the Media Industries Research Centre. He is the author of The Cultural Industries (2nd edn, 2007) and Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (with Sarah Baker, 2010). He has also edited a number of books including The Media and Social Theory (with Jason Toynbee, 2008), Media Production (2005) and Western Music and its Others: Difference, Appropriation and Representation in Music (with Georgina Born, 2000).


Wayne Hope is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His areas of research include time and globalization, New Zealand political economy and media history, public sphere analysis and sports–media relationships. He is at present writing a series of linked essays on time, temporality, and global capitalism. The most recent of these publications, for The International Journal of Communication, is entitled “Time, Communication and Financial Collapse” (2010). Within New Zealand, Associate Professor Hope is a regular media commentator who has written and spoken against virulent local manifestations of neoliberalism.


Sophia Kaitatzi-Whitlock is Professor in Politics and Communication in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include the interfaces between political communication, the political economy of media organizations and of communicative practices, and public policy making in this field. In 2005 she published Europe’s Political Communication Deficit, focusing on the EU’s democracy deficit and its relation to EU-wide political communication deficits. She is the author of the chapter “The Political Economy of the Media at the Root of Europe’s Democracy Deficit” (2008), in the edited volume Media, Democracy and European Culture. Her latest book Forms and Means for Political Communication, was published in 2010 (in Greek), by University Studio Press, Thessaloniki.


Guillermo Mastrini is a professor at the Communication School, National University of Quilmes, where he is also Director of the Master in Cultural Industries. He was president of the Argentine Federation of Social Communication Schools. His publications include: Globalización y monopolios en la comunicación en América Latina (Globalization and monopolies in Latin America’s media, 1999, with César Bolaño), Mucho ruido, pocas leyes. Economía y políticas de comunicación en la Argentina (Much ado about laws: economy and politics of communication in Argentina, 2005), Periodistas y Magnates, (Journalists and tycoons, 2006, with Martín Becerra), Los duenos de la palabra (The owners of speech, 2009, with Martín Becerra).


Armand Mattelart is Professor Emeritus of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. His areas of studies include communication theories and history, media studies and international communication. His books include Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, The Invention of Communication, Networking the World 1794-2000, and, with Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions. His most recent book is The Globalization of Surveillance (2010).


Eileen R. Meehan is a professor in the Department of Radio-Television at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is the author of Why TV is Not Our Fault, and coeditor of Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in Media Studies (with Ellen Riordan), and Dazzled by Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project (with Janet Wasko and Mark Phillips). Her research examines the structures of media corporations and markets and their influence over commercial expression.


Philippe Meers is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Visual Culture Research Group, at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His publications on popular media culture and film audiences have appeared in Media, Culture and Society, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Bulletin, and Iluminace. He has edited two Dutch language readers with Daniel Biltereyst (Film/TV/Genre, 2004, De Verlichte Stad (The Enlightened City, 2007) and contributed to several books, including Big Brother International (2004), Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Relations (2004), The Lord of the Rings: Popular Cinema in Global Culture (2007), and Watching The Lord of the Rings (2007). With Richard Maltby and Daniel Biltereyst, he is currently editing two books (The New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, 2010, and Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives of Film Cultures and Cinema-going, forthcoming).


Bernard Miège is Emeritus Professor of Communication and Information Science at Stendhal University in Grenoble, where he served as the President from 1989 to 1994. He has a PhD in economics (Paris) and another in humanities (Bordeaux). Miège is the author of numerous publications concerning the cultural industries, information and communication technologies and organizations, and theories of communication.


Colleen Mihal is a doctoral candidate in media studies at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado. She currently is completing her PhD dissertation on the exceptions to the rule of law governing communication by social activists, introduced during the presidential administration of George W. Bush.


Vincent Mosco is Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Professor Mosco received his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University in 1975. He is the author of numerous books in communication, technology, and society. His most recent books include The Political Economy of Communication (2nd edn 2009), The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite (with Catherine McKercher, 2008), Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (with Catherine McKercher, 2007), and The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (2004). The Digital Sublime won the 2005 Olson Award for outstanding book in the field of rhetoric and cultural studies.


Graham Murdock, Reader in the Sociology of Culture at Loughborough University (UK), has written widely on the social organization of culture and communications and has a particular interest in the transformation of the cultural commons and debates around cultural citizenship. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Free University of Brussels, and the Universities of California at San Diego, Bergen, Stockholm, and Helsinki. His work has been translated into 19 languages. His recent books include, as coauthor, The GM Debate: Risk, Politics and Public Engagement (2007), and as coeditor Digital Dynamics (2010) and The Idea of the Public Sphere (2010).


Giuseppe Richeri is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Lugano (Switzerland) and PhD candidates supervisor at the Communication University of China (Beijing). His recent books are available in translation in China, Argentina, and the UK.


Dan Schiller received his PhD in Communications in 1978 from the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of information and communication systems, he has been a member of the faculty at Temple University, UCLA, UCSD, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his main appointment is in the Graduate School of Library & Information Science. His books include: Objectivity and the News (1981), Telematics and Government (1982), Theorizing Communication (1996), Digital Capitalism (1999), and How To Think About Information (2006). He has authored several prominent articles explicating aspects of the Internet bubble and its aftermath for Le Monde diplomatique, and he continues to lecture internationally. He is writing an archivally grounded study, The Hidden History of U.S. Telecommunications, and he continues to research the history and theory of information commodification.


John Sinclair is currently researching the role of advertising in the globalization of media in Australia, as an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. His published work over the last 25 years covers various aspects of the globalization of the media and communication industries, with a special emphasis on television and advertising in the Latin American and Asian regions. His books include Latin American Television: A Global View and the edited work, Contemporary World Television.


André Sirois (aka DJ Food Stamp) is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon and a professional DJ. His current research looks at the relationships between hip hop DJ culture and the recording and DJ technology industries, as well as the antagonisms brought about by intellectual property law. He also likes to collect records and vintage DJ technology.


Helena Sousa is Associate Professor of the Communication Sciences Department, University of Minho, Portugal. She received her PhD in Communications Policy from the City University, London (1996). Presently a member of the Communication and Society Research Centre Scientific Council, Sousa is also Vice-Chair of the Political Economy Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, and member of the EuroMedia Research Group. She is the editor of the European Journal of Communication. She has published in scientific journals including Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, International Communication Gazette, European Journal of Communication, Telecommunications Policy, and Intercom. She is currently leading two research projects: one on media policy and regulation in Portugal and another on the media structures and policies in Portuguese-speaking countries.


Paul J. Torre is an assistant professor in media industries at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research explores entertainment industry structures and practices, media regulations and policies, the interplay between US and global media markets, and how new technologies are shaping the media business models of the future. His previous entertainment industry experience includes positions in film and television production management and global media distribution. He has written about intersections between media policy and global television distribution for Television and New Media and has authored chapters on global television formats and the global battle over launching satellite television in Germany.


Nathan Vaughan worked on issues around political economy in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University, with particular reference to the expansion of synergies in the Hollywood film industry. His contribution to this volume derives from his doctoral work on this topic.


Janet Wasko is the Knight Chair for Communication Research at the University of Oregon. She is author, editor, or coeditor of 18 books and specializes in the study of the political economy of the media, especially the US media industry.


Yuezhi Zhao is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. Her work concerns both domestic Chinese communication politics and the role of media and information technologies in the global transformations linking to China’s real and imagined rise as a major world political economic power. Her recent publications include Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict (2008) and Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (with Paula Chakravartty, 2008).


Series Editor’s Preface

Welcome to the Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research series. This grew out of the idea that the field needed a series of state-of the-art reference works that was truly international. The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), with a membership from over 80 countries, is uniquely positioned to offer a series that covers the central concerns of media and communications theory in a global arena.

Each of these substantial books contains newly written essays commissioned from a range of international authors, showcasing the best critical scholarship in the field. Each is pedagogical in the best sense, accessible to students and clear in its approach and presentation. Theoretical chapters map the terrain of an area both historically and conceptually, providing incisive overviews of arguments in the field. The examples of empirical work are drawn from many different countries and regions, so that each volume offers rich material for comparative analysis.

These handbooks are international in scope, authorship, and mindset. They explore a range of approaches and issues across different political and cultural regions, reflecting the global reach of the IAMCR. The aim is to offer scholarship that moves away from simply reproducing Westcentric models and assumptions. The series formulates new models and asks questions that bring communication scholarship into a more comprehensive global conversation.

The IAMCR (http://iamcr.org) was established in Paris in 1957. It is an accredited nongovernmental organization attached to UNESCO. It is a truly international association, with a membership around the world and conferences held in different regions that address the most pressing issues in media and communication research. Its members promote global inclusiveness and excellence within the best traditions of critical research in the field.

This series supports those goals.

Annabelle Sreberny
President of IAMCR and Series Editor
London, December 2010

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their hard work and patience.

Also, thanks to Elizabeth Swayze at Wiley-Blackwell and Annabelle Sreberny at the IAMCR, for their work in establishing the Blackwell/IAMCR series, Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research.

Thanks also to Jenny Roberts for her fine copyediting, as well as to University of Oregon doctoral students, Jacob Dittmer and Jennifer Elliott, for their editorial assistance.