What is Political Economy?
• Definitions by prime theorists• Origins in economic thought• How has it been taken up in
communication studies? • Major theoreticians• Tensions
Robert McChesney
• Relationship between media and communication systems and the broader social structures of society
• How do media systems reinforce, challenge, or influence existing class and social relations?
McChesney:
• How does media ownership, support mechanisms, and government policies influence media behavior and content?
• What are the structural factors and labour processes in the production, distribution, and consumption of communication?
McChesney:• Pessimistic view of sustainability of
p-e in American universities because of increasing corporatization
• But, passionate about p-e of communication as being interdisciplinary, taking risks…
• Advocate for media reform – public advocacy is central to intellectual life
Vincent Mosco • PE examines the production,
distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication and information resources
• History• Social Totality• Moral Philosophy• Praxis
History• How to understand the global political
economy• How has social change happened?• What have been previous struggles and
how are they the same or different than current struggles?
• e.g., is globalization new?• When looking at ‘new’ technologies, can
the past illuminate the present (radio: Internet)…
Social Totality
• Holistic analysis• Relationship among commodities,
institutions, social relations, and hegemony
• What are the connections between the economic and the political?, the economic and the social?
Commodity form
• Use of wage labour to produce goods that are sold in the marketplace
• Media forms: television genres, databases, pay-per-view forms, social media (third-party marketing)
• Commodification of information• Corporatization of public space
Examines many institutions
• Those that support, sustain, subvert public and private activities
• Tensions between public vs. private• Globalization & trade relationships
which can exacerbate nation-state, capital, labour relationships
• Closely interpenetrated regimes of power and control in media systems
Social Relations
• How do people engage with the media?
• Issues of race, class, gender, generational differences
• Have’s and have-not’s, digital divides…
Unpacks/considers That H Word – Hegemony
• Process of constituting the ‘common-sense’
• Origins from Gramsci – how to understand capitalist society
• Used in analysis of social control• Beyond ideology – appears natural
Some examples from everyday life…
• We take for granted that…• Voting = democratic process• Capitalistic marketplace = productive &
fair society• Objectivity is the cornerstone of
journalism• (Now, let’s challenge these dominant
hegemonies!)
Moral Philosophical Outlooks
• Abiding concern with social values• What are appropriate social
benefits?• An ethics of information in
society…• E.g., who are the winners and who
are the losers?
Praxis
• In essence, practice & action• Concerned with social justice• Fighting for the public interest• Public intellectual stance• Ex: McChesney’s public advocacy
for media reform
Vincent Mosco
• “…the study of control and survival in social life”
• Argues for a rethinking of p-e of communications with entry points of commodification, spatialization, and structuration
Commodification
• How capitalism accumulates capital and realizes value through the transformation of use values into exchange values
• In short, the process of transforming use values into exchange values
How does this relate to communication?
• “Communication processes & technologies contribute to the general process of commodification in the economy as a whole”
• Ex: just-in-time manufacturing, quick-response systems, e-commerce, information entrepreneurialism
And, (this is from Mosco, 1996, 142)• “Commodification processes at work
in the society as a whole penetrate communication processes and institutions, so that improvements and contradictions in the societal commodification process influence communication as a social practice”
• E.g., deregulation, liberalization of media industries & telecom sectors
Commodification research
• Class power• Media elites• Ownership patterns • Audience commodity• Government-lobbyist liaisons
Policy Research…
• Policy – how this has contributed to media commodification (neoliberalism)
• Tensions between public and private spheres
• Media & democracy • Public interest (whither the…) – ex:
Aufderheide on US Telecom Act of 1996
Spatialization
• Overcoming the constraints of space and time in social life
• Coined by Henri Lefebvre• Innis’ work on time-space• Castell – “space of flows” in
describing network society
Spatialization related to communication studies• Addressed in institutional extension
of corporate power in communications industry
• Analysis of corporate concentration• Horizontal and vertical integration• Conglomerization, cross-media
ownership• Media ownership mapping
Spatialization….and policy
• Commercialization• Privatization• Liberalization• Internationalization
Structuration• “A process by which structures are
constituted out of human agency, even as they provide the very ‘medium’ of that constitution” (Mosco, 1996, 212)
• Looks at agency, social relations, social process, social practice, social movements
• Looks at class, gender, hegemony…