Political Economies of Mass Culture

Whilst PE has been applied as a way of exploring and understanding the media since the 1960s and 70s, the ways in which it has been used can be characterised as being divided into two fairly distinct approaches which stem from roots in Europe and the USA. Within Europe, the cultural and political tradition of social(ist) democracy entailed that the model of broadcast media such as television and radio were dominated by public service broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who were state funded organisations whose services were free at the point of contact and featured no commercial advertising. Consequently, early PE approaches to broadcasting within these countries adopted a Marxist approach which was heavily focused upon the relations between political governance and the media industries, exploring ways that regulation and legislation impacted upon the media whilst also exploring the links between commercial organisations and sections of the press. By contrast, in the USA the lack of a social democratic tradition and politics saw the media organised along strictly commercial lines, which led to PE approaches to media being more focused on the economics of media ownership than their European counterparts.

In the UK, Raymond Williams was a key figure concerned with the study of media and culture within the university system, and his writing made some important revisions to Marxism which were central to the political economy of culture. Marx’s materialism posited that the socio-economic reality of material experience and commodity production formed the base of society, whereas cultural content such as communications and media were seen as the superstructure which grew out of the base. Numerous Marxist readings of culture subsequently argued that as the economic base determines the cultural superstructure, the superstructure simply presents an ideological reflection of the base. Williams, however, contested these notions, arguing that:

We have to reevaluate determination towards the setting of limits and exertion of pressure, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process.Williams 1973 p6

In terms of PE, this intervention contends that the understanding of what counts as the socially productive forces constituting the economic base of society is not solely confined to commodities, but that there are a wide range of forces which produce things, and that these forces are historically contingent, they change over time. For example, confining productivity to commodities would contend that whilst the labor involved in producing a guitar is socially productive, the activities of the guitarist who plays the instrument is consigned to being a superstructural detail. Williams’ position, however, is that both elements must be understood as productive forces, and so the line between base and superstructure becomes blurred, although not erased, as Williams also argues that the distinction remains useful so long as the absolute prescriptions it had been used to suggest are refined. With regards to the PE of media, this is a vital move which means that media, and other cultural forms can themselves be understood as socially productive forces, rather than mere reflections of an economic system. So media’s role within society become more complex and nuanced than simple repetitions of ideologically motivated claims.  Rather, media become an integral part in the production and circulation of meaning and ideologies.  As such,  the PE of media is understood as an important factor which exerts pressures and sets limits upon the forms and approaches that media encompass.

Another key development within the PE of media is the recognition that there exist a number of additional factors surrounding the production of media texts which render them distinct from other forms of commodity. Most products and services can be classified as either private or public goods.  Private goods are ones which a single entity purchases, owns, and consumes, while public goods are ones that are shared, consumed, and paid for by a larger group.  For example, a camera, a cup of coffee, or an article of clothing are examples of private goods, while roads or electricity are classic examples of public goods.  Media products, however, tend to function differently.  One key difference noted by Nicholas Garnham (1990 p160) is that unlike computers, cameras, coffee and clothing:

[t]he cultural commodity is not destroyed in the process of consumption. My reading of a book or watching of a film does not make it any less available to you. Moreover, the products of the past live on and can be relatively easily and cheaply reproduced anew. Thus it has been difficult to establish the scarcity on which price is based. And thus cultural goods (and some services such as broadcasting, for technical reasons) tend towards the condition of a public good.

It is worth noting that Garnham is writing before the advent of widespread networked digital communications here, so the media and cultural commodities he refers to were stored on media such as vinyl records, videotape, film and paper. Even so, the key notion here is that unlike many other forms of commodity, cultural and informational goods such as media do not often have the same relations to scarcity. Whereas, if I drink a cup of coffee and you cannot drink the same cup, we can both read the same book. This is because the bulk of the productive work is in the production of the informational content of the text, rather than the assemblage of paper and ink. Consequently, in order to maintain a high price for cultural goods, an artificial sense of scarcity has to be manufactured by those who control the distribution of media.

Institutions

So what are institutions? We sometimes talk of things like banking institutions, or medical institutions, which sometimes evoke ideas of institutions as places, whereas institutions are really a mechanism of society. We create institutions as a way to govern and maintain society – they are structures that hold together social life. For example, we sometimes speak of the family as an institution. We are not referring to some discrete object when we talk about family – we are interested in the relationships that we have grouped together under the label of family. Different societies have different groupings under that label. For some, it might be the nuclear family. For other societies, it might be the extended family, or some other set of relations beyond notions of biology. What is important to remember is that each institution reflects and supports the values of the society in which it is situated.

Societies build and maintain institutions to create and perpetuate acceptable modes of behavior and interaction that help propagate and stabilize that society. In capitalist societies, banks are considered an institution in that they refer to a relationship of labor and capital. In the economic crashes of the early 21st century, banks were said to be destabilizing. This means that the relationships that form the institutions of banking were seen to be weakening, and as such, we saw a commensurate change in the notions of labor and capital, and their relationships and roles within society.

Social relations that are codified into institutions therefore have within them some measure of power.  And this is where we come back to discourses. Institutions produce discourses as part of the interaction of their social relations, and these discourses reflect and reinforce the dominant ideologies that support and maintain these institutions. It is only when these discourses are challenged that we see the institutions challenged, and sometimes this leads to an institutional change which reflects the changing values in a society.

That’s a lot of looping around, so let’s take a look at an example that has a number of different communicative elements. Let’s look at smoking.

Smoking as a social issue and a personal behaviour has now entered the public health discourses.  It is now related to and reflects a negative social position – smoking is seen to be socially undesirable, and these negative connotations are framed in terms of health and wellness.

This is a relatively recent change. In the first half of the 20th century, smoking occupied a different institutional position, and was part of a different set of discourses related to relaxation and social desirableness. In the immediate post-war period, smoking was seen as a masculine pursuit, and women did not smoke publicly until smoking as a sign entered into discourses around female enfranchisement and the gendering of power. With the rise of public relations, discourses of smoking as a socially acceptable activity for both men and women were constructed by the early ad men, reflecting a developing institutional idea of feminine power. They even came up with the tagline ‘torches of freedom.’ (Bernays) Smoking was a public performance of power, prestige, and luxury and so the sign of smoking became associated with such discourses.

To propagate the business of smoking (a very profitable industry) as the first negative health impacts of smoking became apparent, the discourses surrounding smoking shifted again, and we started to see the rise of the early medical and health rhetorics to counteract the negative discourses of smoking-related illnesses. So in the advertising around cigarettes from 1960 to 1990, we can see a tension between two competing institutional discourses – smoking as being good for you (social discourse) and smoking as being bad for you (medical/health discourse).

Slowly, over the decades, the smoking-as-unhealthy discourse gained dominance, and smoking shifted more fully to fit into discourses of health and social wellness as the institutional landscape around medicine, the human body and leisure were renegotiated to take into account these new relationships and the new signification of smoking cigarettes.

Now, smoking is something of a social taboo, reflecting the new dominant ideologies around smoking and the relationships that represents between smoking and health, and evoking medical discourses and symbols and language of not only ill-health, but also signifiers of shame and ostracism.

We can see similar trajectories of discourses and institutions regarding race, class and gender throughout history.  Over time, as new ideologies gained social power, old institutions underwent a period of disruption, and new institutions, new sets of social relations, were built up in their place.

Studying Social Institutions

Like economics, PE can also be used to understand social institutions in terms of their relations to each other.  We might do this by looking at macro-economic phenomena, which are large scale economic interactions.  Examples might include examining a nation or national market, a particular industry, or the the ways a particular good or service is produced.  Among the range of macro-economic topics PE researchers have examined is the flow of information and entertainment internationally; the concentration of media industries such as film, recorded music, news, or video games; and environmental consequences of high-tech media products.  In contrast, PE might also look at micro-economic phenomena, which are smaller scale economic interactions.  Examples here might be a particular company or type of labor, a particular product, or the behavior of individuals economically.  PE researchers have examined how particular media companies like Disney and Google have evolved and impacted both the industries they are involved in and the cultural consequences of their products, the challenges faced by women and other historically-marginalized groups working in high-tech industries, and how new formats of television production have impacted production among other topics.

Typically, in studying social institutions this way, PE researchers need to understand the difference between industries, sectors, and markets.  An industry can be thought of as all the types of economic activity and institutions related to a particular area of production.  For example, the film industry involves not only the labor in producing a film – actors, directors, lighting, etc. – but also the labor involved in distributing the film – which might include marketers, control board operators, and even the person who takes your ticket at the theater – but also all the various resources needed for those – including everything needed to make and sell the cameras and projectors, the products sold in theaters, and a variety of other things.   Sectors represent a subset of an industry concerned with a single area of production.  Theaters represent a single sector of the film industry.  In contrast, markets represent the moment where a good or service is bought and sold.  It might be a physical space but not necessarily.  Markets might also be examined in terms of a particular product, such as the market for documentary films, or in terms of geography, such as the U.S. theatrical market.   Much of political economic research concerns itself with questions of concentration in markets, sectors, and industries.

Understanding media in this way allows us to see some common trends in how media institutions develop.  One possibility is that institutions might undergo horizontal integration, which is when it acquires other institutions in the same sector.  For example, a radio company like Clear Channel Communications which owns a number of radio stations might purchase more stations.  Another possibility for those institutions to undergo vertically integration, which is when they acquire institutions from across sectors in a particular industry.  Consider the company Sony which began as a hardware manufacturing company, but which acquired film production studies and video game developers as a way to guarantee content for its hardware.  Finally, we might see examples of conglomeration, which is when an institution joins with other institutions, typically across industries.   The work of Janet Wasko on Disney is particularly illustrative of these tendencies (Wasko, 2005, 2020). Disney began as a film production company but eventually acquired properties in a variety of other industries including radio, broadcast television, cable tv, books, and magazines.  When an institution becomes a conglomerate, it might seek to take advantage of the various components to maximize profit.  Again, using Disney as our example, when a new Disney cartoon is created, the company works to promote and profit on that new product by developing related products in all of its other institutions, so there won’t just be a movie, but a ride at the theme parks, merchandise at its stores, books about the cartoon, stories in its magazines about the film, and references to it on its various radio and cable stations.  Maximizing the profitability across the full range of a company or conglomerate’s holdings is called synergy.

The Audience Commodity

Canadian scholar Dallas Smythe (1981) is often cited as introducing a further key element to PE approaches to media, inverting the assumption central to prior approaches to PE which focussed upon meanings, messages and information as the central commodity which relates to media. Smythe instead contends that the economic relationship which is the primary driver of media as an industry is one whereby audiences – or more specifically the attentive capacities of audiences – are sold to advertisers.

This approach makes sense when moving to the commercialised American media context, as it sharply departs from many European countries which, until the deregulation and privatizations of neo-liberal regimes under leaders such as Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, were dominated by public service broadcasting, in which there was often no commercial advertising as the media was funded by central governments as a public good with a mandate to both inform and entertain the public. However, when we approach contemporary global media networks, the role of public service media has generally receded, with commercial networks providing a far greater proportion of media content in countries like the UK than in the 20th Century, when there only existed a handful of television channels, and almost half the content was created in house by the BBC.

A very similar broadcasting history can be observed within the New Zealand context. Up to the 1980s the broadcasting scene, in both radio and television, was dominated by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, an organization very like the BBC in terms of funding, structure and monopoly power.  However, its descendants, TVNZ and RNZ, are competing with commercial interests, for audience attention, funding and content, in a very different media market.

The notion of the audience commodity is useful in conceptualising the PE of media, as it further refines the boundaries of what can be understood as a commodity, but does so in a way which helps to explore exactly why and how a vast amount of contemporary media – newspapers, television, radio, and websites amongst other modes – is funded. These forms are typically free or very cheap at the point of access for the ‘consumer,’ but the economic cost of production is paid for by the insertion of advertising into the media being viewed. The media is thus not paid for by the audience (the cost of a printed newspaper comes nowhere near covering the costs of the paper, printing, journalists, designers, copy editors etc that went into the production of the newspaper, and watching television or surfing the web is usually free) but is funded by the advertisers, who are purchasing the attention of an audience. Buying advertising time during peak hours, or in a more popular newspaper, costs proportionally more precisely because the number of eyeballs the advertising reaches is enlarged.   It is the influence of the audience commodity as measure via ratings that has come to dominate the economic decisions surrounding much of media production, particularly in television (see Meehan 2005 and 2012; Meehan & Riordan, 2002).

This economic situation is also of critical relevance to the ideological context of media content. As the media is funded by commercial (primarily corporate) organisations, the materials which are produced by this system are highly unlikely to be overtly critical of corporate capitalism and consumerism. Indeed, there have been notable cases whereby advertisers have threatened to withdraw funding from television networks if particular programs are aired as they are concerned that this will negatively affect brand connotations. An example of this is highlighted in the video below, an extract from the feature-length documentary film The Corporation (dir. Joel Bakan 2004)

References

Achbar, M., Simpson, Bart, Abbott, Jennifer, Bakan, Joel, Crooks, Harold, Mikael, Mikela J., . . . Zeitgeist Films, film distributor. (2005). The corporation. New York, N.Y.]: Zeitgeist Films

Garnham, N. (1990). Capitalism and communication: Global culture and the economics of information. Sage publications.

Meehan, E. R. (2005). Why TV is not our fault: Television programming, viewers, and who’s really in control. Rowman & Littlefield.

Meehan, E. R. (2012). Gendering the commodity audience: Critical media research, feminism, and political economy. Media and cultural studies: keyworks, 242-249.

Meehan, E. R., & Riordan, E. (2002). Sex and money: Feminism and political economy in the media. U of Minnesota Press.

Smythe, D. W. (1981). On the audience commodity and its work. Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 230, 256.

Wasko, J. (2005). Corporate Disney in action. Popular culture: A reader, 184-196.

Wasko, J. (2020). Understanding Disney: The manufacture of fantasy. John Wiley & Sons.

Williams, R. (1973). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. New left review, (82), 3.