The Routledge Companion to Media Industries

Paul McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000451856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together 49 chapters from leading experts in media industries research, this major collection offers an authoritative overview of the current state of scholarship while setting out proposals for expanding, re-thinking and innovating the field.

Media industries occupy a central place in modern societies, producing, circulating, and presenting the multitude of cultural forms and experiences we encounter in our daily lives. The chapters in this volume begin by outlining key conceptual and critical perspectives while also presenting original interventions to prompt new lines of inquiry. Other chapters then examine the impact of digitalization on the media industries, intersections formed between industries or across geographic territories, and the practices of doing media industries research and teaching. General ideas and arguments are illustrated through specific examples and case studies drawn from a range of media sectors, including advertising, publishing, comics, news, music, film, television, branded entertainment, live cinema experiences, social media, and music video.

Making a vital and significant contribution to media research, this volume is essential reading for students and academics seeking to understand and evaluate the work of the media industries.

Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Part I

Perspectives

Conceptual and critical directions

DOI: 10.4324/9780429275340-2

Media industries research necessarily constitutes a diverse multidisciplinary field of inquiry. As noted in the opening chapter, studies of media industries can be found across a broad spectrum of social science and humanities subject areas. At the same time, the multifaceted make-up of media industries – as locations of economic, technological, social, and cultural activity – but also their transmutability, means no single theoretical framework or methodological approach seems sufficient to grasping how these industries work or the effects they generate. Nonetheless, as the chapters in this part show, certain perspectives and “traditions” are identifiable within the field, each bringing to the object of study their own conceptual credentials and points of critical emphasis.

Initially, two chapters traces histories of formative developments in media industries research. Graham Murdock sees work in Europe from the mid-1960s onward as responding to two contexts: the institutionalization of academic communication research, and the structural transformation of the communication landscape by increased exposure to market forces. Interrogating the latter reinvigorated the critical political economy of communication in the UK and France, while analyses of media organizations and occupations, or situated ethnographies of production practices, examined how broad industry dynamics were being negotiated on the ground. Critiques questioned the deleterious impacts of media marketization on the diversity of available representation, participation in the media, and sustaining the production of a democratic public sphere.

Offering a parallel history, Janet Wasko surveys developments in the United States. Rather than a unified field, media industries research was dispersed across multiple intellectual directions and media. Early work in media management appeared from the 1930s, and during the 1960s a US perspective on the political economy of communication emerged, with the production of culture and production studies denoting more recent approaches. Furthermore, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, media-specific seams of inquiry concentrated on the newspaper, radio, or film industries, while by the final decades of the century the effects of conglomeration and diversification necessitated work that could trace the intersections formed between media.

Outlining some of the most prominent theoretical and critical perspectives active in media industries research, a range of chapters identify the interventions made by critical political economy (CPE), policy studies, media economics, media management, and production studies. Noting the contributions, but also criticisms, of CPE, Jonathan Hardy presents proposals for revising CPE to address the contemporary industrial landscape, and specifically the convergence of media and advertising manifested in forms of branded content. To grasp shifting power relationships in this context, Hardy proffers governance as a central concept to address the multiple sites and processes of rule-making active across production, circulation, consumption, and use. Hardy sets out a range of propositions for applying critical governance analysis to integrate attention to the sources of governance represented by formal regulation, industry self-regulation, market power, and civil society action.

As Maria Michalis argues, policy and industry are inseparable in the media. Centrally concerned with forms of power, critical studies of policy probe how the state and other authorities shape the media systems and content we get, while at the same time advocating for reforms that advance the public interest. As Michalis details, media policy finds multiple points of application (e.g., restrictions on ownership, allocation of communication frequencies, technical standards, copyright, or consumer protection) effecting all categories of industry participant, and operating across sub-national, national, regional, or international spheres of influence. Placing the analytic emphasis on process rather than outcome foregrounds policymaking as a contested terrain.

In media economics, application of economic theories, concepts, and methods enhance understanding of how the business of media is conducted. Yet, as Gillian Doyle argues, the distinctive characteristics of media industries partially defy conventional economic thinking: for example, assessments of efficiency can seem meaningless in a sector where objectives are uncertain or divergent, and quantitative economic analysis seems ill suited to evaluating the impacts of media on public welfare. Still, Doyle views media economics as valuably illuminating business strategies and behaviors, including why and how media industries must work to manage risk, plus providing tools for assessing the economic importance of advertising in the media sector, and explaining why media industries so frequently adopt oligopolistic and monopolistic structures.

While noting common ground with media economics, Ulrike Rohn differentiates media management research by its emphasis on corporate and entrepreneurial decision-making and firm performance over concerns with industries and markets. Scoping the breadth of media management research, Rohn sees studies varying by their chosen unit of analysis (individual, firm, or media product), emphasis on forces internal (e.g., leadership, work culture) or external (e.g., technology innovation, audience behavior, competitive environment) to the media firm, theoretical (e.g., strategic management, structure-conduct-performance, organizational culture) or methodological approach, and stakeholder orientation (does the work address industry, policy-makers and/or academia?).

Studies of media production are certainly not new, but as Philip Drake explains, with the growth of “production studies” there has been a concerted drive to develop modes of inquiry aimed at capturing the complexities of production contexts. Drawing eclectically on multidisciplinary insights, there is no unified direction in this field, yet certain commonalities emerge: an emphasis on engaging with media workers, particularly those occupying “below-the-line” roles, through using interview and observational methods to construct “thick” accounts of the lived micro-level realities of working cultures, and critically prioritizing issues of autonomy, precarious employment, and self-exploitation.

In their search for significance and persuasiveness, theoretical and methodological paradigms can frequently assume universal applicability, bypassing reflection on the contextual circumstances from which ideas and arguments are born, or how incongruous these may seem when transferred to other situations. In the interests of recognizing the territorial embeddedness of research, Georgia Aitaki, Lydia Papadimitriou, and Yannis Tzioumakis offer a case study locating the development of a media industries research agenda in a particular national context. Focusing on studies of media industries conducted in and about Greece, they see the centrality of the state in the nation’s media environment as determining the research trajectory, influencing the theoretical traditions applied, media studied, and issues prioritized. If media industries research deals fundamentally with the material specificities of cultural production, then Aitaki, Papadimitriou, and Tzioumakis’ account foregrounds a need to be equally cognizant of the conditions shaping knowledge production.

1

Assembling production studies

Formative interventions in Britain and Europe

Graham Murdock

DOI: 10.4324/9780429275340-3

Tracking change

The recent resurgence of research on media industries and production to which the present volume testifies, has looked mainly to the United States for conceptual frameworks and models of inquiry. Landmark American studies of Hollywood, network television, and news production continue to offer indispensable resources, but they do not exhaust them. This chapter reviews a second major reference point, represented by the formative work developed in Britain and Europe between 1965 – when communications research began to gather momentum in the universities – and 1995.

This tradition of inquiry has been mostly passed over or recalled selectively, erasing insights that continue to illuminate present conditions. While it addresses many of the same issues, it differs from US research in two ways. First, it is more strongly informed by European social and political theory and, for some authors, by an engagement with Marxism. Second, in contrast to the market-oriented US system, at the outset of the period covered here governments in Britain and Europe played a major role in organizing national communication. Regulation of competition in commercial markets was informed by public interest criteria. Telecommunication networks were nationalized and operated as public utilities. Public service broadcasters, financed by taxation, played a central role in delivering advertising-free television services.

As McDonald (2013) has argued, one of the challenges facing media industry studies is “to situate the now and the new within larger patterns of continuity and change.” My cut-off date of 1995 precludes analysis of the impacts of the new business model developed by the major social media corporations, based on free access to their platforms in return for the exclusive right to monetize the personal data generated by users’ activities. It also excludes the digital majors’ continuing disruption of established communication industries. A concerted focus on technological innovation and new forms of labor and use, however, deflects attention from the fundamental reorganization of contemporary capitalism that gathered momentum from the mid-1980s onward. In Britain and across Europe, we witness the reassertion of markets and profit maximization as the fundamental principles of economic organization. Publicly owned assets were sold to corporate investors (privatization), markets that were previously monopolies or protected were opened to competition (liberalization), employment was increasingly casualized and worker’s rights whittled away, regulations restricting ownership were relaxed, and public institutions pressured to seek additional sources of funding to compensate for reductions in public resource (corporatization).

Despite repeated demands from market advocates, the BBC remained a public corporation, but in 1987, France’s leading public television channel TF1 was sold to investors led by the Bouygues group whose interests spanned telecommunications, construction, and real estate. Britain spearhead the privatization of the national post, telegraph, and telephone (PTT) system, converting it from a monopoly public utility to profit-generating company competing with new entrants, a movement later replicated in all the European Union (EU) countries. The arrival of commercial satellite and cable services broke the broadcast monopolies of public service organizations across Europe. In 1972 Britain introduced commercial radio. A decade later, a fourth national UK television channel was launched, publicly owned but financed by advertising. In 1984, cable companies, previously restricted to relaying terrestrial services, were freed to carry as man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Media, industries, research: Problematizing the field
• Part I Perspectives: Conceptual and critical directions
• Part II Interventions: Rethinking the field
• Part III Transformations: Digitalization and industry change
• Part IV Intersections: Transnational exchanges and industry traversings
• Part V Practices: Doing media industries research and pedagogy
• Index