The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136175954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Research on popular culture is a dynamic, fast-growing domain. In scholarly terms, it cuts across many areas, including communication studies, sociology, history, American studies, anthropology, literature, journalism, folklore, economics, and media and cultural studies. The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, internationally-aware, and conceptually agile guide to the most important aspects of popular culture scholarship.

Specifically, this Companion includes:

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• interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing popular culture;

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• wide-ranging case studies;

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• discussions of economic and policy underpinnings;

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• analysis of textual manifestations of popular culture;

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• examinations of political, social, and cultural dynamics; and

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• discussions of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability and labor.

Featuring scholarly voices from across six continents, The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture presents a nuanced and wide-ranging survey of popular culture research.

Part I

THEORIES

1

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Vincent Mosco

Definitions and Characteristics

Political economy is the study of the social relations—particularly the power relations—that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources (Mosco 2009). This formulation has a certain practical value because it calls attention to how the communication business operates; for example, how communications products move through a chain of producers such as a Hollywood film studio, to wholesalers, retailers, and, finally to consumers, whose purchases, downloads, and attention are fed back into new processes of production. A more general and ambitious definition of political economy is the study of control and survival in social life. Control refers specifically to the internal organization of social group members and the process of adapting to change. Survival means how people produce what is needed for social reproduction and continuity. Control processes are broadly political, in that they constitute the social organization of relationships within a community and survival processes are mainly economic, because they concern production and reproduction.

Political economy has consistently placed in the foreground the goal of understanding social change and historical transformation. For classical political economists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Adam Smith (1937), David Ricardo (1819), and John Stuart Mill (1848), this meant comprehending the great capitalist revolution, the vast social upheaval that transformed societies based primarily on agricultural labor into commercial, manufacturing, and, eventually, industrial societies. For Karl Marx (1976), it meant examining the dynamic forces within capitalism and the relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organization, in order to understand how social change would ultimately lead from capitalism to socialism.

Political economy is also characterized by an interest in examining the social whole or the totality of social relations that make up the economic, political, social, and cultural areas of life. From the time of Adam Smith, whose interest in understanding social life was not constrained by the disciplinary boundaries that mark academic life today, through Marx, and on to contemporary institutional, conservative and neo-marxian theorists, political economy has consistently aimed to build on the unity of the political and the economic by accounting for their mutual influence and for their relationship to wider social and symbolic spheres of activity. The political economist asks: How are power and wealth related (Clark 1998)? How do these influence media, communication, knowledge production, and entertainment (Fuchs and Mosco 2012; McChesney 2013)?

Political economy is also noted for its commitment to moral philosophy, defined as both an interest in the values that help to create social behavior and in those moral principles that ought to guide efforts to change it. It is therefore both descriptive and normative. For Adam Smith (1976), as evidenced in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, this meant understanding values like self-interest, materialism, and individual freedom that were contributing to the rise of commercial capitalism. For Karl Marx, moral philosophy meant the ongoing struggle between the drive to realize individual and social value in human labor and the pressure in capitalism to reduce labor to a marketable commodity. Contemporary political economy tends to favor moral philosophical standpoints that promote the extension of democracy to all aspects of social life. This goes beyond the political realm, which guarantees rights to participate in government, to the economic, social, and cultural domains where supporters of democracy call for income equality, access to education, and full public participation in cultural production based on the right to communicate freely.

Following from this view, social praxis, or the fundamental unity of thought and action, also occupies a central place in political economy. Specifically, against traditional academic positions which separate the sphere of research from that of social intervention, political economists, in a tradition tracing its roots to ancient practices of providing advice and counsel to leaders, have consistently viewed intellectual life as a form of social transformation and social intervention as a form of knowledge. Although they differ fundamentally on what should characterize intervention, from Adam Smith who supported free markets, to Marx, who called on labor to realize itself in revolution, political economists are united in the view that the division between research and action is artificial and must be overturned.

Research on the Political Economy of the Media

North American research has been extensively influenced by the contributions of two founding figures, Dallas Smythe (1981) and Herbert Schiller (1996). Smythe taught the first course in the political economy of communication at the University of Illinois and is the first of four generations of scholars linked together in this research tradition. Schiller, who followed Smythe at the University of Illinois, similarly influenced several generations of political economists.

Their approach to communication studies drew on both the institutional and marxian traditions. A concern about the growing size and power of transnational communication businesses places them squarely in the institutional school, but their interest in social class and in media imperialism gives their work a definite marxian focus. However, they were less interested than, for example, European scholars, in providing an explicit theoretical account of communication. Rather, their work and, through their influence, a great deal of the research in this region has been driven more explicitly by a sense of injustice that the communication industry has become an integral part of a wider corporate order that, they maintain, is both exploitative and undemocratic. Although Smythe and Schiller were concerned with the impact within their respective countries, they both developed a research program that charts the growth in power and influence of transnational media companies throughout the world.

Partly owing to their influence, North American research has produced a large literature on industry and class specific manifestations of transnational corporate and state power, distinguished by its concern to participate in ongoing social movements and oppositional struggles to change the dominant media and create alternatives (McChesney 2000; Mosco 2009; Schiller 1999; Wasko 2003). A major objective of this work is to advance public interest concerns before government regulatory and policy organs. This includes support for those movements that have taken an active role before international organizations in defense of a new international economic, information, and communication order (Mosco and Schiller 2001).

European research is less clearly linked to specific founding figures and, although it is also connected to movements for social change, particularly in defense of public service media systems, the leading work in this region has been more concerned to integrate communication research within various neo-marxian and institutional theoretical traditions. Of the two principal directions this research has taken, one, most prominent in the work of Garnham (2000) and in that of Murdock and Golding (2000), has emphasized class power. Building on the Frankfurt School tradition, as well as on the work of Raymond Williams, it documents the integration of communication institutions, mainly business and state policy authorities, within the wider capitalist economy, and the resistance of subaltern classes and movements that oppose neo-conservative state practices promoting liberalization, commercialization, and privatization of the communication industries.

A second stream of research foregrounds class struggle and is most prominent in the work of Armand Mattelart (1983, 2000). Mattelart has drawn from a range of traditions including dependency theory, Western marxism, and the worldwide experience of national liberation movements to understand communication as one among the principal sources of resistance to power. His work has demonstrated how peoples of the third world, particularly in Latin America where Mattelart was an advisor to the government of Chile before it was overthrown in a 1973 military coup, used the mass media to oppose Western control and create indigenous news and entertainment media.

Research on the political economy of communication from the less developed world has covered a wide area of interests, although a major stream has grown in response to the modernization or developmentalist theory that originated in Western, particularly U.S., attempts to incorporate communication into an explanatory perspective on development congenial to mainstream academic and political interests. The developmentalist thesis held that the media are resources, which, along with urbanization, education, and other social forces, stimulate economic, social, and cultural modernization. As a result, media growth is an index of development (Rogers 1971; Schramm 1964). Drawing on several streams of international neo-marxian political economy, including world systems and dependency theory, political economists challenged the fundamental premises of the developmentalist model, particularly its technological determinism and the omission of practically any interest in the power relations that shape the relationships between rich and poor nations and the multi-layered class relations between and within them (Alzouma 2005; Bolano, Mastrini, and Serra 2004; Pendakur 2003; Zhao 2008).

The failure of development schemes incorporating media investment sent modernization theorists in search of revised models that add new media into the mix (Jussawalla and Taylor 2003). Political economists have responded principally by addressing the power of these new technologies to help create a global division of labor. A first wave of research saw the division largely in territorial terms: unskilled labor concentrated in the poorest nations, semi-skilled and more complex assembly labor in semi-peripheral societies, and research, development, and strategic planning limited to first world corporate headquarters to which most profit would flow. Contemporary research acknowledges that class divisions cut across territorial lines, and maintains that what is central to the evolving international division of labor is the growth in flexibility for firms that control the range of technologies which overcome traditional time and space constraints (Wasko and Erickson 2008; Yu Hong 2011).

One can also map political economic theory through the three social processes that are central to the field: commodification, spatialization, and structuration. Commodification is the process of taking goods and services which are valued for their use, e.g., food to satisfy hunger, stories for communication, and transforming them into commodities which are valued for what they can earn in the marketplace, e.g. farming to sell food, producing drama for commercial television. The process of commodification holds a dual significance for communication research. First, communication practices and technologies contribute to the general commodification process throughout society. For example, the introduction of computer communication gives all companies, not just communication companies, greater control over the entire process of production, distribution, and exchange, permitting retailers to monitor sales and inventory levels with ever-improving precision. Second, commodification is an entry point to understand specific communication institutions and practices. For example, the general, worldwide expansion of commodification in the 1980s, responding in part to global declines in economic growth, led to the increased commercialization of media programming, the privatization of once public media and telecommunications institutions, and the liberalization of communication markets (Murdock and Wasko 2007; Schiller 2007).

The political economy of communication has been notable for its emphasis on describing and examining the significance of institutions, especially businesses and governments, responsible for the production, distribution, and exchange of communication commodities and for the regulation of the communication marketplace. Although it has not neglected the commodity itself and the process of commodification, the tendency has been to foreground the study of business and government. When it has treated the commodity, political economy has tended to concentrate on media content and less so on media audiences and the labor involved in media production. The emphasis on media structures and content is understandable in light of the importance of global media companies and the growth in the value of media content. Tightly integrated transnational businesses, such as Time Warner, Google, News Corp., and Apple create media products with multiplier effects that generate revenue from selling content, delivering viewers to advertisers and making use of the least expensive labor worldwide (Bettig and Hall 2003). Political economy has paid some attention to audiences, particularly to understand the common practice whereby advertisers pay for the size and characteristics of an audience that a newspaper, web site, or television program can deliver. This generated a vigorous debate about whether audiences, in fact, labor, i.e., sell their labor power (in effect, their attention) in return for whatever content is produced (Smythe 1981). Political economy research has advanced the analysis of audience research by examining audience history and the complex relationship of audiences to the producers of commercial culture (Hagen and Wasko 2000; Meehan 1999). It has also extended the debate over audience labor to the internet, where the process of building web sites, modifying software, and participating in social media communities both resembles and differs from the labor of audiences that Smythe described (Terranova 2004).

In addition to media content and audiences, media labor is subject to the commodification process. Braverman’s now classic (1974) work directly confronted the transformation of the labor process in capitalism. According to him, general labor is constituted out of the unity of conception—the power to envision, imagine, and design work—and execution, the power to carry it out. In the process of commodification, capital acts to separate conception from execution, skill from the raw ability to carry out a task, in order to concentrate conceptual power in a managerial class that is either a part of capital or represents its interests, and acts to reconstitute the labor process with this new distribution of skill and power at the point of production. In the extreme, and with considerable labor resistance, this involved the application of detailed and intrusive “scientific management” practices pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Braverman documented the process of labor transformation in the rise of manufacturing, but he is particularly recognized for demonstrating the extension of this process into the service and information sectors. His work gave rise to an enormous body of empirical research and theoretical debate, the latter focusing principally on the need to address the contested nature of the process, the active resistance of workers and the trade union movement and, finally, on how the transformation of the labor process was experienced differently by industry, occupation, class, gender, and race (Mosco and McKercher 2008).

The labor of communication workers is also being commodified as wage labor has grown in significance throughout the media workplace. In order to cut the labor bill and expand revenue, managers replaced mechanical with electronic systems to eliminate thousands of jobs in the printing industry as electronic typesetting did away with the jobs of linotype opera...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Global Popular Culture
• Part I Theories
• Part II Genres
• Part III Places
• Index