What is Political Economy?

1. What is Political Economy? • Definitions by prime theorists • Origins in economic thought • How has it been taken up in communication studies? • Major theoreticians • Tensions

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. 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 advocate

5. Mosco (Meehan and Wasko) • PE examines the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication and information resources • History • Social Totality • Moral Philosophy • Praxis

6. 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)…

7. Social Totality • Holistic analysis • Relationship among commodities, institutions, social relations, and hegemony • What are the connections between the economic and the political?

8. Commodity form • Use of wage labour to produce goods that are sold in the marketplace • Media forms: television genres, databases, PPV • Commodification of information • Corporatization of public space

9. Institutions • Those that support, sustain, subvert public and private activities • Tensions between public vs. private • Globalization exacerbating nation-state, capital, labour relationships • Closely interpenetrated regimes of power and control in media systems

10. Social Relations • How do people engage with the media? • Issues of race, class, gender • Have’s and have-not’s

11. 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

12. Some examples from everyday life… • We take for granted that… • Voting = democratic process • Capitalistic marketplace = productive & fair society • Objectivity as cornerstone of journalism • (Now, let’s challenge these dominant hegemonies!)

13. Moral Philosophical Outlooks • Social values • What are appropriate social benefits? • An ethics of information in society… • E.g., who are the winners and who are the losers?

14. Praxis • In essence, practice & action • Concerned with social justice • Fighting for the public interest • Public intellectual stance

15. Mosco and Reddick • “…the study of control and survival in social life” • Social transformation, social totality, moral philosophy, praxis • Argues for a rethinking of p-e of communications with entry points of commodification, spatialization, and structuration

16. 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

17. How does this relate to imcommunication? • “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 entrepreneurial

18. 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

19. Commodification research • Class power • Media elites • Ownership patterns • Audience commodity • Government-lobbyist liaisons

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. Spatialization….and policy • Commercialization • Privatization • Liberalization • Internationalization

24. 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…