Political Economy of Communications Media

1
Political Economy of Communications Media

• Questions of Definition

2
Vincent Mosco 1995

• Narrow definition
• The study of the social relations, particularly
  the power relations, that influence the
  production, distribution, and consumption of
  resources, including communication resources.
• Broad definition
• The study of control and survival in social life

3
Classic Political Economy

• Political economists of 18/19th centuries
  included Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.S.Mill,
  Karl Marx.
• Fore-grounded the understanding of social change
  and historical transformation
• Examined the social whole, the totality of social
  relations that make up life, in particular the
  integration of politics and economics.
• Commitment to moral philosophy, i.e. an interest
  in the values that help create social behavior,
  and in moral principles that ought to guide
  efforts to change it.
• Fundamental unity of thinking and doing (social
  praxis), between research and action.

4
Some Values in Early Political Economy

• Self-Interest
• Materialism
• Individual freedom/community welfare
• Laissez-faire
• Resistance to commodification of human labor
• Extension of democracy to all aspects of social
  life

5
Orthodox economics

• Formed late 19th century against political
  economy.
• Economics as a science that provides precise
  explanations.
• Focus on buyers and sellers setting prices in the
  market.
• Did not address processes of social and economic
  change that set the conditions for setting
  prices.
• Fore-grounded the individual as primary unit of
  analysis, and the market as principle structure.
• Labor merely one among the factors of production,
  along with land and capital, valued solely for
  its productivity or ability to enhance the market
  value of a final product.

6
Orthodox Economics A Definition

• Samuelson (1976), quoted in Alexander et al.
  (1996), p.2
• The study of how people and society end up
  choosing, with or without the use of money, to
  employ scarce productive resources that could
  have alternative uses, to produce various
  commodities and distribute them for consumption ,
  now or in the future, among various persons and
  groups in society.

7
Different kinds of political economy

• Neo-conservative applies orthodox economics to
  all social behavior with the aim of expanding
  individual freedom.
• Institutional how institutional and
  technological constraints shape markets to the
  advantage of corporations and governments
  powerful enough to control them.
• Neo-Marxian places labor at center of analysis
  issues such as automation, deskilling,
  international division of labor.
• Feminist persistence of patriarchy dearth of
  attention to household labor.
• Environmental links between social behavior and
  wider organic environment.

8
Political Economy of Communication

• American tradition (Schiller Smythe)
• Institutional and Marxian traditions.
• Focus on size and power of transnationals and
  corporatization of media.
• Advance public interest concerns before
  government regulatory and policy organs.
• European tradition (Golding and Murdoch)
• Stronger focus on class power/struggle.
• Third World
• Stronger focus on responses to Western
  modernization or developmentalist paradigms.