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
• Haves and have-nots

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, lets 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