Political Economy of Communications Media

1
Political Economy of Communications Media
2
Vincent Mosco 1995

• Narrow definition
• Study of the power relations, that influence the
  production, distribution, and consumption of
  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.
• Focus on social change and historical
  transformation
• Examined social whole, the totality of social
  relations that make up life, particularly the
  integration of politics and economics.

4

• Commitment to moral philosophy, i.e. values that
  help create social behavior
• And to moral principles that ought to guide
  efforts to change it.
• Fundamental unity of thinking and doing (social
  praxis), between research and action.

5
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

6
Orthodox Economics A Definition

• Samuelson (1976), quoted in Alexander et al.
  (2004), p.5
• 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
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.

8

• Did not address processes of social and economic
  change that set the conditions for setting
  prices.
• Labor merely one factor of production (along with
  land and capital)
• Labor valued solely for its ability to enhance
  the market value of a final product
  (productivity).

9
Political Economy of Communication

• American tradition (Schiller Smythe)
• Institutional and Marxian traditions.
• 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.

10

• Focus on size and power of transnationals and
  corporatization of media.
• Advance public interest concerns before
  government regulators and policy makers.

11

• European tradition (Golding Murdoch)
• Stronger focus on class power/struggle.
• Third World
• Stronger focus on responses to Western
  modernization or developmentalist paradigms.