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1 OVERVIEW OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION

Political economy is a major perspective in communication research. Since the 1940s, the approach has guided the work of scholars around the world and its global expansion continues today (Cao and Zhao, 2007; McChesney, 2007). This first chapter identifies the major ideas that subsequent chapters develop in depth and calls attention to key references that are drawn from throughout the book. The book begins its map of the political economy approach by defining it, identifying its fundamental characteristics, and providing a guide to its major schools of thought. From here, it proceeds to examine how communication scholars have drawn on the theoretical framework to carry out research on communication media and information technologies. The section highlights recent trends, including the globalization of political economic research, the growth of historical research and of studies that concentrate on resistance to dominant media. It also emphasizes the transition from old to new media and the spread of communication activism. The book then turns to the philosophical foundation of a political economic approach in order to better understand the enduring and new issues that need to be addressed in communication studies. Specifically, it calls for an approach to understanding that accepts as real both the concepts or ideas that guide our thinking as well as our observations or what we perceive with our senses. It thereby rejects the view, prominent in some theories, that only our ideas or only our observations, but not both, are real. It also rejects the view that reality is little more than a chimera or a figment of our imagination and that neither ideas nor observations are in any sense real. Moreover, this perspective means that reality is established or constituted by many sources and cannot be reduced to the essentialism of either economics (e.g. money alone drives the media) or culture (e.g. people’s values drive the media). The approach also brings to the forefront the concepts of social change, social processes, and social relations, even if that means re-evaluating the emphasis that political economy has traditionally placed on social institutions, like media businesses, or on seeing social class as a category rather than, as this approach suggests, as a social relationship. Putting these ideas into practice, the book moves on to identify three processes that make up the main starting points for a political economy of communication.

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• • • The Political Economy of Communication • • • Commodification is the process of transforming things valued for their use into marketable products that are valued for what they can bring in exchange. This can be seen, for example, in the process of turning a story that friends enjoy into a film or a novel to be sold in the marketplace. How does the human act of communication become a product produced for a profit? Spatialization is the process of overcoming the constraints of geographical space with, among other things, mass media and communication technologies. For example, television overcomes distance by bringing images of world events to every part of the globe and companies increasingly use computer communication to organize business on a worldwide basis, thereby allowing them greater access to markets and the flexibility to move rapidly when conditions make it less favorable for them to stay in one place. What happens when communications goes global and when businesses use communication to create and manufacture their products worldwide? Finally structuration is the process of creating social relations, mainly those organized around social class, gender, and race. For example, with respect to social class, political economy describes how access to the mass media and new communication technologies is influenced by inequalities in income and wealth which enable some to afford access and others to be left out. The book wraps up by describing how the political economy of communication responds to challenges from disciplines on its borders, specifically from cultural studies and public choice theory by building bridges across theoretical divides. The book concludes with a brief coda on new bridges to build.

What is Political Economy? Let’s put more detail into this overview by taking a closer look at the makeup of this book. Chapter 2 covers the meaning of political economy, first by defining it and then by considering the main characteristics of the approach. Two definitions of political economy capture the wide range of approaches to the discipline. In the narrow sense, 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. This formulation has a certain practical value because it calls attention to how the communication business operates. It leads us to examine, for example, how communications products move through a chain of producers, such as a Hollywood film studio, to distributors, and, finally, to consumers in theaters or in their living rooms. It also directs us to the ways consumer choices, such as the websites we visit and the television shows we watch, are fed back into decisions that companies make about new media products. Furthermore, it asks us to focus on how information about these choices and even our attention to media become products for sale in the marketplace. The definition directs the political economist to understand the operation of power, a concept that addresses how people get what they want even when others do not want them to get it. It also leads us to think about what it means to be a producer, distributor, or consumer, and to appreciate the growing ambiguity about what constitutes these categories. •2•

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• • • Overview of the Political Economy of Communication • • • A more general and ambitious definition of political economy is the study of control and survival in social life. Control refers specifically to how a society organizes itself, manages its affairs and adapts, or fails to adapt, to the inevitable changes that all societies face. Survival means how people produce what they need to reproduce themselves and to keep their society going. According to this interpretation, control is a political process because it shapes the relationships within a community, and survival is mainly economic because it involves the process of production and reproduction. The strength of this definition is that it gives political economy the breadth to encompass at least all human activity and, arguably, all living processes. This definition was initially suggested to me by Dallas Smythe, one of the founding figures of the political economy of communication, in an interview for the first edition of this book. But since that time, it has been advanced by other political economists who are concerned about how humans relate to our increasingly threatened environment (Foster, 2002). Similar views have been advanced as well by leading figures in the rapidly developing field of science and technology studies (Haraway, 2003; Latour, 2005). The principal drawback of this broad definition is that it can lead one to overlook what distinguishes human political economy, principally our consciousness or awareness, from general processes of control and survival in nature. Another way to describe political economy is to broaden its meaning beyond what is typically considered in definitions by focusing on a set of central qualities that characterize the approach. This section of Chapter 2 focuses on four ideas: history, the social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis. These are qualities that all schools of political economic thought tend to share, whatever their other differences. Political economy has consistently placed in the foreground the goal of understanding social change and historical transformation. For the founding figures of political economy, people such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, who were leading figures in European intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this meant explaining the great capitalist revolution, the vast social upheaval that transformed societies based primarily on agricultural labor into commercial, manufacturing, and, eventually, industrial societies. Responding to this first wave of political economy thinking, Karl Marx shifted the debate by critically examining the dynamic forces within capitalism and the relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organization. He did this specifically in order to understand the processes of social change that would, he contended, ultimately lead from capitalism to socialism. The issue of explaining social change remains central for the political economist today but the debate has shifted to include the question of whether we are now entering an information society. Specifically, is ours a new kind of society, as was capitalism, or is it just a form of capitalism, perhaps to be called informational capitalism? Are the forces of new communication and information technology so revolutionary that they are bringing about a radical restructuring that will lead to the transformation or even the dissolution of capitalism? Whatever the differences among political economists on this issue, there is no lack of attention and debate over it. 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 •3•

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• • • The Political Economy of Communication • • • areas of life. Political economy has always believed that there is a big picture of society and that we should try to understand it. Adam Smith was not constrained to look at only those things that a narrow discipline told him to see. He cared about the relationships among all facets of social life, including the political, economic, moral, and cultural. The same applied to Karl Marx, as it also does to today’s political economists, whether they belong to the institutional, conservative, neo-Marxian, autonomist, feminist, or environmental schools of political economic thought. They differ on many points but all aim 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 and how are these in turn connected to cultural and social life? The political economist of communication wants to know how all of these influence and are influenced by our systems of mass media, information, and entertainment. Political economy is also noted for its commitment to moral philosophy, which means that it cares about the values that help to create social behavior and about those moral principles that ought to guide efforts to change it. For Adam Smith, as evidenced in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976), a book he favored more than the much more popular Wealth of Nations (1937), this meant understanding values like self-interest, materialism, and individual freedom, that were contributing to the rise of commercial capitalism. Whereas for Karl Marx (1973, 1976a), moral philosophy meant the ongoing conflict between viewing human labor as a source of individual fulfilment and social benefit, as he hoped would be the case, or simply as a marketable commodity, as he concluded was the case in capitalism. Contemporary political economy supports a range of moral positions but, on balance, tends to favor the value of extending democracy to all aspects of social life. This includes the political realm, where democracy means the right to participate in government, but it also extends to the economic, social, and cultural domains where supporters of democracy call for income equality, access to education, full public participation in cultural production, and a guaranteed right to communicate freely. The fourth characteristic of political economy is social praxis, or the fundamental unity of thinking and doing. Specifically, against traditional academic positions which separate research from social intervention and the researcher from the activist, political economists have consistently viewed intellectual life as a means of bringing about social change and social intervention as a means of advancing knowledge. This is in keeping with a tradition tracing its roots to ancient practices of providing advice and counsel to leaders. Political economists certainly differed on what should characterize intervention. Thomas Malthus so feared that population growth would outstrip the food supply that he supported open sewers because the spread of disease is one way to control population. On the other hand, there was Karl Marx, who called on workers to seize power. Notwithstanding these differences, political economists are united in the view that the division between research and action is artificial and must be overturned. Chapter 3 documents how the political economy approach is also distinguished by the many schools of thought that guarantee a significant variety of viewpoints and vigorous internal debate. Arguably, the most important divide emerged in responses •4•

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• • • Overview of the Political Economy of Communication • • • to the classical or founding political economy of Adam Smith and his followers. One set of reactions, which eventually established contemporary economics, focused on the individual as the primary unit of analysis and the market as the principal structure, both coming together through the individual’s decision to register wants or demands in the marketplace. Over time, this approach progressively eliminated classical political economy’s concerns for history, the social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis. In doing so, it transformed political economy into the science of economics founded on empirical investigation of marketplace behavior presented in the language of mathematics. Broadly understood as neoclassical economics, or simply, in recognition of its dominant position as today’s orthodoxy, economics, it is a perspective which reduces labor to just one among the factors of production. According to this view, labor, along with land and capital, is valued solely for its productivity, or the ability to enhance the market value of a final product (Jevons, 1965; Marshall, 1961). Whether human or non-human, organic or inorganic, matter is assessed to the extent that it can be used productively to create wealth. Whereas political economy was founded on the idea that power is central to society, economics largely ignored it (Foley, 2006). A second set of responses to the classic political economy of Adam Smith opposed the tendencies of neoclassical economics by retaining the concern for history, the social whole, moral philosophy, and praxis, even if that meant giving up the goal of creating the science of economics. This set constitutes the wide variety of approaches to political economy. A first wave was led by a number of groups, including conservatives, who sought to replace marketplace individualism with the collective authority of tradition (Carlyle, 1984). It also included Utopian Socialists, who accepted the classical faith in social intervention but urged putting community ahead of the market (Owen, 1851). Finally, the first wave also included Marxian thinkers, who returned labor and the struggle between social classes to the center of political economy. Subsequent formulations built on these perspectives, leaving us with a wide range of contemporary formulations. On the right-wing side of the academic political spectrum, a neo-conservative political economy builds on the work of people like George J. Stigler (1971, 2003), James M. Buchanan (1999), and Ronald Coase (Coase, 1991; Coase and Barrett, 1968), all recipients of the Nobel prize in economics. These thinkers applied the categories of neoclassical economics to all social behavior with the aim of expanding individual freedom. A recent extension of this approach is called the new institutional economics, a school of thought that is gaining adherents and is exemplified in the work of Oliver Williamson (2000). Central to this view is the continuing use of neoclassical economic tools to examine the market as the universal and most natural of institutions (Ankarloo and Palermo, 2004). All other ways of organizing social life are seen as institutional alternatives that serve only to shore up the market on those occasions when it is deficient in meeting social goals (Boettke and Storr, 2002). On the center left of the academic spectrum an older form of institutional political economy focuses critically on how institutional and technological constraints shape markets to the advantage of those corporations and governments large enough and •5•

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• • • The Political Economy of Communication • • • powerful enough to control them (Galbraith, 1985, 2004; Lawson, 2005; Veblen, 1932, 1934). Institutionalists created the framework for communication research that documents how large media companies can control the production and distribution of media products and, by doing so, restrict the diversity of content, specifically by keeping out work that challenges pro-business views. Neo-Marxian approaches, including theories of post-Fordism (Jessop, 2002; Lipietz, 1988), world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), and others engaged in the debate over globalization (Harvey, 2006; Sassen, 2007), continue to place social class at the center of analysis, and are principally responsible for debates on the relationship between monopoly capitalism, the automation and deskilling of work, and the growth of an international division of labor. Recent research has sought out common ground between institutional and neo-Marxian theories (O’Hara, 2000, 2002). Finally, social movements have spawned their own schools of political economy. These include primarily feminist political economy, which addresses the persistence of patriarchy and the lack of attention to household and other reproductive labor (Huws, 2003; McLaughlin, 2004; Peterson, 2005), environmental or ecological political economy, which concentrates on the links between social behavior and the wider organic environment (Foster, 2002; Rosewarne, 2002; Wall, 2006), and a political economy that melds the analysis of social movements with the Italian autonomous theoretical tradition (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004). Dyer-Witheford (1999) and Terranova (2004) have made the most productive use of this tradition in communication studies.

The Political Economy of Communication Chapters 4, 5, and 6 take up the development of a political economy tradition in communication research and describe its development throughout the world. Chapter 4 begins with the definition of communication. It is interesting to observe the vast range of fields that have found it necessary to address the meaning of communication from their specific vantage points. Areas of study and practice, including engineering, computer science, sociology, information studies, philosophy, linguistics, architecture, and several others, including, of course, communication and media studies, have examined the nature of communication. In keeping with a basic theme of this book, there is no single definition that works across all fields. But for the purpose of exploring the political economy of communication, it is useful to see it as a social exchange of meaning whose o...