Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. (2017) 10:281–295 DOI 10.1007/s40647-017-0167-x ORIGINAL PAPER
Beyond the Political Economy Versus Cultural Studies Debate? Toward a New Integration Jianhua Yao1
Received: 11 October 2016 / Accepted: 18 January 2017 / Published online: 30 January 2017 Fudan University 2017
Abstract Since the late 1980s, the encounter between political economy and cultural studies within the field of media research has raised continuous debates and confrontations among academics and policymakers, but at the same time it casts light on the important questions as well as methodology in media scholarship. This paper aims to analyze the differences between political economy and cultural studies, two primary but sometimes competing ways of examining media and communication, following a detailed description of their theoretical trajectory. Also, this paper suggests building a bridge connecting the two disciplines, the integration of which is essential to an adequate account of gender, race and social movement studies in addition to class analysis. Keywords Political economy Cultural studies Media research
1 Introduction Since the late 1980s, political economists, endeavoring to study information and communication in a more extensive approach, have floundered with their secondtier status in the society due to the wide critiques from mainstream academics, especially from cultural studies scholars, who maintain that political economy ‘‘carries water for communist regimes and certainly has little sympathy for basic democratic principles and civil liberties’’ (McChesney 2007: 45). Such critiques have led to a head-to-head encounter between two heavyweights in the ‘‘political economy versus cultural studies’’ debate—Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg. When Garnham (1995: 62) suggests that ‘‘the project of cultural studies & Jianhua Yao
[email protected] 1
School of Journalism, Fudan University, 400 Guoding Road, Shanghai 200433, China
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can only be successfully pursued if the bridge with political economy is rebuilt’’, Grossberg (1995: 72) rebuffs his entreaty for the reconciliation of these two approaches of media inquiry by arguing that they have never been more than ‘‘distant cousins’’ and showing his constant disinterest in their rapprochement. However, is the new integration of political economy and cultural studies possible if we are to fully appreciate the complex phenomena collapsed into the communication field or other related fields? This paper attempts to answer this question by first differentiating administrative media research from critical media research, with the former mainly including conservative/celebratory cultural studies (simplified as cultural studies in this paper, if not specifically addressed) and the latter divided into political economy and critical cultural studies (including Sect. 2). Following this, the second part of this paper (including Sects. 3, 4, 5) analyzes the differences between political economy and cultural studies, based on a detailed description of their theoretical trajectory. Finally, a bridge is suggested to be built as an effective way to connect the two disciplines, the integration of which is essential to an adequate account of gender, race and social movement studies in addition to class analysis (including Sect. 6).
2 Administrative Media Research and Critical Media Research Media research has both administrative and critical camps. Basically, the application of political economy to media research indicates a critical perspective, compared to what has been called an administrative media research approach. To distinguish these two approaches, Lazarsfeld (2004) argues that administrative media research is carried out at the behest of large organizations in the marketplace by using different media, whereas critical media research supplies a broad, often historical context, concentrates on the ‘‘general role of our media of communication in the present social situation’’, develops ‘‘a theory of the prevailing social trends of our time’’, and insists on ‘‘ideas of basic human values according to which all actual or desired effects should be appraised’’ (p. 17). In Meehan’s (1999) view, If we begin with a shared valuation that ‘‘although some problems may exist, capitalism is fundamentally good,’’ our research thereby takes a celebratory stance toward media products, audiences and institutions. If our shared valuation suggests that ‘‘despite some progress, capitalism is fundamentally flawed,’’ a critical stance is an integral part of our research. Attempts at dialogue across these mutually exclusive valuations seem bound to fail (p. 150). To specify, conservative/celebratory cultural studies, as a major component of administrative media research and more aligned with the humanities—from literary studies, esthetics, philosophy, art history, and so forth, has essentially focused on the constitution of meaning in texts—how meaning is produced in particular expressive forms, and how it is continually negotiated and constructed/deconstructed through daily practices, defined broadly to include all forms of social communication (Garnham 2000; McRobbie 2005). Different from administrative media research,
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critical media research, originated from eighteenth-century social science, largely addresses its dialectical mode of analysis, its inter-disciplinarity, and its negative stance toward concentrated power. As Mosco (2009) summarizes, critical media research takes on a philosophical approach that is open to subjectivity and is more broadly inclusive, and it also insists on a realist and materialist epistemology that underpins the value of historical research, of thinking in terms of concrete social totalities, of moral commitment, and of overcoming the distinction between social research and practice. For example, when studying the impact of economic and financial activities on media operations and managerial decisions, administrative media scholars aspire to broaden their understanding on how media operators meet informational and entertainment demand in addition to the needs of audiences, advertisers and media companies. They also discuss the crucial factors influencing the consumption of either media products or services, and in this way, the long-standing concern of administrative media research is concluded as audiences, consumption and leisure, instead of industries, production and work (Hartley 2009; Peck 2006; Tapscott and Williams 2008). By contrast, critical media research concentrates on the relationship between social relations and meanings, the consistent and strong analysis of the institutional or structural context of cultural consumption, and the examination of the circumstances that give rise to any existing distribution of power and of the consequences for consumers and citizens (Melody 2007).1 Essentially, critical media scholars give considerable attention to describing and analyzing capitalism, which turns resources including raw materials, land, information and labor into marketable commodities that can earn a profit for those who invest capital into the system. In this paper, my examination of critical media research starts with outlining the theoretical trajectory of political economy, one of its major constitutes, through the analysis of the definition of political economy in either a narrow or a broad sense as well as that of its central qualities.
3 Political Economy 3.1 Definitions of Political Economy Two definitions of political economy capture the wide range of specific and general approaches to the discipline that social theory presents. In a narrow sense, political economy is the scholarly discourse studying power relations affecting the production, distribution and consumption of wealth, income and resources, including information and communication resources (Mosco 2009; Wasko 2005). 1
To explain, the following issues are generally listed on the agenda of critical media researchers: market structure, advertising support, labor relations, profit motivation, technologies and government policies that are shaping the media industries, journalistic practices, occupational sociology, and the nature and content of the news and entertainment (Mansell 2004). Nowadays, with growing attention to the rise of new media and their global influences, critical media research intends to understand how the structuring of global networks and the flows and consumption of digital information are informed by both predominant and alternative principles, values and power relations.
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This formulation aims to understand the institutional circuit of communication products that link, for example, a chain of primary producers to wholesalers, retailers and consumers whose purchases, rentals and attention are reintegrated into the new production process (Anderson 2009; Cova and Dalli 2009). Accordingly, political economists in media research concentrate on analyzing the meaning of media messages as well as on exploring the social process through which these messages are constructed and interpreted, and the contexts and pressures that shape and constrain those constructions.2 For a more general but ambitious definition of political economy, it can be described as the study of control and survival in social life. In this definition, control refers to the internal organization of people and the process of adapting to change; survival means how people produce what they need for social reproduction and continuity. To explain, for the study of control in social life, political economy specifically looks at how a society organizes itself, with the analysis of how the internal organization of social group members adapts to or fails to adapt to the inevitable changes that all societies are faced with. For the study of survival, it examines how people produce what they need to reproduce themselves and to keep their society going. Therefore, it is important for political economists to examine not only the political aspect of social life by concentrating on the control process that encompasses the social organization of relationships within a community, but also the economic aspect by focusing on the survival process that involves both production and reproduction (Mosco 2009). 3.2 Central Qualities of Political Economy There are four central qualities that characterize political economy, and these qualities have broadened its meaning beyond what is typically provided in definitions. Political economy is characterized by addressing social change and historical transformation, the totality of social relations, moral philosophy and social praxis. Firstly, political economists have consistently concentrated on understanding social change and historical transformation. The founding figures, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, primarily explored the greatest capitalist revolution, as well as the social transformation that had led to the emergence of an industrial society in their times. Karl Max critically examined the dynamic forces within capitalism and the relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organizations, in order to comprehensively understand the processes of social changes that would result in socialism (Schiller 2007).
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Several generations of pioneering political economists in media research are worthy of being mentioned. They include Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller, Nicholas Garnham, Garham Murdock, Dan Schiller, Peter Golding, Janet Wasko, Armand Mattelart, Robert McChesney, Vincent Mosco and numerous others. In one way or another, all of these scholars have been preoccupied with how the dynamics of capital accumulation and class power manifest themselves in the capitalist mode of production, particularly the institutional structure, organization and production processes of the media industries (Calabrese 2004).
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Different from orthodox economists who began to coalesce against political economy in the late nineteenth century and tended to transform political economy into the science of economics—like the science of physics, political economists try to understand the broad processes of social and economic changes that create the conditions for buyers and sellers coming together to set price in the marketplace, instead of merely analyzing how they set the price. For political economists in media research, they are dedicated to taking on the central questions of the information society, figuring out the fundamental rearrangement of social structures and processes, particularly with the examination of the following four historical processes: the growth of the media, the extension of corporate reach, commodification and the changing role of state and government intervention (Mansell et al. 2002). Secondly, political economy is holistic in the sense that it concentrates on examining the totality of social relations that involve the political, economic, social and cultural aspects of social life. This notion indicates that compared with mainstream economics, which predominantly sees the economy as a separate and specialized domain, political economy focuses on the interplay between economic organizations and political, social and cultural life. A commitment to the social totality not only means understanding the connection between the political and the economic, but also means linking society’s political economy with the wider social and cultural field (Mosco 2009). That is to say, political economy has consistently aimed to build on the unity of the political and the economic by accounting for their mutual constitution and for their relationship to wider social and symbolic spheres of activities. Therefore, political economists try to understand how power and wealth are related, as well as how they are connected to cultural and social life. For example, the research emphasis of most contemporary political economists is mainly on the integration of corporations, states and classes across national, regional and even developmental divides (Mosco and Schiller 2001). For political economists particularly interested in media research, they are keen to understand the relationship of power and wealth to mass media, information and entertainment (McChesney 2001; Murdock and Wasko 2007; Smythe 1977). In more details, they attempt to examine how media and communication systems and content reinforce, challenge or influence existing class and social relations when particularly seeking to explore how economic factors influence politics and social relations. It means that political economists in media research specifically look at how ownership, support mechanisms and government policies—in association with power relations—influence media behavior and content, concentrating on the structural factors and the labor process in the production, distribution and consumption of communication. Thirdly, Mosco (2009) states that ‘‘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’’ (p. 4). Often, political economy goes beyond technical issues of efficiency and effectiveness to engage with such basic moral questions as social justice, social inequality and the public good. The moral dimension of political economy remains strong because it provides a powerful defense of democracy,
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equality and the public sphere in the face of dominant private interests (Artz et al. 2006). To specify, political economists, often morally-committed, have paid close attention to the distortions and inequalities of the market system. Golding and Murdock (2005) argue that ‘‘public good’’ lays down the foundation for the analysis of the balance between the public and the private sector, as well as the analysis of constructing a public cultural space, which is open, diverse and accessible. According to Habermas (1991), communication has become a central component of democracy; therefore, the central problem of political economy has been the matter of determining a more democratic media system than that provided by the market. Political economy also promotes a deeper understanding of democracy and the key issues surrounding the relationship of communication to democracy and to capitalism, and the relationship between democracy and capitalism (Maxwell 2001). Finally, political economy is concerned with social praxis, or the unity of thinking and doing. Against traditional academic positions that separate research from social intervention and the researcher from the activist, political economists, united in the view that the division between research and action is artificial and must be overturned, have consistently viewed intellectual life as a means of bringing about social change and social intervention as means of advancing knowledge. Political economists have conducted an array of field studies, being fully engaged with the participants of their research. For example, in ‘‘Women and Knowledge Work in the Asia-Pacific: Complicating Technological Empowerment’’, McLaughlin and Johnson (2007) closely examine the female knowledge workers in Singapore and Malaysia, and figure out that discrimination, based on both structural and social elements, is reproduced in women’s use of technology. As such, they critically urge a change of hierarchical and patriarchal authority, including the changes of social attitudes, cultural ideologies and gender stereotypes. Political economists have largely turned out to be social activists in different kinds of social movements when pursuing moral philosophy that is deeply rooted in the tradition of the discipline. They are promoting women’s rights and opposing domestic violence, defending the rights of minority groups and migrant workers, and becoming leaders of environmental movements. Specifically, in alliance with feminists, political economists have pushed government officials to implement social policies that facilitate women’s agency and protect their interests in the name of social justice rather than promoting women’s access solely for the purpose of national economic development (Huws 2003; Lee 2006, 2007). Additionally, working together with trade union officials, political economists have also succeeded in advancing numerous trade union movements in the information age by incorporating the new tools of information technology and telecommunications. Ambitiously, they are striving to fabricate a complex web of communication networks and information sources, which aims to bring together national unions, workplaces, nongovernmental organizations and other popular organizations (McKercher and Mosco 2007; Mosco and McKercher 2008; Yao 2014).
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4 Cultural Studies Cultural studies is a discipline that centers on the general relations between the social order of a society and the totality of symbolic forms through which its meaning is explicated and expressed—in short, its culture (Murdock 2001; Williams 1989). To echo this statement, Babe (2009) loosely defines cultural studies as ‘‘the multidisciplinary study of culture across various social strata, where culture refers to arts, knowledge, beliefs, customs, practices and norms of social interaction’’ (p. 4). Generally, when cultural studies scholars address the centrality of the mass media in relaying social meanings when understanding modern societies, they consider media artifacts as texts, and the process of their analysis consists of ‘‘reading off’’ the layers of social meaning they contain and then extrapolating outward to the social relations involved in their production and use (Bergquist and Ljungberg 2001; Hesmondhalgh 2002). Aside from analyzing mass communication, cultural studies also deals with the traditional forms of symbolization embedded in arts, literature and religion, as well as with everyday expressive forms such as conversation, clothing and body gestures. Treatment of power separates critical cultural studies from what is termed conservative/celebrative cultural studies. Conservative/celebrative cultural studies scholars propose that ‘‘message recipients make their own meanings’’, or that ‘‘people select cultural products from a vast array of possibilities according to which ones best satisfy their preexisting wants and needs’’ (Babe 2009: 63). More specifically, they start from the hypothesis that all cultural forms contain traces of the processes and assumptions involved in their creation and offer interpretive guidelines to consumers (either present or potential). In this sense, media products are just plain fun. By contrast, within critical cultural studies, ‘‘asymmetries and injustices in the distribution of communicatory power are front and center’’ (Babe 2009: 64). According to Sardar and Van Loon (1998), three characteristics out of five of critical cultural studies explicitly deal with power: Critical cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relationships to examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices. Critical cultural studies’ objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context within which it manifests itself. Critical cultural studies is committed to moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. Cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in capitalist societies in particular (p. 9). It is essential to note that political economy and critical cultural studies are integrated when they are both centrally concerned with the constitution and exercise of power. Critical cultural studies, as aforementioned, gives full consideration to the relations of dominance and dependence, which is related back to power struggles
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(Hall 1992). Meanwhile, the operation of power has long been the focus of political economists who aim to understand how power is structured and differentiated, where it comes from and how it is renewed. Political economists always view structures of domination and oppression in a way that they serve concentrated political and economic power, and more importantly, that they are supported and defended by these centers of power.3 For both political economists and critical cultural studies scholars, political and economic analysis is crucial because political and economic power relations are understood as the core of the world, including the balance between capitalist enterprises and public intervention, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, copyright act revisions, law enforcement, taxation, war and annexations, weaponry, advertising and public relations, and so on (Babe 2009). Therefore, as Golding and Murdock (2005) summarize in ‘‘Culture, Communications and Political Economy,’’ political economy and critical cultural studies are integrated: ‘‘both (of them) work within a broadly neo-Marxist view of society, both are centrally concerned with the constitution and exercise of power, and both take their distance from the liberal pluralist tradition of analysis with its broad acceptance of the central workings of advanced capitalist societies’’ (p. 12).
5 Differences Between Political Economy and Cultural Studies Arguably, distinguishing political economy from cultural studies is not an easy task. Although these two approaches focus on different areas of inquiry or objects of study, both of them seem to be needed for a complete critical analysis of culture and media. According to Meehan (1999), the reason why the differences between political economy and cultural studies exist is that they focus on different objects of study: political economy mainly deals with the ‘‘political’’ and ‘‘economic’’ areas of human activities when it ‘‘provides the context for media products as cultural artifacts’’, while cultural studies concentrates on the ‘‘cultural’’ areas by examining ‘‘how particular creators, particular artifacts, or particular consumers operate within that context’’ (p. 7). The political economy versus cultural studies debate is fueled by such a separation—where ‘‘politics/economy’’ and ‘‘culture’’ have been conceived as empirically distinct levels of human existence. In other words, if cultural studies is primarily interested in the way how mechanism works within a particular media text or across a range of texts, political economy is concerned to explain how the economic dynamics of production has structured public discourse. As Garnham (1995) maintains, for political economists, the cultural commodities must be situated in their historical and material contexts to reveal not only the controlling interests of the producers but also how ‘‘monopoly capitalism has been the exercise of the political and ideological domination through the economic’’ (p. 3). Therefore, political economy departs from the tendency in cultural studies toward what Pecheux (1975: 34) calls ‘‘the narcissism of the 3
The analysis of power relations also links political economy with communication because both of them are located between capitalism and democracy, directly deal with commercial and material issues, and are concerned with issues of social justice and political self-governance.
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subject,’’ by correcting the now fashionable inclination to reject thinking in terms of historical practices and social totalities. Political economy also departs from the growing proclivity toward an obscurantism in cultural studies that belies the original view that cultural analysis should be accessible to those ordinary people who are responsible for its social construction (Rothschild 2002). Moreover, Meehan (1999) argues that the separation of political economy and cultural studies rests on an enduring dualism within Western thought, which is variously construed as ‘‘material’’ versus ‘‘symbolic’’. Political economy gives primacy to the ‘‘material’’—understood as the productive forces, processes and relations of a given social formation—and sees the ‘‘symbolic’’, the ‘‘cultural’’ as secondary and dependent. From the view of political economists, the ‘‘necessary structure of social (productive) collaboration is the form through which individual social agents are shaped and related to one another’’ (Garnham 1995: 64). That is to say, individual consciousness is a product of ‘‘material interest’’, which is determined by one’s position within class-based relations of production and constitutes the ‘‘link between the base and the superstructure’’ (ibid). Thus, instead of scrutinizing texts, discourses or symbolic meanings, political economists aim to understand the production of meaning as the exercise of power, how public discourse is constructed by promoting certain cultural forms over others within the economic dynamics of production, and the barriers that result in material inequalities when limiting the freedom of consumption, for example, time, space and cultural competence (Golding and Murdock 2005). Cultural studies, however, prioritizes the ‘‘symbolic’’, or the ‘‘culture’’ as the embodiment of identity and relegates the ‘‘economic’’ to a contingent position. As a result, the analysis of cultural texts is significant, and such an analysis is variable and depends predominantly on different contexts (Kelly 2009; Lessig 2004). In Grossberg’s (1995) view, ‘‘it is precisely because no specific fit or pre-given compatibility can be discerned between the base and the superstructure that the questions of cultural studies (and of cultural politics) become important’’ (p. 79). Therefore, the mode of production, which for political economy is the key determinant and to which ‘‘people’s actual practices are a response,’’ holds no such determinative centrality in cultural studies. In ‘‘Commodity, Culture, Common Sense: Media Research and Paradigm Dialogue,’’ Meehan (1999) explicates: …cultural studies had renounced its roots in Marxism and political economy by ignoring how the resources for cultural practice, both material and symbolic, are made available in structurally determined ways through the institutions and circuits of commodified cultural production, distribution and consumption…By decontextualizing its objects of study, ranging from diasporic culture to soap operas to shopping, cultural studies celebrates them as politically liberating ‘‘texts’’ through which individuals construct personal identities while opposing capitalism…However, these statements are nonsensical because understanding such texts requires contextualizing them in terms of structures, forces and dynamics that are firmly rooted in the problem of survival and in relations of domination. A society’s culture is intimately
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connected to its political economy: Both expression and consumption of culture are shaped by the structure of opportunities institutionalized within a society (pp. 151–152). Indeed, the academic breach not only stands in contrast to the material conditions of everyday life, in which the realms of politics, economics and culture are continuously intertwined, but challenges the scholarly trajectory which characterizes political economy and cultural studies as ‘‘fully integrated, consistent and mutually supportive’’ (Zeffiro 2011: 238). McChesney has further clarified the relationship between political economy and cultural studies specifically regarding media/communication research. In ‘‘The Political Economy of Communication and the Future of the Field,’’ McChesney (2000) maintains that cultural studies concerns the relationship of media texts to audiences and both of them to existing class and social relations. It also regards media economics as an indispensible approach to provide micro-analysis of how media firms and markets operate, but assumes that, like the field of mainstream economics, the existing social and class relations are a given. Political economy, however, chooses a different perspective by inquiring about the structural factors that influence the production of media content, with a broader understanding of the relations between politics and economy. Additionally, it highlights the significance of corporate, commercial penetration in general, as well as its interest-generating characteristics to shape the new media (Javary and Mansell 2002; Kim and Weaver 2002). According to McChesney (2000), in the media sector, ‘‘Political economists have sidestepped the demoralization and political pessimism of neoliberal times, and rekindled reasoned utopianism—the notion that it is the right of the world’s people to use their imaginations to construct the media, the economy, the world, within reason to suit their democratically determined needs’’ (p. 116).
6 Building a Bridge: Integration of Political Economy and Cultural Studies Although it is important to address the differences between political economy and cultural studies, in ‘‘Political Economy, Communication, and Labor,’’ Mosco (1998) points out that cultural studies has contributed to the rethinking of political economy in several ways, and vice versa. Basically, these two approaches, to a certain extent, are formed into a new integration. To begin with, in recent years, political economy has been challenged by cultural studies scholars for its neglect of ideology and the ways in which discourse shapes meaning and allows for resistance. In response, political economists have increasingly gone beyond studies of ownership and control to consider relationships of political economy and cultural studies, and therefore to include questions about texts, audiences and consumption. At the same time, political economic analyses begin to reconceptualize the ‘‘cultural’’ and broaden the objects of study to include individual experiences rather than focus primarily on macro-level, institutional and structural analyses. As a result, the tradition of political economy is more complex
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and diverse than some critics claim; however, political and economic analyses are still considered as the primary and necessary grounding for ideological readings and cultural analyses (Bagdikian 2000; Sussman 1999). Second, political economists focus on analyzing the patterns of ownership and control to understand how they structure and constrain cultural production. In most cases, they address consumption by looking at business growth as a structural response to the economic crisis of overproduction, and as a social response to the political crisis (Mosco 2009). In other words, political economists concern themselves less with the consumption practices of individuals, and more with the production issues of cultural artifacts. However, cultural studies often takes consumption practices as an entry point, and in Grossberg’s (1995) words, ‘‘cultural studies has paid too much attention to consumption, and that it may even have lost some of its critical edge by having overemphasized the pleasure, freedom and empowerment of consumption’’ (pp. 74–75). Instead of conceptualizing it as an economic practice, consumption is most often theorized as a cultural practice. Cultural studies scholars believe that while capitalism is considered as a cultural practice, it must be understood in terms of its political and economic implications as well as its cultural significance. To further understand capitalism and its relationship to the daily lives of people, political economists, in alliance with cultural studies scholars, are paying specific attention to the meaning of consumption, not only as it results from a crisis of overproduction, but also as it stems from the ‘‘pleasure’’ many politically, economically and socially disenfranchised groups derive from consuming (Riordan 2002). For political economists, understanding wants and desires as experienced by individuals and groups of people, as well as how this pathos combines with the crisis of overproduction, opens the way to the change of social consciousness. Moreover, political economists have realized that consumption has become an integral part of the reproduction of capitalism and class inequalities (Bauwens 2009). In this way, the meaning and status conferred upon consumption practices, although widely varied across different groups and communities, is of significant importance in understanding how subjectivities are both politically and economically constructed. Third, political economists have paid growing attention to gender, race and social movements in addition to class analysis. Political economy tends to focus on social class—namely the structure of access to the means of production and the distribution of the economic surplus—as the key to the structure of domination, with agency, process and social practice emphasized. There are good reasons for this emphasis. According to political economists, class structuration is a central entry point for comprehending social life, and numerous studies have documented the persistence of class divisions in the political economy of media/communication research. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there are other dimensions that complement and conflict with class structuration, including gender, race, social movements and other potential makers of differences. These alternative structures of domination, along with class, constitute much of the social relations of communication. Associated with cultural studies scholars, political economists acknowledge that society is considered as the ensemble of structuring actions
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initiated by social actors that shape and are shaped by class, gender, race, social movements, etc. In other words, society exists, if not as a seamless, sutured whole, at least as a field mutually constituted by various identifiable social relationships. It thereby rejects the subjectivities that produce purely nominal processes of categorization. As a result, class, gender, race and social movements are viewed as real, both as social relationships and as foci of analyses (Mosco 2009). To be more concrete, in recent years, political economy has not been entirely silent on the issue of gender, although it typically addresses the subject as a dimension of class relations (Gandy 1998; Haraway 2003; Harding 2003). For example, it has done this in research on information technology and the international division of labor, which underscores the double oppression that women workers face in industries such as microelectronics. In this industry, women workers experience the lowest wages and the most brutalizing working conditions. Therefore, principally by examining the role of media and information technology in its constitution, political economy has primarily advanced a sense of the world not merely as class-divided, but sometimes as gender-divided, under the umbrella of addressing the questions of capitalism extensively (Meehan and Riordan 2002).
7 Conclusion Political economy is the scholarly discourse studying social relations, particularly the power relations, which affect the production, distribution and consumption of wealth, income and resources, including information and communication resources. It is also the study of control and survival in social life. Therefore, political economists concentrate on the issues that are intimately associated with audience commodities, corporate power and the propaganda model. Political economists in media research concentrate on the examination of the material foundations of what we have come to call ‘‘the public sphere’’, the understanding of our news and entertainment industries as capitalist enterprises, and the analyses of the frontiers of ‘‘new media’’ development with media policies and regulations specifically examined. Also, different from cultural studies that arguably scrutinizes texts, discourses or symbolic meanings of communication, political economy is characterized by addressing social change and historical transformation, the totality of social relations, moral philosophy and social praxis. It also focuses on the structural factors that influence the production of media content, with a broader understanding of the relations between politics and economy. Such a difference makes the political economic approach critical and important. However, cultural studies has also contributed to the rethinking of political economy in several ways, and vice versa; therefore, these two approaches, to a certain extent, are formed into a new integration. Political economists have increasingly gone beyond studies of ownership and control to include questions about texts, audiences and consumption—including individual experiences in addition to macro-level, institutional and structural analyses. They have also taken individual consumption practices into consideration while continuing to concentrate
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on the production issues of cultural artifacts. Moreover, there is the rise of gender, race and social movement research from a political economic perspective, examining various identifiable social relationships that mutually constitute a society and avoiding the exclusive analysis of nominal processes of categorization. Undoubtedly, political economy is a living tradition in media research, one that responds to either the changes in material conditions or the upheavals in intellectual life, as China has experienced in recent years. Therefore, it becomes rather substantial for Chinese media/communication scholars to respond to the rapid social development by underlining important current trends in political economy, for example, the globalization of political economy research, a new emphasis on how citizens and workers have influenced the history of communication, the growth of research from alternative standpoints, etc. These trends require a new integration of political economy and cultural studies, especially when old media are shifted to new social media, and political participation with media is largely expanded. Also, more contributions from and about China and the entire region of Asia are expected to be made on condition that the political economy tradition—which was once principally based in North America and Europe—has now become global, transcultural and more inclusive, with cultural studies allied.
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Jianhua Yao is currently an assistant professor in the School of Journalism, Fudan University. He received his doctoral degree from Queen’s University, Canada, and his research interest includes political economy of communication, Chinese publishing industry, and labor studies. His latest book Knowledge Workers in Contemporary China: Reform and Resistance in the Publishing Industry was published by Lexington Books in 2014.
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