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222 Communication Theory & Research
find everything from Marxist domination (in Shoemaker’s scheme it would
occupy the ‘ideology’ level) to structural-functionalist control (at the ‘extra-media’
level) to Berger and Luckmann’s constructivist understanding of knowledge
production (the ‘routines’ level).
In an empirical study this diversity, valuable in itself, has to be reduced
in order to avoid eclecticism. For my purpose, an approach to power should
bear at least two features: it should be able to include different social influences
(not only the government) and be applicable to the fluid character of contempo-
rary Russian society. An insight for a unifying concept of power can be found in
some ideas of Michel de Certeau (1984) and his rethinking of Michel Foucault –
a tradition that to my knowledge has never been used to theorize media
production.
The main novelty of Foucault’s works is that he was the first to treat power as
(1) ‘something that is rather exercised than possessed’ (de Certeau, 1984: 26), that
is as practice, and as (2) something not solely repressive, but productive as well.
This is what de Certeau directly borrows from Foucault, but, unlike the latter, he
gives more attention to agents of practices, especially ‘weak’ ones whose role in
power relations is often invisible, yet very important. According to de Certeau,
Foucault (1977) only examined the practices of production of power, while
de Certeau looks at how power might be assimilated, accepted or resisted.
Using these ideas as a starting point, I understand power as practice. By prac-
tices of power – my major unit of analysis – I mean typical actions of imposing
agents’ will, restrictive or productive, to media producers or directly to the final
media product. Thus, for the purpose of my research I reduce media production
to a system of interactions between individuals or groups who possess certain
resources that in turn shape their practices. My study suggests three most impor-
tant resources: (1) access to violence/enforcement, (2) economic capital and
(3) information resource. Access to creation of rules (4) (that in de Certeau’s
terms discriminates between weak and strong agents) is also a very important
resource, though of a slightly different nature. Based on various combinations of
these resources, the following ideal types of power agents may be discerned:
‘state’ agents (resources 1–4); other, i.e. ‘illegitimate’ sources of violence (1);
advertisers (2, 3); owners (2, 4) and sources of information (3). In practice, agents
may also possess different combinations of resources, as well as form temporary
alliances and constant teams with holders of other resources. The reasons for
exclusion of audience from the list of agents is addressed in one of the following
sections.
Unlike audiences, news producers – from rank-and-file reporters to media
executives – are active players of the game and possess their special resources:
privileged access to media production (an institutional resource) and a mono-
poly of certain skills (professional). This opposes them to all the rest as ‘internal’
agents to ‘external’ ones, following the Shoemaker–Reese distinction. However,
this externality is nothing more than a necessity to act through media workers
in order to influence the final product; despite it, ‘external’ agents are hardly
less constitutive for news production than the journalists themselves. The
boundaries between media organizations and their environment are blurred,
and real people often form teams across them, as well as divide into competing