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14 Communication Theory & Research
and Tracey (1985) are recent examples of a rigorous rejection of the conspiratorial
version of the thesis.
Without going into details of the twenty-year debate about the shape of
international television flows and their determinants, it is fair to conclude that
the position of West European countries in the media imperialism framework
remains uncertain; no authors explicitly exclude Western Europe from the media
imperialism thesis. It also seems that empirical evidence about international
television flows, and particularly about their effects, is scarce. Until recently the
empirical ‘evidence’ in both major and minor studies of international commu-
nication flows has mainly comprised compilations of examples at a ‘trade press
level’ referred to above, plus routine reference to the classic systematic empirical
work by Nordenstreng and Varis. More recently, reference has normally been made
to Varis (1985), but this has not changed the dominant understanding since the
conclusions of this study are similar to that of the earlier joint work (Nordenstreng
and Varis, 1974). [...]

Proposal for a Conceptual Framework

There is an obvious need for a framework to guide descriptions and analyses in
the field of research on international communication flows. Such a framework is
suggested in this section. Television is used as an example but the basic elements
of the framework apply to all kinds of media content.
The general purpose of all studies on international television flows has been
to establish knowledge about the movement of programmes between countries
on the assumption that these have cultural and economic effects in specific
countries or regions or among specific groups of viewers. Some of the most
frequently used concepts in the publications based on these studies are ‘inter-
national’, ‘transnational’, ‘internationalization’ and ‘transnationalization’. The
references listed at the end of this article convey the impression that these
concepts are normally used without reference to commonsense definitions to
describe both the flows (the independent variable) and their effects (the dependent
variable).
An investigation of the application of these notions in a number of central
contributions to the literature on international communication flows does
not add to conceptual clarity (see Nordenstreng and Varis, 1974; Read, 1976;
Tunstall, 1977; Lee, 1980; Many Voices, 1980; Janus, 1981; Janus and Roncagliolo,
1979; Hamelink, 1983; Anderson, 1984; Mattelart et al., 1984; Mowlana, 1986;
Varis, 1985). 1
In these publications ‘internationalization’, and the now more frequently used
‘transnationalization’, are employed to describe several phenomena: the expansion
of something transnational, the global penetration of, for example, advertising, the
transcending of borders, the growth of transnational companies or even growth of
co-productions, and sundry effects like the homogenization of cultures, the creation
of new non-indigenous cultures and cultural synchronization.
All the above mentioned publications are interesting contributions to the
study of international communication flows, but none of them offers a general