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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 59

described as ‘the negative consequences of commercialism’and thus restricting the
profit-seeking strategies of the media market. Pressure groups in civil society organize
to counteract certain kinds of media content and convince state authorities to force
media industries into self-regulation. The American Parent’s Music Resource Centre
(PMRC) did this in the 1990s, and similar alliances of parental, religious or feminist
movements and associations working with state authorities have resulted in restric-
tions of violent, racist or sexist media content in many countries, including Sweden.
Such efforts depend on symbolic power, which works in both direct and indirect
or mediated ways. It is incorporated into people’s consciousness and corporeally
embodied through processes of socialization and schooling, with effects later reflected
in media habits, cultural consumption and taste patterns that differ according to
class, gender, ethnic background and education. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the
embodiment of durable dispositions or generative schemes that determine people’s
orientation in the social world, is a powerful theoretical tool to grasp how such
processes are related to symbolic power in the form of cultural capital. 39 Through
habitus, symbolic power is built into actions and practices without direct external
coercion. This habitus formation guides individuals towards adapting certain habits
of consumption and media use, or taste preferences. Symbolic power thus works
through people’s self-regulatory practices, whereby they structure the conditions of
their own media consumption.
But symbolic power is also at stake in the struggles for convertible forms of capital
within the multiple and relatively autonomous fields of cultural production,
including the educational, academic, journalism, arts and literary fields. The multi-
plicity of cultural fields contributes towards differentiating cultural capital into
specific forms, like educational, scientific, informational and artistic capital.
Complex struggles for symbolic power take place both between and within these
fields of cultural production. They are hierarchically ordered, as are their relations to
the overall fields of economic and political power, or what Bourdieu – parallel to
Habermas’ notion of political power – terms ‘the field of power’. 40
Media power is an institutionalized form of communicative power that hardly
qualifies as an autonomous cultural field, since it is primarily controlled by economic
or political forces. It is nevertheless perhaps the most important contemporary source
of symbolic power. Based on the control of resources of communication and infor-
mation, media power works through processes of selection, including the so-called
agenda-setting function whereby dominant media set the agenda for public discussion
by paying attention to some issues while systematically disregarding others. However,
media power can be used either to reveal or to conceal other (economic, political or
symbolic) power strategies. This makes it a central power source whose links to
economic and political power are particularly controversial in public and political life.
Communicative power resides in acts of communication. As Habermas shows in
The Theory of Communicative Action, building on speech act theory, all communica-
tion involves an exchange between subjects, balancing communicative and instru-
mental (goal-oriented, strategic) forms of interaction, and thus the exertion of social

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