Page 123 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

102 Critical investigations in political economy

power of media professionals. CPE analysis must show the ways in which different
organisational arrangements and cultures of media work influence activities.
Such detailed attention to media work is needed since the accounts of media
work that have emerged in recent years have not always pursued either the
macro analytical frameworks or criticality of political economy.

Network analysis and control

There are tensions between instrumental and structural accounts of media owner-
ship. Instrumentalist accounts focus on owner behaviour and pursue a critique of
intervention, ideology and the consequences of the pursuit of political and com-
mercial interests. Structuralist accounts relocate agency to the dynamics of market
competition. In one the promotion of capitalism arises from ideological affiliation;
in the other it arises from the market imperatives and networking of firms. Both
accounts have salience and help identify processes. Yet they also replicate problems
in conceptual formulations of structure and agency that are irresolvable. There
have been efforts to overcome structure–agency problematics in network analysis.
For actor–network theory (ANT) sociology should be redefined as the study of
network associations (Latour 2005: 5). Arsenault (2012: 102) proposes a ‘network
political economy approach’ whose ‘primary focus of analysis is on the processes,
programs, and structures that constitute a given network rather than capital or
markets’. There are a number of valuable features of this approach. It shifts the
focus from traditional ‘global media’ content businesses to examine how the core
communications system comprises complex networking relationships between
multinational companies. It brings greater attention to telecoms- and computing-
based groups within the core communications system. It highlights that digitalisation
aids the production of diverse content. It proposes that to understand power we must
recognise not only the control of big corporations but also the ‘creative capacity of
new producers’ (Mastrini and Becerra 2012: 69). Conceptions of structure and
agency are recast. Network linkages may take many forms including interpersonal
interactions, but also strategic corporate alliances and flows of information
between and within groups. A focus on network relations also grants ‘equal, if
not greater, significance to the processes of collaboration between actors’
(Arsenault 2012: 103) rather than traditional CPE focus on competition and
consolidation. The network approach

sees power as embedded in networks rather than something that is a function
of corporate hierarchies.
[ … ]

Power is thus not necessarily concentrated within any single company
but embedded in the processes of association between key nodes in the
network.
(Arsenault 2012: 103)