Page 210 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media convergence, communications regulation 189

examines marketisation in Britain by researching and comparing impacts in
broadcasting and in the health service. Lunt and Livingstone (2012) explore the
performance of regulators and public engagement across media and financial
services. However, there is scope for greater engagement with theories of policy
and policy analysis so as to match the ambition of the regulationist school, while
moving beyond its restrictive explanatory framework.
In radical analysis there has been a shift from totalising frameworks derived
from Marxism towards greater use and interaction with political science theories
that emphasise ‘politics matters’, policy actors and networks, together with new
institutionalism, and renewed attention to discourse. Another emphasis, drawing
on ideational approaches, has been to stress the importance of struggles to set
discursive agendas and to frame policy problems. Here Hancher and Moran’s
(1989: 271–99) conception of regulatory space offers a useful synthesis, examining
the discursive and non-discursive space in which regulatory issues are identified,
framed and enunciated. Likewise, Sum and Jessop (2013) emphasise discursive
struggles in processes of legitimation for regimes of accumulation and regulation.
There have been overarching shifts to neoliberal policy values, as many analysts
have examined. However, policy and regulation tends to be more complex,
contingent, contradictory and contested than stagist. Engaging with this com-
plexity involves attention to the discursive and ideational aspects of policy. In
democracies, governments and regulators have pressures and motivations to
address a range of values which may be conflicted or undermined by policies.
Media attracts special concerns regarding the quality of democracy, culture,
communication and the public good that influences discursive struggles. The
policy environment and organisation of ‘regulatory space’ is therefore of critical
interest and importance. Another key qualification is recognition of the varied,
often conflicting interests of media businesses.

Policy actors and interests

Policies affect media sectors, and firms within those sectors, in different ways.
These may be regarded by some as superficial differences and antagonisms that
can serve to mask the underlying ‘pro-business’ orientation of policies and the
displacement, or exclusion, of values and concerns other than those of private
business interests. However, the manner in which policies impact on different
sectors and firms has become increasingly significant as convergence, digitisation
and regulation confer differential advantages on firms and business models.
Firms also seek to use regulation, and associated legal action, as a tool for
competitive advantage.
In addressing these issues, media policy analysts, including radicals, have
tended to move beyond the framework of interest group analysis and regulatory
capture. In its left inflection the latter tends to focus on the ‘capture’ of reg-
ulators in the service of big business. For right-wing public choice advocates, it
refers to regulators’ affiliation to incumbents and tendencies to defend current