Page 25 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

4 Mapping approaches and themes

approaches. I take the critical political economy approach to encompass studies
that consider political and economic aspects of communications and which are
critical in regard to their concerns with the manner in which power relations are
sustained and challenged. The vitality of critical political economy studies of
communication is demonstrated across recent collections of international scholarship
(Wasko et al. 2011; Winseck and Jin 2012) and work on regions such as Latin
America (Bolaño et al. 2012). There are several contributing factors that can help to
explain this revitalisation, but an overriding factor is that the organisation of
communication services has returned to prominence. The promise of limitlessness
(in digital communications, content creation, creative labour, global cultural
flows) encounters the constraining influences of money and power (the economic
and political) in a manner that is unavoidable for serious analysis. The tensions
here are not only with visions of limitlessness generated by those advancing the
wonders of digital capitalism but also for counter-hegemonic visions of global
solidarity and cultural exchange. This chapter introduces media political economy
analysis and situates this in relation to alternative approaches.

Political economy
Political economy originally referred to a tradition of economic thinking that
addressed the production, distribution and consumption of resources used to
sustain human existence. For Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish
enlightenment thinker, political economy was the study of ‘wealth’, and was
concerned with ‘how mankind arranges to allocate scarce resources with a view
to satisfying certain needs and not others’ (Smith 1776: 161). For Smith this was
also the study of political decision-making, a ‘branch of the science of a statesman
or legislator’ concerned with the activities of government to aid economic
growth. The so-called classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, were primarily interested in capitalism
as a system for the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of wealth.
In the nineteenth century Marx (1818–83) and Engels added class analysis,
underpinning their radical critique of capitalism.
A general definition of political economy is the ‘study of the social relations,
particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution
and consumption of resources, including communication resources’ (Mosco
2009: 24). Mosco traces four ideas central to political economy: engagement
with social change and history, understanding the social whole, moral philosophy
and praxis (Mosco 2009: 26–36). One link between what we will examine as
critical political economy and what is known as classical political economy is that
the economic sphere is not separated off from related social and political
phenomena. The allocation of resources is recognised to involve political, not
merely economic, decisions whose moral consequences permeate social life.
Political economists sought to explain the emergence of capitalism but also to
assess its implications for human life across societies. This ‘holistic’ approach