Page 27 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

6 Mapping approaches and themes

and extends neoclassical economic tenets to focus on calculating ‘welfare’
maximising advantage and by applying this to all forms of social behaviour. It
does so, critics argue, by pursuing a narrow and conservative model of welfare
based on promoting the activities of acquisitive individuals exercising freedom
over their supposedly naturally acquired property rights. The purported aim is
to provide ‘positive’ or value-neutral analysis, yet the base assumptions are
anything but.

Critical political economy

Critical political economy refers to approaches that place emphasis on the
unequal distribution of power and are critical of arrangements whereby such
inequalities are sustained and reproduced. This critical tradition is influenced by,
although by no means limited to, Marxism, as we will examine. Marxian political
economy provides a historical analysis of capitalism including the forces and
relations of production, the production of surplus value, commodification, social
class divisions and struggles.

The political economy of communications

Any examination of communications that addresses economic or political aspects
may be included in a broad category of political economic analysis. More
narrowly, much ‘political economic’ analysis addresses aspects of the way in
which communications are organised and provided as services. Emerging in the
twentieth century the main focus has been on mass communication, defined as
‘the industrialized production and multiple distribution of messages through
technological devices’ (Turow 2010: 17).
The political economy of communication represents a broad field of work
drawing on economics, political science, communication and cultural analysis. A
more accurate term for the tradition that developed in media and communication
studies is critical political economy (or CPE). This ‘critical’ approach is at odds,
as we will see, with ‘mainstream’ traditions in communication research as well as
in economic, political and social theory.

Critical scholarship

The term ‘critical’ is usefully broad and encompassing, but it also has distinctive
historical roots in communication research. It alludes to the academic practices
and values of critique in intellectual enquiry – questioning, interrogating and
challenging the adequacy of explanations of phenomena. For Mosco (2009: 128)
political economy is critical ‘because it sees knowledge as the product of com-
parisons with other bodies of knowledge and with social values’. As a descriptor
for political economy, however, ‘critical’ has a more precise meaning for scholarship
that is critical of the deficiencies of capitalism and of rule by elites. The term critical