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What (is) political economy of the media? 17

to historians. The principal case for revisiting is that the division can help
new generations of students to map and decode differences formulated in
contemporary as well as historical writings.
The shared intellectual roots of cultural studies and political economy have
been described by many scholars (Babe 2009). This excavation has often been
allied to an effort at reintegration or a redrawing of the map to realign critical
scholars working across cultural studies and CPE traditions (Meehan 1999;
Couldry 2000; Fenton 2007; Hesmondhalgh 2007). This is vital work, to which
this book seeks to contribute. For Babe (2009: 4):

Cultural studies may be loosely defined as the multidisciplinary study of culture
across various social strata, where culture refers to arts, knowledge, beliefs,
customs, practices, and norms of social interaction. Studies in political economy
of media, in contrast, focus on the economic, financial, and political causes
and consequences of culture.

Babe argues that there are common roots in cultural materialism, an approach
developed in the work of Raymond Williams. Williams (1983: 210) called for a
‘cultural materialist’ approach that should pursue ‘analysis of all forms of
signification [ … ] within the actual means and conditions of their production’.
Williams (1980: 243–44) outlined ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material)
productive process and of specific practices, of “arts”, as social uses of material
means of production’. This emphasised that cultural forms and activities needed
to be comprehended in more encompassing social processes. The legacy was
complex, though. As Schiller (1996: 187) discusses, Williams’s cultural materialist
theory generated an ‘ambiguous oscillation, for it explicitly assigned to language,
communication and consciousness as such “a primacy co-equal with other forms of
the material social process, including …‘labour’ or ‘production’”’, yet reproduced
the dualism in the terms used in discussion, tending to separate language (or
consciousness) and production (or being). The field of communications, argues
Schiller (1996) has struggled to overcome such dualistic thinking, dividing mental
and material and cultural and economic in Western thought, a dualism that
Peck (2006) argues structured the mid 1990s debates on political economy versus
cultural studies between Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg. 2
The formative intellectual context in which CPE and cultural studies developed
has been mapped, albeit in fragmented ways. Schiller (1996: 186) highlights the
turn to culture in the 1960s and 1970s, informing political economic analysis of
‘transnational corporate communication’ and British cultural studies’‘engagement
with the history and present status of the British working class and, soon, with the
anti-racist and feminist movements that began once again to burgeon. In both
cases “culture” appeared to satisfy, or at least, to raise the prospect of satisfying
the need for drastic conceptual revision of entrenched Marxian formulations’.
Curran (2004) traces how the influence of Marxism and literary studies led to
British cultural studies and along a path through textual analysis, psychoanalytic