Page 39 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

18 Mapping approaches and themes

theory and ideology to postmodernism and towards idealist thought and
acquiescence. Likewise, McGuigan (1992) charts the shifts from cultural materi-
alism to cultural populism and a more celebratory account of consumer/user
power in cultural markets. Against the much better known Birmingham School
of British Cultural Studies (whose first directors were Richard Hoggart, then
Stuart Hall), Curran (2004) describes a Westminster tradition where Nicholas
Garnham, Curran and others took a more materialist path focused on policy
and regulation, media institutions and work, technology and history. Babe (2009:
84) argues that in their formative years political economy and cultural studies
approaches ‘were fully integrated, consistent, and mutually supportive’. CPE
shares common roots and integrates well with critical cultural studies (char-
acterised by Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism) but the other scion of
postmodernist cultural studies is inimical. Critical of the postmodernist (and
populist) turn in cultural studies, Babe advocates the reintegration of a cultural
materialist, critical cultural studies with political economy. We will return to
examine these issues at various points but to do so it is important to identify key
differences informing relations between varieties of cultural studies and CPE,
some of which remain salient. However, divisions at the level of ontology, episte-
mology, methods, political philosophy and outlook belie easy summary, much
less synthesis (see Ferguson and Golding 1997; Mosco 2009; Curran 2002;
Meehan and Riordan 2002; Cottle 2003a; Babe 2009). Three key areas of division
are epistemology, politics and political and social theory, and theories and analysis
of culture and communications.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and is concerned with the nature, sources
and extent of the knowable, and the justifications for beliefs. As discussed above,
CPE generally operates in an epistemological framework of critical realism. This
realist epistemology is based on the ‘assumption that there is a material world
external to our cognitive processes which possesses specific properties ultimately
accessible to our understanding’ (Garnham 1990: 3). That reality is only accessible
to us through concepts and discourses, but there is a material reality independent
of discursive construction. For some culturalist critics such ‘realism’ is conflated
with positivism, a crude belief in the capacity to determine ‘objective’ facts from
external reality. Cultural studies, influenced by postmodernist thought, tends towards
post-positivist, constructionist and subjectivist epistemologies (Hesmondhalgh
2007: 46). Yet, plenty of culturalist scholars share the main tenets of critical
realism. Instead, a more general critique made of CPE is that it is empiricist,
privileging observable ‘facts’ at the expense of interrogating meaning systems
and articulations with rigour, in other words doing precisely what the Frankfurt
School decried. The charge itself reflects tensions traceable to the humanities’
influences on cultural studies and the social scientificinfluences on CPE (Philo
and Miller 2001). Some observations; first, it is problematic to conflate empirical