Page 42 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 21

economists argued that active audience accounts reproduced liberal ‘uses and
gratifications’ research, taking media provision as given (offering an uncritical
account of what was made available for audiences) and downplaying the highly
unequal power dynamics between producers and consumers (Mattelart
1994: 237).
An influential model developed by scholars at the Open University (UK)
conceptualised a ‘circuit of production linking processes of representation, identity,
production, consumption and regulation’ (Du Gay: 1997). They argued that all
these foci are required to ‘complete’ a study, and that any can serve as entry
points for analysis. By contrast, CPE scholars argue for an ordering and
sequencing of analysis that recognises the antecedence of production; ‘production is
processually and temporally prior to consumption’ (Born 2000: 416). For Murdock
(2003: 17) analysing ‘the dynamics that are currently reshaping the professional
production of public culture’ is ‘an essential first step to understanding the symbolic
textures of everyday life’.
Today the re-examination of production and consumption stimulates fruitful
dialogue and integration across CPE and culturalist work, for instance in work
on the dynamics of corporate synergy and intertextuality. Corporations seek to
exploit their brands and intellectual property across a wide range of media
platforms, forms and allied merchandise, which are promoted and cross-promoted
through their various media outlets. The strategies of recycling, reversioning and
repurposing have been analysed by CPE scholars as strategies to maximise revenues,
including using corporate forms of transmedia storytelling, as in the Matrix
trilogy and spin-off products, to create ‘narratively necessary purchases’ (Proffitt
et al. 2007: 239; Meehan 2005). Within culturalist literature such ‘top down’
critiques of power tend to be reversed in favour of a more celebratory account
that takes themes of active audiences and resistant readings into an analysis of
fan-generated production. The best work, however, is alert to the contradictory
tensions in fandom (Hills 2002) and draws on the strengths of CPE and cultural
studies to examine the nature of the constraints and opportunities of inter-
textuality. Jenkins (2006) examines the contradictions for media companies in
their desire to police intellectual property while encouraging lucrative forms of
immersion by fans. Waetjen and Gibson (2007) argue that Time Warner’s Harry
Potter films and merchandise created a ‘corporate reading’ that supplanted the
contradictory and polysemous discourses on commodification encountered in the
J.K. Rowling books. Such studies highlight the value of considering how corpo-
rate activity seeks to order ‘(inter) textual space’, encouraging analysis of the
contending forces and sites of communicative exchange involving user-generated
content alongside corporate promotions and journalistic commentary (Hardy
2010a, 2011). In turn this allows for a critical political economy that is alert to
contradictions within cultural production and exchange, and can draw on the
insights of cultural theory. Far from diminishing critical accounts this strengthens
analysis of power dynamics, including corporate strategies to impose proprietary
control over symbolic meanings.