Page 49 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

28 Mapping approaches and themes

“culture industry” necessarily results in cultural forms which are consonant with
the dominant ideology’ (1977: 18). Likewise, Thompson (1990: 105) argues that
Adorno and Horkheimer ‘try to read off the consequences of cultural products
from the products themselves’. For Garnham, the Frankfurt School’s weakness
lay ‘not in their failure to realize the importance of the base or the economic,
but insufficiently to take account of the economically contradictory nature of the
process they observed and thus to see the industrialization of culture as unpro-
blematic and irresistible’ (Garnham 1979: 131). This insistence on the contra-
dictory nature of industrialisation and of cultural processes was influenced by the
work of British cultural historians, notably Raymond Williams, with whom
Garnham had collaborated as a television producer.

Harold Innis and institutional political economy

Another influence on critical political economy came from historical accounts
that emphasised the profound effects on social organisation and consciousness
arising from the introduction and adoption of successive forms of communication.
This analysis was non-Marxist, forming part of a broader ‘institutionalist’
approach (Mosco 2009; Babe 2009) and its account of communication is generally
referred to as ‘medium theory’.The leading figure is Harold Innis (1894–1952) a
Canadian economic historian who focused on media late in his career although
his earlier work had examined broader forms of communications, notably trans-
portation. Innis integrated the control of communication resources into broader
histories of political and economic power, and affirmed a dynamic set of rela-
tionships between communication power and consciousness. Changes in media
technologies were related to changes in political and economic power and to the
manner in which knowledge was organised and distributed through societies. In
Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951) Innis argued
that the physical properties of media (heaviness, durability, storage capacity)
generate a bias towards different systems of control through time and space, with
printed paper, for instance, being a more space-binding medium for governance
across large geographical areas than stone or parchment. This work informed
historical studies that foregrounded the influence of communications systems, as
well as versions of medium theory that regard media as having intrinsic properties
that bring about social change (a technological determinism that Innis himself
rejected but which was developed by others, notably Marshall McLuhan). Babe
(2009: 22, 32–46) seeks to recover Innis from relative neglect, as someone whose
own integration of political economic and cultural analysis could inform efforts
to reintegrate these fields today.

Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller

Two ‘founding’ figures, Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller, are regarded as
especially influential upon North American research, and indeed internationally