Page 55 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

34 Mapping approaches and themes

commercialisation and the integration of marketing by scholars like Wasko,
Meehan and McAllister refutes this).
The stated divisions distort the historical record but also obscure the plurality
of approaches and interconnection amongst scholars today. Mapping intellectual
tendencies to geographical settings involves too many truncations to be sustainable.
More importantly it distracts from two vital but differently constituted tasks, that
of locating scholarship in its particular historical political and intellectual contexts,
and the task of developing appropriately sophisticated analytical approaches
through critique and revision.
Winseck (2012) offers another mapping, outlining four main perspectives in
political economy.

1 ‘Conservative and liberal neoclassical economics’
2 ‘radical media political economy’
3 Schumpeterian institutional political economy (including creative industries
and network political economy schools)
4 the cultural industries school.

We have so far discussed three. Schumpeterian political economy, emphasising
technology and innovation as driving forces for change and ‘creative destruction’,
is examined more fully in chapter five, together with arguments for a ‘network’
political economy. Within radical political economy, Winseck (2012: 3) argues
there are two main versions: monopoly capital and digital capitalism schools.
The monopoly capital approach is associated with McChesney’s work; its main
weakness is ‘its view of the media industries as a giant pyramid, with power
concentrated at the top and not enough attention paid to the details of key
players, markets, and the dynamics and diversity that exists among all the elements
that make up the media’ (Winseck 2012: 23). The focus on big media ‘embodies
a static view of the world’ that blots out ‘standpoints of resistance, especially
labor’. The other variant, digital capitalism associated with Dan Schiller and
Mosco, stresses the underlying continuity of capitalist dynamics shaping ‘infor-
mation societies’ as much as they did ‘industrial societies’ (Winseck 2012: 23).
Winseck argues that neither of these strands of radical political economy pay
sufficient attention to explaining the complexity of the media industries. The
monopoly capital school ‘overemphasises the tendency toward market con-
centration’, the digital capitalism school ‘overplays the ineluctable colonization
of the lifeworld by market forces’ and regards commodification as a pervasive
process, incorporating all, even oppositional, cultural forms (Winseck 2012: 24).
Like Hesmondhalgh, Winseck favours a ‘cultural industries’ approach. We will
examine these debates more fully and readers can reach their own conclusions
on the value of different approaches. My own criticism is twofold. First, while
there are important differences and limitations, these mappings construct an
inaccurate caricature of the disfavoured position. Second, the appeal for com-
plexity and ambivalence is a vitally important one but it should not be applied in