Page 57 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

36 Mapping approaches and themes

1974). CPE became institutionalised on a wider scale during the 1980s. Yet,
during this decade the Marxian influence waned across intellectual fields
including communications, and political economy settled to an acknowledged
but marginal place, with postmodernism and varieties of ‘classic liberalism’
dominant (Garnham 1990: 1; Curran 2002; McChesney 2007; D. Schiller 1996:
158–59). In the 1990s communications scholarship moved further from critical
to more affirmative accounts based on the growth of digital media and reflecting a
period of ascendant neoliberalism influencing Anglo-American and Australian
academia in particular. Yet this was also a period in which the salience of CPE
analysis of converging communications industries helped to increase the influence
of a resurgent critical scholarship.

Notes
1 I have benefited enormously from the wisdom and generosity of scholars with whom
I have discussed the book’s themes in person and a great many more I know only
through their writings. I would especially like to thank James Curran, Natalie Fenton,
Des Freedman, David Hesmondhalgh, Matthew McAllister, Bob McChesney,
Graham Murdock, John Nichols, Tom O’Malley, Julian Petley, John Sinclair, Joseph
Turow, Janet Wasko, Granville Williams.
2 To resolve this ‘interminable’ debate requires, argues Peck (2006: 104), ‘formulating a
materialist conception of signification’ that encompasses what Williams (1977: 80)
terms ‘the indissoluble connections between material production, political and cultural
institutions and activity, and consciousness’.
3 Economism neglected what Williams emphasised throughout his writings, human
agency in cultural processes and practices. Like Thompson (1978), Williams empha-
sised agency and lived experience against the structuralism of Althusser. However,
Williams’s alternative formulation of culture in terms of the social totality and ‘struc-
tures of feeling’ provided an uncertain and rather opaque legacy for cultural theory
(Schiller 1996: 122–23).
4 Mosco (2009: 84) identifies several leading political economists influenced by Smythe’s
work at Simon Fraser University including William Melody, Robert Babe, Manjunath
Pendakur, William Leiss, Sut Jhally, Robin Mansell and Rohan Smarajiva.