Page 31 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy
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20 Chapter One
Figure 1.1. Typology of Media/Communication Studies. Media Studies has both ad-
ministrative and critical camps, which are in turn divided into arts/humanities (“cul-
tural studies”) and social science (“political economy”).
The second stream of critical political economy, a non-Marxian (“institu-
tionalist”) approach, also known as communication in history and as medium
theory, was inaugurated by a Canadian economic historian, Harold Adams In-
nis (1894–1952). Innis took his PhD in economics from the University of
Chicago (1920), where he became familiar with, among other writings, the
works of maverick political economist Thorstein Veblen, to whom Innis was
