Page 130 - Culture Society and the Media

120 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES

Table 1: Varieties of approach to corporate control

analysis, on the other hand, is concerned with the ways the options open to
allocative controllers are constrained and limited by the general economic and
political environment in which the corporation operates. The pivotal concept
here is not power but determination. Structural analysis looks beyond intentional
action to examine the limits to choice and the pressures on decision making.
There has been a tendency for these two approaches to develop separately and
even antagonistically. As I have argued elsewhere (Murdock, 1980) this is a false
dichotomy. An adequate analysis needs to incorporate both. A structural analysis
is necessary to map the range of options open to allocative controllers and the
pressures operating on them. It specifies the limit points to feasible action. But
within these limits there is always a range of possibilities and the choice between
them is important and does have significant effects on what gets produced and
how it is presented. To explain the direction and impact of these choices
however, we need an action approach which looks in detail at the biographies
and interests of key allocative personnel and traces the consequences of their
decisions for the organization and output of production. As Steven Lukes has