Page 131 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 121
pointed out, the concept of power is a necessary complement to structural
analysis.

To use the vocabulary of power in the context of social relationships is to
speak of human agents, separately or together, in groups or organisations,
significantly affecting the thoughts and actions of others. In speaking thus,
one assumes that, although the agents operate within structurally
determined limits, they nonetheless have a certain relative autonomy and
could have acted differently. The future, though it is not entirely open, is
not entirely closed either. (Lukes, 1974, p. 54)

A full analysis of control then, needs to look at the complex interplay between
intentional action and structural constraint at every level of the production
process.
As well as this division between action and structural approaches, the analysis
of corporate control has been caught up in the basic opposition betwen what
Giddens has called ‘theories of industrial society’ and ‘theories of capitalism’
(see Giddens, 1979, p. 100–1). These theories offer fundamentally opposed
models of the socio-economic order produced by industrial capitalism. The basic
positions began to polarize in the mid-nineteenth century with Marx on the one
side, and Saint Simon and his personal secretary Auguste Comte (one of the
founding fathers of modern sociology) on the other (see Stanworth, 1974).
Although both ‘theories’ start from an analysis of the economic system, they
approach it in very different ways. Marx begins with the unequal distribution of
wealth and property and its convertibility into productive industrial capital
through the purchase of raw materials, machinery and labour power. For Marx,
the defining feature of the emerging industrial order was that effective possession
of the means of production was concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class,
enabling them to direct production (including cultural production) in line with
their interests, and to appropriate the lion’s share of the resulting surplus in the
form of profit. However, Marx argued, capitalists are not free to do exactly as
they like. On the contrary, he suggests that they were in much the same position
as ‘the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells’ (Marx and Engels, 1968, p. 40). The
economic system created by the pursuit of profit has, he argued, a momentum of
its own which produces periodic commercial crises and social conflicts which
threaten profitability. Consequently, many of the actions of capitalists are in fact
reactions—attempts to maintain profits in the face of the pressures exerted by
shifts in the general economic and political system. Marx’s general model,
therefore, contains both an action and a structural approach to control over the
cultural industries and both these strands have been pursued by later writers.
The action strand in Marxism focuses on the way in which capitalists use
communications corporations as instruments to further their interests
and consolidate their power and privilege. In its simplest version, this kind of