Page 135 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 125
now head the great corporations are unknown…(they) own no appreciable
share of the enterprise. (Galbraith, 1969, p. 22)

As we shall see later, the ‘managerial revolution thesis’ is open to a number of
empirical and conceptual criticisms. Not least, it tends to blur the crucial
distinctions between the levels of ownership and control we distinguished
earlier.
Despite these problems, however, it has had an enormous influence on current
thinking and has supported two important currents of analysis which correspond
to the two levels of instrumentalism in the Marxist approach. The first of these
concentrates on the balance of power and influence within individual
corporations. Where Marxists emphasize the continuing power of effective
possession operating directly through specific interventions in the production
process or indirectly through the limits set by allocative decisions, managerialists
stress the relative impotence of owners and the autonomy of administrative and
professional personnel. At the second, more general level managerialism feeds
into pluralist accounts of power. Where Marxists insist that the capitalist class is
still the most significant power bloc within advanced capitalism, pluralists regard
it as one élite among a number of others composed of the leading personnel from
the key institutional spheres—parliament, the military, the civil service, and so
on. These élites are seen as engaged in a constant competition to extend their
influence and advance their interests, and although some may have an edge at
particular times or in particular situations, none has a permanent advantage.
Hence, instead of seeing the effective owners of the communications corporations
as pursuing the interests of a dominant capitalist class (as in the Marxist version
of general instrumentalism), pluralists see the controllers of the various cultural
industries as relatively autonomous power blocs competing with the other
significant blocs in society, including industrial and financial élites.
This pluralist conception of the power structure is linked in turn to the laissez-
faire model of the economy which provides the basis for the structural level of
analysis within the theory of industrial society. Both conceptions are dominated
by the image of the market. Just as there is a competition for power and influence
between institutional élites, so media corporations are seen as having to compete
for the attention and loyalty of consumers in the market. And, in the final
analysis, so the argument goes, it is the demands and wants of consumers that
determine the range and nature of the goods that corporations will supply. Like
the capitalists in Marxist accounts, the ‘new princes’ of managerialism are not
free to pursue their interests just as they like; their actions and options are limited
by the power and veto of consumers. This notion of ‘consumer sovereignty’ is
central not only to many academic analyses but also to the rationalizations that
the communications industries give of their own operations. Here are two recent
examples, the first from the eminent British journalist John Whale, and the
second from the American marketing analyst, Martin Seiden: