Page 161 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 151
social action analysis of organizations proposed by Silverman (1968). This calls
for a more actor-based perspective, an analysis of the process relating an
organization to the wider environment, the development of hypotheses based on
internal and external factors and the interrelationship of these factors. Such an
approach, which informs the direction of the argu ments which follow here,
would see media output as the ‘present outcome of the ends sought by different
groups and the actions which they have chosen to pursue in the light of the
means available to them’ (Silverman, 1968).
This perspective views organizations and occupations as dynamic, as part of a
social process, as change-oriented. It demands an examination of the relationships
of the wider environments of media organizations to routines and practices in their
operations; an analysis of this relationship as part of a socio-historical
development, within which mass communication organizations can be placed in
particular social contexts; and a consideration of the relative importance of
organizational and occupational factors in shaping media output.

MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS: SOURCES OF EXTERNAL
CONSTRAINT

A central feature of mass communication organizations is their ambivalent
relationship to other sources of power in society. Mass communicators are
typically characterized as a potentially powerful social group with access to
scarce societal resources—the channels of communication. This power,
however, is exercised in the context of a network of public controls and
constraints external to the organization. Such controls are used to counterbalance
the potentially disruptive power of the mass communicators: access to large
diffuse audiences, for instance, could be used to threaten accepted social
distributions of knowledge and ideas which, in stable societies, tend to be
integrated with established hierarchies of power and social control.
However, it cannot be assumed that mass communication organizations are
directly or even particularly effectively controlled by other powerful social
institutions. External constraints, for example, are paralleled by equally
influential demands internal to the organizations themselves. In part, these relate
to the claims of individual communicators to a sense of professional autonomy
and are manifested primarily in terms of intraorganizational conflict or tension.
At the same time, this drive towards autonomy or independence is expressed
collectively in organizational terms in the delicate set of balances which maintain
the separation of media institutions from the apparatus of the state. Overriding
all these individual and organizational demands, however, is the problem of
survival: communication organizations are concerned to stay in business.
Consequently, they are involved in a continual and evolving process of
negotiation or bargaining with other sources of civil and social power. This
means that the operation of a mass media organization will be bounded by rules
and conventions which may not be explicit, but which fit the prevailing notions