Page 168 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

POLITICAL ECONOMY

division of space into front and back regions or into the appropriate uses of
kitchens, bedrooms and parlours is of course cultural. Thus distinct cultures design
homes in different ways, allocating contrasting meanings or modes of appropriate
behaviour. 145
Links Discourse, emotion, identification, meaning, power, space

Political economy Political economy is a domain of study that is concerned with
power and the distribution of economic resources. Thus, political economy explores
the questions of who owns and controls the institutions of economy, society and
culture. Within cultural studies the main interest in political economy has been
related to the scope and mechanisms by which corporate ownership and control of
the culture industries shape the contours of culture.
For example, the institutions of television have been of interest to cultural
studies because of their central place in the communicative practices of modern
societies. These concerns have become increasingly acute as public service
broadcasting has been seriously challenged by commercial television in the context
of a broadcasting landscape dominated by multimedia corporations. In particular,
since the mid-1980s media organizations have undergone processes of convergence
and synergy that has created multimedia giants such as AOL–Time Warner and Walt
Disney as governments have relaxed the regulations restricting cross-media
ownership.
These are the global trends in the political economy of television that have
underpinned a change in programming strategies and thus a change to the patterns
of cultures. Thus, contemporary developments in television organization and
funding across our world have placed visual-based advertising and consumerism at
the forefront of culture. Television is pivotal to the production and reproduction of
a promotional culture focused on the use of visual imagery to create value-added
brands or commodity-signs. Thus has the political economy of television helped to
shape the contours of contemporary culture.
However, one of the central tenets of cultural studies is its non-reductionism so
that culture is understood to have its own specific meanings, rules and practices
which are not reducible to another category or level of a social formation. In
particular, cultural studies has waged a battle against economic reductionism, that
is, the attempt to explain what a cultural text means by reference to its place in the
production process. For cultural studies, the processes of political economy do not
determine the meanings of texts or their appropriation by audiences. Rather,
political economy, social relationships and culture must be understood in terms of
their own specific logics and modes of development. Each of these domains are
‘articulated’ or related together in context-specific ways.
This argument has been expressed via the metaphor of the ‘circuit of culture’.
Here, meanings embedded at the moments of production may or may not be taken
up at the levels of representation or consumption where new meanings are again
produced. Indeed, meanings generated at the level of representation and
consumption shape production itself through, for example, design and marketing.