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onceptions of 'culture' that had been informing cultural studies in the 1970s.
These were the British historical tradition that sought to understand culture in
terms of lived experience and 'the study of relationship between elements in a
whole way of life' (\Villiams, 1965, quoted in Hall, 1986, p. 36), with its
implied agenda of democratizing culture by revaluing the culture of subordinate
classes or 'ordinary people'; and the European structuralist tradition,
which stressed the influence of the determinant elements of culture upon lived
experience, through its structuring into class relations, language and signifying
systems. Hall proposed that it was in the relationship between these two
elements, which draw attention to the complex terrain that is 'marked out by
those strongly coupled but not mutually exclusive concepts culturelideology',
that the concept of hegemony could advance a materialist theory of culture by
confronting in different, and sometimes opposed ways, 'the dialectic between
conditions and consciousness' (Hall, 1986, p. 48). A central means of developing
this understanding of hegemony in Hall's work is through the concept
of nrticrrlntio~r,w hich refers both to the con~plexu nity formed between different
elements in a particular historical conjuncture, and to the role played by
discourse in establishing 'common sense' through the ordering and regulation
of statements and meanings, as well as the extent to which social conflicts are
expressed through language and the 'struggle over meaning' of particular
terms and concepts (Hall, 1996). An example of the former notion of articulation
could be the relationship between religion and the state in different societies,
where it is strongly aligned to class power in some countries, and a
source of political opposition in others. An example of the latter is the way in
which terms such as 'democracy', 'the people', 'common sense' or 'national
identity' have different and contested meanings at different times and in different
places (Hall, 1982).
Contemporary mass media have provided rich terrain for analysis and
testing of these propositions. At the sam; time, Hall has been criticized for
having 'con~paratively little to say about the institutions of mass communication'
and lacking 'a detailed appreciation of how the economy and the state
shape cultural production' (Stevenson, 1995, pp. 41, 43). There is a political
economy of media developed within Hall's model of cultural studies through
the et~codilzg/decodittgg tttodel of media messages. The process of etrcodilzg of
media texts incorporates the institutional structures of media, organizational
cultures and production practices, relations of production, and technical
infrastructure, through which a media form, such as a newspaper or a televi-
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40 Understanding Global Media
sion programme, is produced. Through this production process, a media text
will have been produced which has encoded within it certain dominant meanings
and, in order that the media text is able to reach an audience, it must be
meaningful to them, or align itself to audience expectations about what
constitutes a media text that they would wish to consume. In the process of
receiving the media text, however, the audience engages in a decodirrg of that
media text, o