英语论文网

erstood Marxism, in conflating the 'material'
Supplied by The British Library - "The world's knowledge" 1
--
l 36 Understanding Global Media
with industrial production and the 'ideological' with cultural production.
Garnham instead proposed that the key question for a materialist theory of
culture was to understand the processes through which cultural forms became
'industrialized', or subject to the general forms and practices of capitalist
commodity production. Analogous approaches to understanding the dynamics
of commercial cultural industries can be found in the work of Mikge
(1989) on the relationship between cultural products and cultural work,
Ryan's (1992) analysis of the contradictions between creative practice and
corporate organization in the cultural sectors, and Hesmondhalgh's (2002)
synthesis of this diverse literature into a practical understanding of the
economics and sociology of the cultural industries.
The nexus between these themes and approaches is seen in recent work on
the political economy of global media. Edward Herman and Robert
McChesney's T l ~ eG lobal Media: The Ncru Missio~rarieso f Global Capitalisnl
(Herman and McChesney, 1997) restated many of the key themes of the
cultural imperialism thesis as developed by Herbert Schiller and others in the
1970s, alongside a detailed overview of trends towards media concentration
on a global scale that gained particular momentum in the 1980s and 1990s.
Herman and McChesney's analysis will be discussed in more detail in Chapter
3, but they propose that the period from the early 1980s to the present has
involved 'a dramatic restructuring of national media industries, along with the
emergence of a genuinely global commercial media market' (Herman and
McChesney, 1997, p. l ) , with the consequences of concentration of media
power on a global scale in the hands of a relatively small number of multinational
corporations (MNCs), and a thoroughgoing commercialization of
media worldwide. They argue that the global media system has become 'an
indispensable component of the globalizing narke et economy as a whole', both
because of the significance in the wider economic sense of global investments
in the media, communications and information industries (or what Schiller
referred to as the 'ECI complex'), but also because 'the global media provide
a vital forum for advertisers and the promotion of demand and consun~erist
values that grease[s] the wheels of the global market' (Herman and
McChesney, 1997, p. 189).
Global Hollyruood (Miller et al., 2001) is a/n important contribution to the
critical political economy of global media literature, as it seeks to shift debates
about global media from the 'cultural imperialism' thesis - and its attendant
questions of ideology and influence - towards global production systems, or
what Miller et al. term the Neru Ii~terimtio~rDali visiorr of Cltltltral Laborlr
(NICL). For Miller et al., what is distinctive about the current phase of globalization
of predominantly US-based audiovisual media industries is that they
have been structurally separating the 'activities of the hand' - the production
of films and television programmes as material artefacts - from the 'activities
Supplied by The British Library - "The world's knowledge" I
Theories of Global Media 37
3n.
of
me
list
m-
:ge
rk,