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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When we talk about media and the economy, 'the economy' is usually understood as the macro economy or GDP, while 'the media' usually refers to television and print news, or the digital output of mainstream news providers. But communication about money and the economy in everyday life is far more wide-ranging than this. It is also changing: opportunities to discuss economic matters – whether public or personal – have proliferated online, while new payment systems and shopping platforms embed economic behaviour more deeply into communications infrastructures.
Challenging earlier narrow definitions, this ambitious book offers a new framework for thinking about the role of communication in our economic lives. Foregrounding the broader category of communicative practices, the book understands economic life not only in terms of the macro economy, but more sociologically as a set of processes of providing for material wants and needs. How we talk about these wants and needs, and our means for meeting them, is how we come to understand our economic lives as meaningful. The book explores how our economic lives are constructed communicatively in a variety of modes that move through, but also exceed, mass media – from the symbolism of credit cards to the language used by economists, and from social media promotion to debates in online forums.
Communication and Economic Life is a vital resource for students and scholars in media and communications and sociology, and for anyone interested in how we talk about economic lives.
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Seitenzahl: 362
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The economy and ‘economic life’
Communication, media and economic life
Value plurality in economic life
Structure of the book
Notes
Part I: Economic action is communicative
1. Does
homo economicus
talk? Communication in economic theory
Economic action is a form of communication
Communication is information plus signalling
Communication is the strategic use of information: game theory
Recent developments: a new role for communication?
Conclusion
Notes
2. The symbolism of money, payment and price
Money’s symbolic qualities
Psychoanalysis and money symbolism
The symbolic function of payments
The meaning of price
Changing meanings of money, payment and price
Conclusion
Notes
Part II: Communication constructs economic life
3. Promotion
The rhetoric of the economic system
The world of work: promotion and self-promotion
Consumption and delinguistified communication
Conclusion
Notes
4. Information
New volumes of information
New forms of exchange and new economic models
Software, algorithms and proprietary data
Marketing discrimination
Price personalization
Conclusion
5. Narrative
Narratives, stories and why they matter
Literary fiction and the repudiation of the market
Filmic and televisual narratives about money
The fact/fiction continuum in economic writing
The economy as a narrated phenomenon
The challenge to narrative
Conclusion
Notes
6. Discussion
Mediated discussion about economic life
Audience discussion shows
Online discussion
Everyday discussion of economic issues
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Reframing communication in economic life
What should economic communication be like?
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For Max and Ezra
Communication and Economic Life
LIZ MOOR
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Liz Moor 2022
The right of Liz Moor to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8701-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8702-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939063
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me to complete this book. Three reviewers of the original proposal made helpful suggestions, while Nick Couldry, Jo Littler and Don Slater offered early encouragement. Parts of chapter 1 were presented to the Geography department at the University of Nottingham and I greatly appreciated their attentive reading and thoughtful comments. Some ideas were also tested at a MeCCSA panel organized by Rebecca Bramall, who has been kind and supportive throughout. At Polity, Stephanie Homer, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and Mary Savigar have all been endlessly patient and accommodating, for which I am very grateful.
Friends and colleagues who read parts of the text include Clea Bourne, Beckie Coleman, David Moats and Dave O’Brien. I would like to thank them for their frank and constructive feedback. The remaining errors and omissions are my own.
Some parts of chapter 2 have previously been published in Consumption, Markets and Culture and in the Journal of Cultural Economy. I am grateful to Jonathan Schroeder for encouraging me to put my thoughts about money symbolism down on paper at a relatively early stage, and to Liz McFall for ongoing enthusiasm and kindness. Liz has been central to many people’s experience of intellectual community in recent years, at a time when it has been especially important. My thinking about price (and much else) has been enriched through conversations with Celia Lury. Lana Swartz provided encouragement and inspiration from across the Atlantic.
Colleagues at Goldsmiths supported me with a one-term sabbatical. I am particularly grateful to Clea Bourne, Natalie Fenton, Gholam Khiabany, Rachel Moore, Anamik Saha, Gareth Stanton and Milly Williamson for encouragement, gifts of books and cakes, teaching and administrative cover, and general good vibes. I would also like to thank Jenny Carpenter, Sam Friedman, Meghan Horvath, Shireen Kanji, Kate Maclean, Rebecca Strong and Emma Uprichard. Chris Arning made trips to the British Library more companionable. Max and Ezra are the best possible people to come home to. Special thanks to Sarah Bloomfield for the expert childcare that made finishing the book possible.
Introduction
At the end of 2016, Anand Menon, an expert on European politics, reflected on what he had learned from a year spent travelling around the UK to discuss the referendum on leaving the European Union. During a trip to the northeast of England he had told a town hall-style meeting that the vast majority of economists agreed that exiting the EU would lead to a substantial economic slowdown, and a two per cent drop in gross domestic product (or GDP), the usual measure of an economy’s health. Responding to him, a member of the audience had shouted, ‘That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours!’. On another excursion, he had met a woman in Yorkshire who told him that she didn’t mind taking the economic ‘hit’ associated with Brexit, but that it would be ‘nice to see the rich folk down south suffer’ (Menon 2016a). Reflecting on these events, Menon thought that they showed a distrust of elites and experts, but also a distrust of aggregate data and statistics. Perhaps it was all very well to show that on average membership of the EU had increased GDP, or that on average migration to the UK had been positive for the economy, but if these averages did not tally with people’s own experience, then it was unsurprising that the figures might not seem to ‘belong’ to them (Menon 2016b). As one commentator observed, maybe Menon’s heckler was right that the UK economy had become so unequal that ‘it can no longer be talked about as one unitary economy’ (Chakrabortty 2017).
Academic research confirms that not everyone experiences the economy in the same way, and that many people struggle to understand key concepts. When Jack Mosse (2018) asked people in north London to define ‘the economy’, most were unable to do so, and when he asked them if they felt part of it, many simply didn’t understand what he meant. It is not just that measures like GDP reflect national rather than local output, but that the terms themselves – sometimes even terms like ‘the economy’ – are often too far from most people’s experience to be meaningful. There is a split between the breadth of our actual economic lives and what counts as the economy in more formal spaces. This is reflected in my own discipline of media and communications. When we talk about media and the economy, ‘the economy’ is usually understood as the macro economy or the activities included in GDP, and ‘the media’ usually refers to television and print news, or the websites and social media feeds of news providers.1 Alternatively, we may think about how patterns of ownership or other business relationships influence ‘communication’, but this is understood almost exclusively in terms of the mass communication of news or advertising, rather than the way people talk in everyday life. While work in this field has been very good at showing how few voices get heard in news reporting of economic crises (e.g., Berry 2013) or how ‘bad’ economic news tends to attract more coverage than good (Harrington 1989; Damstra and Boukes 2021), it has mostly avoided questioning how concepts of ‘the economy’ are arrived at in the first place, and who or what this leaves out.
The importance of economic communication, when it is addressed, is understood either in terms of comprehension or in terms of ‘bias’. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, for example, public debate focused partly on the question of why no one had seemed to see it coming, but also on the extent to which the language of finance, as well as the financial products being described, had become so complex that few people, including regulators, could understand it (see, e.g., GAO 2009; Schwarcz 2009). As John Lanchester, a novelist and chronicler of the crisis, put it some years later, ‘the language of money is a powerful tool, and it is also a tool of power. Incomprehension is a form of consent. If we allow ourselves not to understand this language, we are signing off on the way the world works today’ (2014: n.p.). In this view, many of the problems of the financial sector were really problems of communication and comprehension. The solution was something like a collective education programme: Lanchester encouraged those who shared his concerns to learn the language of finance so that they may better scrutinize the financial sector and hold it to account.
Learning the language of finance may not be for everyone, but Lanchester nonetheless captured something important about the gap between the language of economics on the one hand, and the economic experiences of ordinary people on the other. This gap has been observed since at least Hayek’s time: he lamented the domination of economics by mathematics and statistics, and the tendency of economists to adopt a ‘scientistic’ tone that gave special significance to ‘numerical statements and quantitative measurements’ (1942: 275). For him, this took economists too far away from the attempt to understand the human and subjective groundings of economic action. In recent years, however, this criticism has taken on a new significance, as those with an undergraduate degree in economics, or related subjects such as accounting, have come to occupy a growing proportion of senior roles in the civil service (in contrast to the earlier dominance of classics and the humanities), as well as more broadly in government and public life (Davis 2017: 598–9). The consequence, some suggest, is a serious knowledge gap between those in power and those they represent, on questions that have a material effect on their lives.
Problems of comprehension are also blamed on ‘the media’, and particularly those media organizations with a public service remit. Criticism of their role in economic communication typically takes two forms. The first, which often comes from media and communication researchers, is that there is a bias or skew in the selection of viewpoints and speakers that feature in coverage of economic issues. In the UK, early studies of media coverage of the economy found a tendency to replicate dominant narratives and framings (Eldridge 1995), while more recent studies have found that many mainstream discussions of economic matters privilege voices from business over either academic economists or the representatives of workers and unions (e.g., Berry 2016a). A second criticism, arguably even more powerful, is that national media, including public service media, often fail to explain economic debates in ways that are accessible to a wide audience. This in turn reinforces, rather than reduces, the gap in understanding between the public and those in power (or those with a background in business and finance). Consider the findings of two surveys from 2015 and 2016: in one, 60 per cent of adults in the UK could not identify the correct definition of GDP from a multiple choice, and almost half could not identify the correct definition of the government budget deficit, yet only a tiny number described the subject as ‘unimportant’. In another, only 12 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘politicians and the media tend to talk about economics in an accessible way that makes it easy to understand’ (Inman 2015; YouGov 2016). Taken together, this lack of understanding of key concepts, and the widespread sense that neither governments nor media organizations are especially willing to explain them, means that only those with existing knowledge are able to take something useful – or even comprehensible – from economic news coverage. This has unfortunate implications for democratic participation, since it makes it much harder to evaluate politicians’ claims about the country’s economic situation, or their proposals for future action. And faced with large volumes of hard-to-parse information, it may be more tempting to rely on ‘gut instinct’ – something that can easily be manipulated by politicians (see, e.g., Andrejevic 2013; Davies 2018a).
Both criticisms have merit, and both turn on the claim that, one way or another, media are not just reporting on reality but shaping it – either through a heavy-handed or partial framing of issues, or by neglecting the educational or explanatory dimensions of their role. But I want to suggest a third way in which media shape reality, which is through their definition of ‘the economy’ itself. The claim of this book is that there is in fact a lot more to economic life and economic communication than the contents of the business, financial and economics sections of newspapers or television news, and that while the language of economics and the media reporting of economic issues are vitally important areas of research and study, they should not be seen as coextensive with the economic lives of most people. Many people find it hard to see their own lives reflected in either the official language of economics or the way economic matters are reported on television, but this is partly because the definitions of ‘the economy’ in these places are so limited. What is more, these limitations are often replicated in academic studies of economic communication. When this happens, social science disciplines make it harder rather than easier for people to understand the connections between ‘the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history’ (Mills 1959: 4).
In what follows, I attempt to challenge these narrow definitions of the economic, and expand our horizon away from news and current affairs. Instead, I propose a framework for thinking about economic communication that foregrounds the broader category of communicative practices rather than ‘media’, and that understands economic life not only in terms of the macro economy and GDP, but more sociologically as a set of processes of providing for material wants and needs, which may be subjectively meaningful for those engaged in them (Weber 1978). To do this, I first highlight how economic action itself is communicative, and then explore how our economic lives are constructed communicatively in a variety of modes that move through, but also exceed, mass media. The modalities that I focus on in Part II of the book – promotion, information, narrative and discussion – remind us not only that ‘the economy’ looks different in different communicative practices, but also that the values governing economic life are not so uniform as they sometimes seem. A communicative practice like ‘informing’, discussed in chapter 4, may have two quite different sets of meanings: one that is relatively open, and has to do with disseminating facts and ideas; another that is more secretive and involves passing information to those in power. Discussions online often challenge the accounts of economic life offered by banks or even schools, and the economic narratives found in films and novels, discussed in chapter 5, often reflect quite different value systems from those found in television news or newspapers’ financial pages. This plurality of values matters, because it is part of what makes economic change thinkable.
In the remainder of this introduction I outline the frameworks and theoretical ideas that underpin the chapters that follow, and the account of communication and economic life that the book offers: first, I explore the idea that ‘the economy’ is a historical construction, rather than natural category, and the consequences of this for social science researchers; next, I outline the rationale for starting from a conception of ‘communication’ or ‘communicative practices’ rather than ‘media’; finally, I explain why it is appropriate to assume value plurality in economic life.
The economy and ‘economic life’
In arguing that media researchers would benefit from a new way of thinking about communication and economic life, I am suggesting, first of all, that they need a way of framing ‘the economy’ that does not depend solely on the definitions used by governments, or the range of topics designated as ‘economic’ by television news. The first step, therefore, is to recognize all the ways in which the economy, as an object of study, is already constructed, even before its appearance in media. Michael Emmison (1983) has shown that modern uses of the term ‘economy’ did not appear until the 1930s, alongside Keynes’s conception of the macro economy and his proposal of a wider role for government in managing it. More recently, Timothy Mitchell has shown that the modern Western concept of ‘the economy’ – in the sense of ‘the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region’ (1998: 84) – emerged with the shift from colonial government to a post-colonial world order, and partly as an outgrowth of the experience of colonial rule (Mitchell 2002: 83–4). Here, ‘the economy’ appears at the intersection of various new forms of discourse, techniques of measurement and forms of classification, including maps that link territories to ownership, and statistics that capture information about populations and their assets.
Perhaps the most influential definition of ‘the economy’ and economic activity is gross domestic product (GDP). In recent years it, too, has become an object of some scrutiny. This is because the way it is calculated leaves out various activities that might legitimately be seen as ‘economic’ while overstating the significance of others. These decisions have important consequences, because they reinforce a sense of what is productive and therefore valuable and, by implication, what is not. Diane Coyle’s (2014) study of the history of GDP shows that one important omission is household production. Work based in the home, including caring work and cleaning work, is not included in GDP measures because it is unpaid, despite the fact that it is clearly both productive and valuable (indeed its value can readily be estimated through reference to its paid equivalent). Its omission means that much work – often women’s work – is in effect considered unproductive. Similarly, many digital goods and services (including Google, Wikipedia, Twitter) that contribute to economic welfare are not included in GDP because they are zero-priced, intangible and often hard to measure. Yet they are surely productive and valuable. This is a problem for economists, as Coyle notes, because it makes the gap between economic welfare – i.e., general living standards, prosperity and wellbeing – and the definition of economic output unhelpfully wide.2 But there is also a salutary lesson here for researchers in other fields who take formal definitions of ‘the economy’ at face value, thereby consigning certain aspects of productive experience to some other domain of study altogether.
The consequences of relying on narrow definitions of ‘the economy’ for media and other social science research can also be illustrated by another example from Coyle’s work, to do with the role of finance. The value of the financial sector to the national economy has been overestimated by between one fifth and one half, according to Coyle, in large part because of a controversial change to the calculation of GDP that allowed financial risk-taking to be counted as an ‘output’ rather than an intermediate service, which would not normally be included. Where previous accounting techniques showed financial services making either a negative, or only barely positive, contribution to GDP, the methodological change ‘turned finance from a conceptually unproductive into a productive sector’ (2014: 103, 104). This had significant political effects. As Coyle shows, the view that finance is a strategically important sector of the economy developed alongside those statistical changes, but a belief in finance’s strategic importance made it more likely that regulatory reform would be shaped around it in beneficial and supportive ways. The problem for media research is that the classifications and definitions of ‘the economy’ used by government agencies tend to get repeated in news and current affairs,3 and then, by extension, by media researchers themselves. The pages of media and communications journals show fairly clearly how much more importance the discipline attaches to finance than, for example, housework or care work.4 This does not mean that finance is unimportant – indeed there would be good reasons to study it even if it were seen as unproductive through the lens of GDP – but it does show how much ordinary economic action might be deemed irrelevant if we follow government or media definitions of economic life to the exclusion of all others.
How might media researchers avoid relying on definitions of the economy that either exclude important aspects of productive activity or simply replicate the choices of news editors? There are at least two ways to do so. The first would be to recognize that ‘the economy’ is the outcome of a process – often conflicted or contested – and then to shift more attention to that process, rather than its outcome. The process, following Çalişkan and Callon (2009, 2010), might be called ‘economization’. This refers to all the ways in which ‘activities, behaviours and spheres or fields are established as being economic’ (2009: 370). In the same way that social researchers see ‘the social’ as a constant production (Hall 1977; see also Couldry 2006: 17), so, too, is the economy ‘an achievement rather than a starting point or pre-existing reality’ (Çalişkan and Callon 2009: 370). One now well-established way of looking at processes of economization is to focus on the work of economists, and the field of economics, since these actors are often a powerful influence on how real-life economies and markets are made, as well as being key voices within government. I take up this idea in chapter 1, where I look at the way economists have historically downplayed the role of communication in economic life, or else skewed its definition towards ‘information’.
A second way to avoid ‘capture’ by governmental or media definitions of the economy is to more explicitly incorporate anthropological and sociological understandings of economic life into our definitions of the field of study. For both sociologists and anthropologists, what is of interest is not so much ‘the economy’ itself as some pre-given thing, but rather ‘economic action’ as a purposive activity. And economic action, in turn, is interesting because of its meaningfulness for those involved and its continuity with other forms of social action (Weber 1978). The first part of this argument concerns the scope of ‘the economic’. In Weber’s account of economy and society, actions were ‘economically oriented’ insofar as they were concerned with making provisions or satisfying a desire for utilities (Swedberg 2011). One way of doing this would be via exchange on the market. But households – which were the dominant economic form for much of history – could make provisions for themselves in all kinds of ways, including through home production, non-market exchange and various other forms of production and distribution. Similarly, anthropologists have historically found that economic actions are organized according to logics of reciprocity and redistribution as well as market exchange. This range of forms of provisioning can still be observed today, even in highly specialized market economies where non-market provisioning is assumed to be a minor part of economic activity (and where it is not counted in standard measures of ‘the economy’). And yet to focus on ‘provisioning’ or ‘satisfying the desire for utilities’ is to imagine a much broader terrain of study – and one that more closely captures everyday experiences of economic life – than either the macro economy or the economics of particular sectors.
The second point concerns the meaningfulness of economic action and its continuity with other forms of action. Weber’s economic sociology is again relevant because of his distinction between formal and substantive rationality. In economic action, something is substantively rational to the extent that ‘the provisioning of different groups of persons … is shaped by economically oriented social action under some criterion (past, present, or potential) of ultimate values, regardless of the nature of these ends’ (cited in Swedberg 2011: 68, emphasis added; see also Weber 1978: 28–30). This is contrasted with a ‘formal’ economic rationality – of the kind usually modelled by economists – concerned with quantitative calculation of means and ends. As Çalişkan and Callon (2009: 374) note, to adopt a formalist approach to the economy in a field like anthropology (or indeed media studies) is essentially to engage in ‘the continuation of economics by other disciplinary means’, because it replicates economists’ definitions of the terms and purpose of the field of study. A more properly sociological or anthropological approach is one that engages with ultimate values and emphasizes the fact that much of what we call ‘economic action’ is, at some fundamental level, continuous with other kinds of social action. This might mean looking beyond traditional topics (e.g., firms, hiring practices, price setting and market design) to things like student loans, therapy bills, art galleries and branding practices. But the emphasis on the meaningfulness of economic action has also led sociologists after Weber to be much more interested in where the desire for particular ‘utilities’ comes from, or how the various means chosen to meet and satisfy those needs and preferences come to be socially meaningful rather than simply efficient or functional. Perhaps the most well-known example of this approach comes from Viviana Zelizer (e.g., 1994, 2005), whose work has been concerned not only with the way people combine intimate relationships with economic ones, but also with the way that economic transactions can be used to organize and comment on social relationships. But this approach to the social meaningfulness of economic action can also be seen in Daniel Miller’s longstanding insistence (e.g., 1987, 1998, 2001) that the meaning of consumption and provisioning cannot be simply read off from the mode of production within which goods were produced.5
I will draw out the implications of these sociological and anthropological definitions of the economy for media researchers in more detail in the conclusion, where I outline some of the potential sites for a reconfigured approach to communication and economic life. In the rest of the book, I draw most explicitly on these insights in chapter 2, where I offer a preliminary account of the symbolic or communicative dimensions of relatively mundane aspects of economic activity (such as payment) and artefacts (such as monetary tokens and prices). Sociological accounts also influence the choice of examples in later chapters – the focus on, for example, debt discussion boards, small-scale investor clubs, online reviews and ratings or audience discussion shows are all ways of emphasizing forms of provisioning and the way these are communicated or mediated, rather than ‘the economy’ and how it appears in news and current affairs. Finally, I draw on these fields throughout the book in my use of the term ‘economic life’ rather than ‘the economy’ (see, e.g., Spillman 2011; Wherry 2012). To focus on economic life is to deliberately distance oneself from definitions of ‘the economy’ as only the macro economy, and to attempt instead to capture the breadth and diversity of economic activity, beyond capitalism, and even beyond markets (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Instead, it takes as its objects of study those processes of provisioning where both ‘economic’ and non-economic values collide, mingle and influence each other, and in which the meaning-making activities of ordinary people are as important as the calculating activities of more powerful institutional actors.
Communication, media and economic life
The book’s focus on communication and economic life is motivated not only by this expanded conception of ‘the economic’, but also by a particular approach to media and communication. Media and communications research is a broad field, with many different kinds of scholarship, but in Britain it has historically been concerned primarily with media texts, institutions and technologies rather than with the more obvious – and much larger – category of communication and communicative practice. This is no doubt partly due to its coexistence alongside a powerful cultural studies tradition, in which the idea of ‘communication as culture’ (e.g., Carey 1989) has been well developed, and in which there is correspondingly a wider sense of what counts as ‘media’ for communicative practice. However, to the extent that media and communications has an identifiable sub-field of economic communication, it has been overwhelmingly focused on the way that ‘the economy’ (understood in the limited ways outlined above) is represented in media texts or genres such as ‘the news’ and, less commonly, film and television. As such, it has tended to overlook a broader range of ways that economic activities, practices and beliefs are constituted communicatively.
Why does a focus on (usually mass) media texts and institutions, rather than a wider array of communicative practices, matter? One reason is simply that it leaves out a great many empirically interesting and consequential aspects of how economic life is constructed communicatively. These include the way people talk about economic matters to family, friends and partners, the way they use computers or phones to research goods or make financial plans, what they learn about money from reading books and magazines, or from watching plays, the way they present themselves at work, the way they choose a hairdresser or how they decide when to make a meal from scratch rather than buy it from a supermarket or restaurant. It also ignores a good deal of the communicative activity that goes on inside businesses and firms, such as meeting, reviewing, complaining or gossiping. As we have seen above, leaving such practices out of our accounts of economic communication may also mean replicating dominant definitions of ‘the economy’, rather than understanding that these definitions are contested, or the outcome of a process. It also means ignoring the wider sociological and anthropological traditions that explore the symbolic dimensions of economic life and its subjective meaningfulness for those who participate in it.
Another reason to avoid a sole focus on mass media texts such as news is that it leaves the field open to the charge of media-centrism. As Nick Couldry notes, this is a real problem for media and communications scholars because, by assuming the importance of media, we bypass the question of ‘how central media actually are to the explanation of contemporary change’ (Couldry 2006: 12, emphasis added), and ignore the possibility that ‘sometimes, perhaps more often than … we suspect, media are less consequential in the social world than other forces’. What Couldry has in mind here are broader social and economic forces, including shifts in income, changing patterns of employment or ownership, and so on. But his point remains true even within the field of media and communications. There is a tendency to assume that (mass) mediated communications are the most consequential forms of communication, and then to focus on them. Yet the fact of being ‘media’ or ‘mediated’ may often be less important than the fact of taking narrative form, or of being a work of science fiction. Of course, the communicative aspects of economic life may ultimately be less important than its other parts too – the extent to which communication constitutes economic life is clearly an empirical question – but ‘communication’ offers a much broader starting point than ‘media’ (particularly when ‘media’ is really code for mass media texts), and, for scholars interested in these questions, it makes sense to start with them before assessing the extent to which mediation matters.
In practice, focusing on ‘economic communication’ or ‘communication in economic life’ means drawing multiple traditions of work into the same orbit. Work on the way that, for example, financial crises or industrial disputes are represented in ‘the media’ (whether that is news and current affairs, or Hollywood films) must sit alongside work considering how ordinary people discuss debt and savings on internet discussion boards, or how they use savings apps on their phones, but also how their views of capitalism might be formed through reading particular kinds of novels or playing particular kinds of computer games. These are all forms of economic communication, and one is not more ‘authentically’ economic because it deals with inflation or central bank lending. Within such a framing, mediation would be posed as both a question and a spectrum. It has to be a question, rather than something we assume, because not all forms of economic communication are mediated, and certainly not through ‘mass’ media. As we shall see in chapter 6, the ordinary face-to-face discussions people have about the economy are vital for understanding how people make their own process of provisioning subjectively meaningful, and one of the advantages of attending to them is that they often show how far ordinary understandings of ‘the economy’ converge with or diverge from accounts offered by either governments or news media. On the other hand, mediation is also a spectrum because as we see in chapters 5 and 6, the ‘mediated’ versions of these conversations (for example as they take place on internet discussion forums) may share a good deal of the substance of their face-to-face counterparts. Where they differ is that mediated discourse extends the availability of these discussions in time and space, and offers a wider range of interlocutors (and perhaps of viewpoints) than are typically available in everyday life. Studying them alongside each other thus allows us to draw certain conclusions about how much difference mediation makes.
The approach to mediation in the chapters that follow draws on two traditions. The first is the expanded sense of media as including materials, technologies and systems. In this view, communicative forms such as novels, paintings and graffiti might be considered as mediators, because they play a role in shaping how we think about things (they ‘get in between’ us and some more direct view of a topic or event). But they are also mediated in the sense that their communication occurs via materials that place certain limits on them. In fact, all kinds of phenomena can perform a ‘mediating’ function: trains, radio signals and cloud storage can link people together, and have the potential to enable (but also place limits on) actions that are communicative (Innis 1950; Peters 2015). German sociologists Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann both include ‘money’ and ‘power’ in their definitions of communications media, and Luhmann even includes ‘scientific knowledge, art, love, [and] morals’ (Fuchs 2011: 90). These are beyond my scope here, but I do take this view of media as materials and systems seriously, particularly in chapter 2, where I look at the symbolic dimensions of money and payments media, and in chapter 3, where I explore the significance of ‘delinguistified’ and ambient forms of promotion.
The second tradition I draw upon is work in European media studies about ‘mediation’ or ‘mediatization’. This work explores the way that mediated communication creates ‘new forms of action and interaction in the social world, new kinds of social relationship and new ways of relating to others and to oneself’ (Thompson 1995: 4), and, as an unavoidable part of this, new ways of exercising power. This approach is developed by scholars who argue that the traditional focus of media and communications research – ‘mass’ communication, separated into the study of production, texts and reception – risks ignoring the significance of a more overarching set of historical developments in which media and processes of mediation have entered into many more aspects of daily life (see, e.g., Livingstone 2009; Couldry and Hepp 2013). In a post-internet age – but discernible before then – it has become much harder to speak about the media, as though that referred to a fixed set of forms and genres. Instead, we must begin by acknowledging the mediation, or potential mediation, of many elements of our experience, from taking out a loan or buying a book to going on holiday or seeking advice. From here, we can ask what difference this makes to social interaction and organization, to the distribution of resources, and so on. As various authors have noted, the concept of mediatization is therefore less a grand theoretical framework than a historical claim, a ‘sensitizing concept’ (Couldry and Hepp 2013) alerting us to what we must now consider when we explore the relationship between media and the social. The concepts of mediation and mediatization are valuable to the study of economic communication because they take seriously the fact that mediation, and mediated messages, can now be found in all kinds of places beyond what we think of as ‘the’ media, without determining in advance which are likely to be most consequential.
What does all this mean for the study of economic communication and the construction of economic life? I take economic communication to refer to a large, but still circumscribed, set of actions, interactions, encounters and forms of expression, which may be mediated or unmediated (or involve a complex interplay between the two), and which have to do, very broadly, with ways of understanding and providing for our material wants and needs. As I have suggested, a major theme of the rest of the book concerns the role played by both communication, broadly understood, as well as specific media technologies in defining the content, scope and limits of ‘the economic’, both as an object out there in the world (as, for example, in the case of the construction of the economy on television news) and as a lived set of experiences of provisioning.
Value plurality in economic life
A final concept underpinning the rest of the book is that of value plurality. If we take seriously the expanded view of economic communication outlined above – that is, if we are willing to include novels, films, social media accounts or online forum discussions as instances of economic communication – then we will likely find that economic life is marked by a much wider range of ideas, values and beliefs than if we focused solely on the way that ‘the economy’, understood in conventional terms as the macro economy and particular industrial sectors, is represented on television and in the press. We may live in societies dominated by capitalist logics and forms of accumulation, or that depend on consumer spending for growth, but to believe in value plurality is to believe that our material circumstances do not necessarily exhaust our ways of thinking about the world. In much of what follows, therefore, I keep ‘value plurality’ as an open question: to what extent do particular modes of economic communication (e.g., promoting, informing, narrating), media (e.g., books, films) or genres (e.g., news, advice, self-help) imply or invoke particular sets of values, or particular ways of framing and constructing economic life?
In foregrounding this question, I am drawing on a tradition of thought, spread across various social science disciplines, that sees economic life as governed by multiple logics, rather than a single capitalist logic. Within this tradition, we might start by considering Nick Couldry’s (2006) work on the ‘myth of the mediated centre’, mentioned above. In challenging the idea that media are our privileged points of access to social reality or shared social values, Couldry notes that while there may be a bureaucratic or organizational centre to social life, there may not necessarily be any ‘centre’ of social values at all. Rhetorical claims about ‘the nation’, or ‘society’, are often rhetorical only, and the coherence or otherwise of social values is something to investigate empirically, rather than to assume. Indeed, if we look closely, he suggests, we might see ‘disorder or a lesser degree of order: disputes over value, contests over legitimacy, [and] alternative explanations of social change’ (2006: 16). In making this argument, Couldry is drawing in part on earlier challenges to the idea of a ‘dominant ideology’ (e.g., Abercrombie et al. 1981). In this critique, the claim that an ideological ‘glue’ or superstructure is necessary to hold capitalist societies together in the face of their internal contradictions is wrong, simply because it overlooks the sheer range of other things that might make societies cohere. People may not accept the versions of social reality offered by a dominant class, or found in mainstream media output, but are often too busy with work and making ends meet to ‘resist’ in any way that critics would recognize. In any case, ideological control, or even consent, may not be necessary for the status quo to survive; it may indeed be the diversity of views and plurality of belief systems that keeps the organizational centre relatively stable.
