Media Industries E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 815

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Media Industries: History, Theory and Method is among the first texts to explore the evolving field of media industry studies and offer an innovative blueprint for future study and analysis.

• capitalizes on the current social and cultural environment of unprecedented technical change, convergence, and globalization across a range of textual, institutional and theoretical perspectives
• brings together newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in film, media, communications and cultural studies
• includes case studies of film, television and digital media to vividly illustrate the dynamic transformations taking place across national, regional and international contexts

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?

Defining Media Industry Studies

The Genesis of Media Industries Scholarship

Disciplinary Influences and Analytical Frameworks

Converging Media/Converging Scholarship

PartI: History

1 Nailing Mercury: The Problem of Media Industry Historiography

Industrial Production

Structuring Paradigms

2 Manufacturing Heritage: The Moving Image Archive and Media Industry Studies

The Rise of a “Profession”

The Semantic Mausoleum

The Archival Industry and its Implications for Media Industry Studies

Conclusion

3 Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History

Mode of Production

Authorship

Film Style

Conclusion

4 Historicizing TV Networking: Broadcasting, Cable, and the Case of ESPN

Broadcasting and Cable: The Networked Nation and the Niche Market?

TV and Sport: From Broadcasting to Cable and Back Again

ESPN, and ESPN Original Entertainment Programming’s Hip-Hop Moment

TV and the Multi-Mediated Future

5 From Sponsorship to Spots: Advertising and the Development of Electronic Media

The Rise and Fall of Radio as a National Advertising Medium, 1920s–1940s

The Transition to Television in the 1950s

The Tripartite Network Oligopoly, 1960s–1970s

Cable Television and the Fragmenting of the Audience, 1980s–2000s

Television and New Media

6 New Media as Transformed

What’s in a Name?

Audience-Subject to User-Subject

Interactivity: Enabling the User

Understanding the New Media Industry: The Case of YouTube

PartII: Theory

7 Media Industries, Political Economy, and Media/Cultural Studies: An Articulation

The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry

British Cultural Studies and the Circuits of Culture

Political Economy and the Media Industries

Overcoming the Divides: Toward a Critical Media Industry Studies

8 Thinking Globally: From Media Imperialism to Media Capital

From Imperialism to Globalization

The Logic of Accumulation

Trajectories of Creative Migration

Forces of Sociocultural Variation

Conclusion

9 Thinking Regionally: Singular in Diversity and Diverse in Unity

What is “Regional”?

A Framework for Thinking Regionally

Economics and the Regional

The Construction of Regions

Cultural Policy

New Geographies

Grassroots Regionalism

Conclusion

10 Thinking Nationally: Domicile, Distinction, and Dysfunction in Global Media Exchange

Against “mis-underestimation”

Scale: The National as a Means of Position (and Maneuver)

Subsidy: Media Policy and the Production of National Authenticity

Subjectivity: Identity, Mobility, and the Itineraries of the National

Conclusion: The National as Somewhere, Everywhere, and Nowhere

11 Convergence Culture and Media Work

Media Industries and Society

Media Industries and Work

Media Industries and Production

Convergence Culture

Industry Perspective

Audience View

Mixed Media Ecology

The Dark Side

Conclusion

PartIII: Methodologies and Models

12 Media Economics and the Study of Media Industries

Media Economics as a Field: Background and Evolution

The Distinctive Economics of Media Industries

Using Media Economics to Understand, Study, and Critique Media Industries

Conclusion

13 Regulation and the Law: A Critical Cultural Citizenship Approach

Four Approaches to Media Regulation

The Expert Class, Cultural Hierarchies, and the Emergence of Broadcasting

Local Service Stations, Mass Culture Frustrations, and the Emergence of Television

Cable Television, Consumer Choice, and the Neoliberal Polity

Digital Media, Participatory Culture, and the Cybertarian Society

Conclusion

14 Can Natural Luddites Make Things Explode or Travel Faster? The New Humanities, Cultural Policy Studies, and Creative Industries

Exploding Binaries

Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy Studies

Things Traveling Faster

Critical Cultural Policy Studies

Conclusion

Appendix 14.1

Appendix 14.2

Appendix 14.3

15 Cultures of Production: Studying Industry’s Deep Texts, Reflexive Rituals, and Managed Self-Disclosures

An Integrated Cultural-Industrial Methodology: Artifacts and Cultural Practices in Production Studies

Conclusion

16 The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Produsers and Other Participatory Audiences

The Value of Engagement and Participation

Prohibitionists and the Moral Economy

Final Thoughts

PartIV: The Future: Four Visions

17 From the Consciousness Industry to the Creative Industries: Consumer-Created Content, Social Network Markets, and the Growth of Knowledge

Media Industry Studies: All Change?

Industry: Reality or Metaphor?

From Industry to (Social Network) Markets

The Creative Industries Concept

Creative Industries: Tested to Destruction?

Supply to Demand

Social Network Markets

Creative Destruction

The Growth of Knowledge: A Future for Media Industry Studies?

18 Politics, Theory, and Method in Media Industries Research

Creative Industries Analysis

Political Economy

Cultural Economy

Toward a Politics of Cultural Production

19 An Industry Perspective: Calibrating the Velocity of Change

Power to the People

Taking Responsibility

Uncertainty Creates Opportunity

From Observation to Leadership

A Community of Understanding

20 Toward Synthetic Media Industry Research

Index

This edition first published 2009 © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2009 Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Media industries : history, theory, and method / edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-6341-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6342-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mass media. I. Holt, Jennifer. II. Perren, Alisa.P90.M3676 2009 302.23–dc222008041563

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Figures

15.1 On-the-set worker behavior. DP Lazlo Kovacs, ASC, animates longstanding, conventionalized “actor-networks” to achieve collective effects (photo © J. Caldwell)

15.2 Worker technical icons. Telenium: Big, Fat, Nasty Post House (photo of promo poster © J. Caldwell)

15.3 Trade show technical demos (photo © J. Caldwell)

15.4 HD speed-dating for industry professionals (photo © J. Caldwell)

15.5 Worker shoot-outs and bake-offs (photo © J. Caldwell)

15.6 Syndication markets (photo © J. Caldwell)

15.7 Behind-the-scenes programming: Gay Hollywood(photos of video frames © J. Caldwell)

15.8 “Table-read” and Q&A. Arrested Development’s writers’ room as semi-public theater (photo © J. Caldwell)

17.1 Provider model of creative causation

17.2 Demand model of creative causation

17.3 Interactive model of knowledge growth

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the contributors for their innovative work and generous commitment to this book. Collaborating with every one of them was a privilege and we are sincerely grateful for all of the effort, energy, and ideas they each brought to this project. Some have contributed even more than their essays. John Caldwell, Horace Newcomb, and Tom Schatz have been brilliant mentors to us over the years, and this book is largely a product of their inspiration and teachings. Particular appreciation goes to Tom for the unwavering support, expert guidance, and friendship that he has provided throughout our careers.

We are grateful to our colleagues in Film and Media Studies at UC-Santa Barbara and the Department of Communication at Georgia State for the encouragement and thoughtful discussions. We are also indebted to numerous graduate students and faculty at UT-Austin, the place where the seeds for this project were first planted.

This book would not have existed without the input of Jayne Fargnoli at Blackwell. We thank her for enthusiastically taking a chance on us and also for her limitless patience and sage counsel. Thanks also to Ken Provencher and Margot Morse for editorial assistance.

Danielle Williams and Shane Toepfer have proven to be invaluable as research assistants. Their attention to detail and willingness to put in the extra hours toward the end helped bring this project to the finish line. Thanks also to Caroline Frick, Jennie Phillips, and Rebecca Epstein for their input from the initial idea to the final drafts.

Finally, special thanks to our families as well as to both Greg Siegel and Cully Hamner for their heroic support throughout this process.

Jennifer Holt and Alisa PerrenMarch 2008

Notes on Contributors

About the Editors

Jennifer Holt is assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. She is currently working on Empires of Entertainment, a manuscript chronicling deregulation and structural transformation in the film and television industries.

Alisa Perren is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. She is completing a manuscript tracing the evolution of Miramax during the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. She has published articles on the development of niche markets in the New Hollywood as well as on the programming and distribution strategies of contemporary US television networks.

About the Contributors

John Thornton Caldwell is professor and chair of cinema and media studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. His books include Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television(2008); Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television(1995); Electronic Media and Technoculture(editor, 2000); and New Media(co-editor, 2003). He has also published articles in Cinema Journal, Asian Film, Television & New Media, and Media, Culture & Society. Producer/ director of the award-winning films Rancho California (por favor)(2002) and Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath(1989), and recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the AFI, and regional fellowships, his films and videos have been shown widely at festivals in Sundance, Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Toulouse, and Mexico City, and broadcast on public television in the US and Australia.

Michael Curtin is director of global studies at the University of Wisconsin International Institute and professor of media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication Arts. His books include Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics(1995); Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV(2007); Making and Selling Culture(co-editor, 1996); and The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict(co-editor, 1997). He is currently working on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization(Blackwell) and The American Television Industry(British Film Institute). He is co-editor of the International Screen Industries book series for the British Film Institute.

Mark Deuze holds a joint appointment at Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, US, and as professor of journalism and new media at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Publications comprise five books including Media Work(2007); guest-edited special issues of journals on convergence culture (Convergence 2008, International Journal of Cultural Studies2009); and articles in journals such as Information Society, New Media & Society, and Journalism Studies. Weblog: http://deuze.blogspot.com.

Caroline Frick serves as assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, she founded and acts as executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (www. texasarchive.org). She has worked in film preservation at Warner Bros, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration. She has also programmed films for the American Movie Classics cable channel in New York and currently serves as a director of the board for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Her book, Saving Cinema, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Nitin Govil teaches comparative media and cultural studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he is assistant professor in the Department of Communication. He is co-author of Global Hollywood(2001) and Global Hollywood 2(2005) and has also published on cultural politics and media technology, media history, globalization and the culture industries, and film piracy across local and global contexts. He is currently completing a co-authored book on the Indian film industries.

Joshua Green is a postdoctoral researcher in the comparative media studies program at MIT, where he is also research manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium. His research looks at changing understandings of what television “is,” the formation of the participatory audience, and television branding in the context of participatory culture. He has published work on participatory culture and the relationship between producers and consumers, television scheduling strategies, the history of Australian television, and the construction of the cultural public sphere. He is co-author (with Jean Burgess) of YouTube: Online Video and the Politics of Participatory Culture(2008). He holds a Ph.D. in media studies from the Queensland University of Technology.

John Hartley is Australian Research Council federation fellow and research director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He is a distinguished professor of QUT and adjunct professor of the Australian National University. He was foundation dean of the Creative Industries Faculty (QUT), and previously head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. He is author of 18 books, translated into a dozen languages, including Television Truths(2008); Creative Industries(2005); A Short History of Cultural Studies(2003); Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts(2002); The Indigenous Public Sphere(with Alan McKee, 2000); American Cultural Studies(with Roberta Pearson, 2000); Uses of Television(1999); and Popular Reality(1996). He is editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

David Hesmondhalgh is professor of media industries at the Institute of Communications Studies and co-director (with Justin O’Connor) of CuMIRC, the Cultural and Media Industries Research Centre at the University of Leeds. His publications include The Cultural Industries(2nd edn. 2007) and five edited volumes: The Media and Social Theory(with Jason Toynbee, 2008); Media Production(2006); Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity(with Jessica Evans, 2005); Popular Music Studies(with Keith Negus, 2002); and Western Music and its Others(with Georgina Born, 2000). He is currently writing up a two-year research project, “Creative Work in the Cultural Industries,” conducted with Sarah Baker and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Michele Hilmes is professor of media and cultural studies and director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author or editor of several books on media history, including NBC: America’s Network(2007); Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States(2nd edn. 2006); The Television History Book(2003); and Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952(1997).

Henry Jenkins is the co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program and the Peter de Florez professor of humanities. He is author and/or editor of 12 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide; Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture; The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture; Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture; Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture; and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog: henryjenkins.org.

Victoria E. Johnson is associate professor of film and media studies and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also affiliated faculty in African American Studies. Her book, Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for US Identity(2008), examines the imagination of the American Midwest as symbolic heartland in critical moments in prime-time television and US social history. She has published several articles and chapters regarding the politics of place, race, and popular music in anthologies and journals including Film Quarterly and The Velvet Light Trap.

Douglas Kellner is George F. Kneller chair in the philosophy of education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, co-authored with Michael Ryan; Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; works in cultural studies such as Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on postmodern theory with Steve Best; and a trilogy of books on the media and the Bush Administration, encompassing Grand Theft 2000, From 9/11 to Terror War, and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. His latest book is Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre. Website: www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.xhtml.

Jordan Levin is co-founder and CEO of Generate, a next-generation studio launched in early 2006 creating targeted content for multi-platform distribution across both traditional and digital media. Formerly CEO of The WB, he was part of the founding executive team responsible for defining series that established the network’s distinctly youthful brand such as Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Felicity, Smallville, and Everwood, for which he also directed an episode. In addition to The WB, he oversaw Kid’s WB! and established The WB’s original movie division by launching the American Girl film franchise. Prior to The WB, he was a member of the creative group that revitalized the Disney brand in network television with properties like Home Improvement, Ellen, and Boy Meets World. He has lent his expertise as a consultant to leading digital companies and currently sits on numerous boards including nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, political advocacy groups, and media companies.

P. David Marshall currently holds a chair in new media and cultural studies at the University of Wollongong. He has also been professor and chair of communication studies at Northeastern University. His books include New Media Cultures(2004); Web Theory(with Robert Burnett, 2003); The Celebrity Culture Reader(2006); Fame Games(with Graeme Turner and Frances Bonner, 2000); and Celebrity and Power(1997). He has published many articles and been regularly interviewed by the media and press on new media, media and popular culture, and the public persona. His current research focuses on the shift from a “representational” media regime to a presentational media regime via new media forms.

John McMurria is currently assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to his published articles in book anthologies and journals, he is coauthor, with Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, of Global Hollywood 2(2005). He is working on a critical cultural policy history of cable television in the US.

Cynthia Meyers is assistant professor of communication at College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. Her research areas include the advertising industry, broadcast history, media economics, and new media. She is currently completing a book manuscript about the role of the advertising industry in the development of radio from the 1920s through the 1940s. Her publications include articles in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the Encyclopedia of Television, and Columbia Journal of American Studies.

Toby Miller is author, co-author, or editor of The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject(1993); Contemporary Australian Television(1994); The Avengers(1998); Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media(1998); Popular Culture and Everyday Life(1998); SportCult(1999); A Companion to Film Theory(1999); Film and Theory: An Anthology(2000); Globalization and Sport: Playing the World(2001); Sportsex(2001); Global Hollywood(2001); Cultural Policy(2002); Television Studies(2002); Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader(2003); Television Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies(2003); Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s(2003); Política Cultural(2004); Global Hollywood 2(2005); El Nuevo Hollywood: Del Imperialismo Cultural a las Leyes del Marketing(2005); A Companion to Cultural Studies(2006); and Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age(2007). He is editor of Television & New Media and co-editor of Social Identities.

Philip M. Napoli is the director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of media institutions and media policy. His books include Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace(2003) and Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media(2001). He has testified before Congress and the Federal Communications Commission on media policy issues, and his work has been supported by organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Benton Foundation, and the Center for American Progress.

Horace Newcomb holds the Lambdin Kay chair for the Peabodys and is director of the George Foster Peabody Awards in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. He is editor of two editions of the Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television and seven editions of Television: The Critical View. He is author of TV: The Most Popular Art and coauthor of The Producer’s Medium. He writes and lectures on topics related to television and culture.

Thomas Schatz is professor and Mary Gibbs Jones centennial chair of communication at the University of Texas, where he has been on the faculty in the Radio-Television-Film Department since 1976. He has written four books about Hollywood films, including Hollywood Genres; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era; and Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. He also edited a recent four-volume collection on Hollywood for Routledge. His writing on film also has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere, The Nation, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Cineaste. He is currently working on a book project with Thom Mount, former president of Universal Pictures, and serving as executive director of the UT Film Institute, a program devoted to training students in narrative and digital filmmaking, and the production of independent feature-length films.

Cristina Venegas is assistant professor in film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The focus of her research is on international media with an emphasis on Latin America, Spanish-language film and television in the US, and digital technologies. She has written about film and political culture, revolutionary imagination in the Americas, telenovelas, contemporary Latin American cinema, and regionalism. Her book, Digital Dilemma, about Cuban digital media since the 1990s, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. She has curated numerous film programs on Latin American and indigenous film in the US and Canada, and is co-founder and artistic director of the Latino CineMedia Film Festival in Santa Barbara.

Introduction Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?

Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren

The study of media industries is a varied and diverse project, incorporating research on everything from “mobisodes” designed for iPhones and the labor force manufacturing plasma television sets in Malaysia to the Creative Commons movement and trade shows in Budapest. Such work is conducted in film and television studies, communication, law, public policy, business, economics, journalism, and sociology departments. The research about these issues is dispersed across similarly vast terrain, as the media industries have been substantively explored and discussed in numerous arenas far beyond the traditional purview of academic study. Discourses in the trade papers, the popular press, and academic publications are supplemented by writing in digital communities, online journals and the blogosphere.1

This range of perspectives is both a necessary component and a constitutive element of this work; after all, to explore the media industries in the twenty-first century is to engage with an extraordinary range of texts, markets, economies, artistic traditions, business models, cultural policies, technologies, regulations, and creative expression. And yet, while such an array of resources and emphases sustains an inspiring breadth of scholarly endeavors, thus far these diffuse conversations have not been united by any specific disciplinary tradition. Further, there remains a dearth of formal gatherings and conferences for those researching the media industries, as well as an absence of journals or anthologies devoted specifically to the study of media industries as a coherent discipline.

While academic organizations and cross- disciplinary conversations focused on the media industries have been in short supply, the media industries themselves have been experiencing a period of unprecedented influence, prosperity, cultural debate, and transformation. Shifts in regulatory philosophy and political power have led to dramatic clashes between Congress and the FCC, which have put the regulation of these industries on the front page and at the center of heated public discussion. Trade agreements and other economic and geopolitical alliances have led to more regional and transnational collaborations in a globalized media culture. Technological and industrial convergence has eroded old relationships between media while cultural policies have created new ones. Audiences have become newly valued and “monetized” by media industries seeking the latest user-generated content, and at the same time new modes of distribution have undercut decades of industry tradition and thrown well-established business models into disarray.

Further, as the media industries grapple with the evolution of their products and structures, they are also affected by a multitude of external developments. These include the ascendance of neoliberal economic policy, the increasing power of new global markets and trade, the growth of an international middle class (and the erosion of an American one), wars in the Middle East and Africa, dramatic Internet-induced changes in social interaction, and the changing definitions and roles of labor in the digital era. Meanwhile, shifting hierarchies of taste and value in popular culture are having a profound impact on media products and strategies; one need only consider the proliferation of television programming across digital platforms to understand how audience behavior, advertising strategies, and longstanding conceptions of “old” media are changing rapidly in the new millennium.3

These myriad developments have created a pressing need to bring interdisciplinary scholarship on media industries into a common dialogue. It is therefore our belief that media industry studies should be mapped and articulated as a distinct and vitally important field unto itself. This has become increasingly urgent in the present landscape of convergence, technological growth, and global exchange, and we believe that the time is right for such an intervention. To that end, we have enlisted the help of internationally renowned scholars to delineate and integrate the various traditions, historical trajectories, critical parameters, and potential paths of inquiry that define this discipline. These essays represent the early imaginings of what the field of media industry studies might look like. This book is neither a definitive blueprint nor a final statement. It is not an exploration of specific media industries in any particular locale. Rather, it is an open conceptual discussion about the many ways that media industry research has been undertaken in the past and what interdisciplinary models, methods, and visions it might embrace in the future. It is also a recognition of the fact that, while the world does not necessarily need another field of study, one has indeed emerged.

Defining Media Industry Studies

In this volume, we focus on film, radio, television, advertising, and digital media. This list could easily be expanded to include music, newspapers, book publishing, and even telecommunications. Scholars who write about “creative industries” and “culture industries” incorporate all of the aforementioned as well as a host of other areas in discussing both the art and economics of media industries. Those focusing on creative industries4 have also analyzed the realms of architecture, art and design, performing arts, fashion, and software, among others. Cultural industries scholars have included museums, art in stitutions, libraries, live performance, and sport in their purview.5

Choosing the appropriate scope for this project has been challenging. We have decided to narrow our focus to primarily audiovisual media (with the exception of radio, which is inextricably bound to broadcast and advertising histories) for the purposes of initially mapping this critical terrain. Our parameters were determined by the disciplinary cohesion and shared academic traditions of these media, as well as the degree of commonality or overlap between their cultural and institutional histories, objects of study and modes of analysis. By no means do we consider industries such as music, publishing, or telecommunications to be “outside” disciplinary boundaries or of lesser significance; they were merely beyond what could be substantively and productively addressed by this volume.

Our main objective is to articulate the diverse academic traditions and common threads defining media industry studies while also illustrating how the integrated analyses of media texts, audiences, histories, and culture could enable more productive scholarship. Another goal is to situate this discipline within a humanistic context; while some of the methodologies and models explicated here are more commonly employed by the social sciences, we believe that the textually oriented concerns of film and media studies could be enhanced and enlivened by a broadened base of analysis without threatening the larger commitment to the qualitative, critical work associated with humanist paradigms. To that end, the essays in this book attend to constructs of text and image as they relate to industrial structure and economics, connect politics and policy to issues of art and audience, and develop theoretical and methodological paradigms that not only engage with the past but also offer ways of thinking about media industries in the present (and presumably future) landscape of convergence.

In the essays collected here, the authors address several key themes and concerns, including:

the relative power and autonomy of individual agents to express divergent political perspectives, creative visions, and cultural attitudes within larger institutional structures;the means by which the relationships between industry, government, text, and audience can be conceptualized;the need for a grounded, empirically based understanding of media industry practices, including the operations, business models, and day-to-day realities of the media industries, past and present;the aesthetic, cultural, economic, and social values associated with the media industries and their contents;the degree of diversity in both the industries themselves and the products that they create and distribute;the power of the media industries to shape cultural agendas in local, trans/national, regional, and/or global contexts;the moral and ethical issues that emerge as a result of the activities and operations of the media industries;the roles and responsibilities of scholar-citizens in the process of describing and analyzing the media industries.

The discussion that follows emphasizes both the historical and future importance of these issues for scholars of media industries. In looking back on the formative influences on this area of study, we have opted for a macro-level survey that sketches the diverse disciplinary roots of a media industry studies approach. Since our contributors effectively provide the background relevant to their particular topics, our goal in the next few pages is to outline the relationships between a range of scholarly traditions and to show how these traditions both inform this field at large and illuminate the dynamics outlined above. In the process, we indicate ways in which future work on the media industries can further engage in a transdisciplinary conversation about the converging global media landscape.

The Genesis of Media Industries Scholarship

The culture industry and mass communication theories

Many of the foundational ideas about the media industries emerged in critical/scholarly writing from the 1920s through the 1950s. The arrival of World War II – combined with the dominance of several forms of mass media including motion pictures and radio – contributed to the development of different strands of media industries research in both the humanities and social sciences. A key contribution to humanities-based scholarship came with the arrival of a number of German-Jewish emigrants, including Frankfurt School members Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, into the US. These Marxist theorists were previously based at the Institute of Social Research in Germany until the war led them to flee the country. As Douglas Kellner explores more fully in his essay, the ideas forwarded by the Frankfurt School influenced both political economy and cultural studies, as well as a wide range of other disciplines including philosophy and literature. For the purposes of our discussion, what is particularly significant is an essay written by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944 entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”6

This essay has influenced how media industries are conceptualized by scholars in a number of ways. Adorno and Horkheimer expressed concern about the extent to which mass media commodified culture. They believed the commercialized media produced within industrial structures – which they labeled “the culture industry” – contributed to the cultural and artistic bankruptcy of American society. Further, they were troubled by the potential degree to which such large-scale media industries shaped the minds of the “masses.” They believed that the ideology perpetuated by mass media systems contributed to a depoliticized populace and to their willingness to accept the current social and political status quo. From their point of view, Hollywood represented the epitome of mass-produced culture; its products cultivated superficial materialistic needs instead of leading people to see the way in which the capitalist system oppressed them and led to their continued domination by the established powers.

While many of these ideas are anathema to our current approach, they are important to understand because of the degree to which they have framed the discourses about the media industries for decades. Their work was significant in terms of raising questions about the kinds of texts produced by mass media industries and the ways these texts might impact audiences.7 Nonetheless, from the perspective of contemporary media industry studies scholars, Adorno and Horkheimer’s views become prob -lematic for a number of reasons. First, inherent in their work was an elitist attitude toward what constituted art (e.g., such high culture activities as operas and symphonies qualified; Hollywood movies and network broadcasts did not). Second, they assumed a monolithic media industry when in fact, as Michele Hilmes and Cynthia Meyers show in their essays, even during the 1930s and 1940s there were numerous stakeholders within the industries that had different agendas. Though the metaphor of the “factory system” might have been applied to the Hollywood studios, for example, struggles continually took place between everyone from producers to directors to writers and cinematographers. The factory system also implied highly standardized, interchangeable products – a point that has been significantly challenged by work in such areas as film studies and cultural studies for decades.8 Third, the vision of the industry constructed by Adorno and Horkheimer assumed a one-way flow of communication from a central industry out to a passive audience. This attributed a tremendous amount of power to the media, combined with minimal agency for individual viewers. What’s more, it presumed that other social, cultural, and political institutions had little influence on movie viewers and radio listeners.

Concurrent with the rise of humanistically oriented research by the Frankfurt School, there emerged another strand of scholarship on the media industries out of the social sciences. This area, which was labeled as “mass communication” by the 1930s,9 differed from the Frankfurt School in terms of its politics and its methodologies. The Frankfurt School used qualitative analyses informed by Marxian critical theory; these analytical tools were designed to advance radical, polemical arguments about overhauling political and economic structures. Conversely, mass communication scholars generally used quantitative methods such as surveys and content analyses in the interest of better understanding the “effects” of mass media forms such as motion pictures and radio on the public. Their interest was less in the radical social change pursued by the Frankfurt School than in modifying the existing system in order to make it more democratic. Mass communication researchers often assumed minor modifications in media systems could contribute to a more democratic society. These views and methods made their work more amenable to government and industry funding.10

Notably, much mass communication scholarship viewed communication via the “transmission model” of “who says what to whom to what effect.”11 This model assumes a linear communication process with the greatest power and influence residing with the “who” (typically sectors of industry or government) and much less authority residing with the “whom” (namely, the audience). Communication scholars – as well as related fields of sociology and psychology – often focused on the ways messages (the “what”) could be modified. For the government, the modification of messages was pursued largely in the interest of increasing public participation and civic involvement; for industry, the goal was to sell more of the growing number of consumer goods being produced on assembly lines. These two primary objectives contributed to the direction of much of the initial work on the media industries. Specifically, early communication-oriented studies of the media industries were frequently geared to looking at either advertising or news and information programming. To this day, researchers coming out of mass communication departments continue to focus extensively on these topics. For example, prominent books like David Croteau and William Hoynes’ The Business of Media and Robert McChesney’s The Problem of the Media are centered on deficiencies in news coverage and the continuing expansion of consumer culture.These topics are framed in terms how the media industries add to – or, more frequently, constrain – democratic discourse.12

As these recent applications of decades-old ideas illustrate, concepts developed during the 1930s and 1940s continue to shape the research questions and approaches of scholars across the humanities and social sciences. It is precisely these perspectives that the contributors of this book are contesting, challenging, and reconceptualizing. While the ideas formulated by “mass culture” and “mass communication” researchers are valuable, they must be viewed largely as of historical value. The essays by Thomas Schatz and Victoria Johnson on film and television industry history reveal the degree to which such views on mass culture and mass communication were produced within specific Fordist economic, political, and social circumstances13 (e.g., the Hollywood studio system and the classic broadcast network system).

While the “mass culture” and “mass communication” approaches may inform media industry studies, they are not central to its future development. As will be explored in the following pages, media industry studies favors different models of the media industries than those developed in the Fordist era. This means supporting analysis that more fully considers the interrelationships between industry, text, audience, and society. Further, the “industry” spoken of by media industry studies scholars is presumed to be anything but monolithic – a point underscored by Horace Newcomb in his provocative essay, which concludes this book. Rather, our approach perceives culture and cultural production as sites of struggle, contestation, and negotiation between a broad range of stakeholders. These stake-holders include not only sectors of industry and government, but also “ordinary people” (e.g., media user/consumer/viewers). In addition, media indus-try studies is no longer bound to old frameworks that operated predominantly in terms of nation-based media systems. Nor should we necessarily think only in terms of specific media forms. Changes in the industries, the texts they produce, and the ways these texts are consumed make media-specific formulations increasingly problematic. A number of authors in this collection, including Thomas Schatz, P. David Marshall, Henry Jenkins, and Joshua Green explore the challenges that emerge in writing about “distinct” media, past and present, in light of industrial convergence. Thus, while this section has dealt with foundational and historical approaches to the study of the media industries, what follows is a sketch of influences and analytical frameworks that more immediately inform contemporary understandings of this discipline.

Disciplinary Influences and Analytical Frameworks

Sociology and anthropology

Mass communication and mass culture perspectives may have been prominent from the 1920s to the 1950s, but they were not the only ways media industries research was undertaken during those years. Indeed, a handful of scholars, including sociologist Leo Rosten and anthropologist Hortense Powder-maker, initiated ethnographically oriented studies of the Hollywood community and filmmaking process.14 Rosten and Powdermaker looked at Hollywood from the “bottom up.” These individuals were among the first to employ interviews and participant observation in order to better understand the complex nature of power relations in the media industries, the tensions that arise in the process of making meaning, and the ways in which audiences are conceptualized by both executives and creative figures.15

In spite of the richness that such methods can provide, few media industry scholars employed these strategies until the 1970s. When this work was taken up again, it was predominantly by sociologists interested in exploring the day-to-day operations of news organizations. In the late 1970s, American sociologists Gaye Tuchman and Herbert Gans, as well as British sociologist Philip Schlesinger, undertook studies that examined the ways institutional structures variably enabled or constrained newsroom staffs.16 A handful of studies on the production of entertainment programming emerged simultaneously. These included several works by UK-based scholars; examples include John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s observation of the production of Dr. Who and Tom Burns’ ventures down the halls of the BBC.17 One of the few scholars to have conducted examinations of both news production and entertainment programming is sociologist Jeremy Tunstall. Over more than 30 years, Tunstall has interviewed hundreds of individuals involved in both public and commercial media systems throughout Britain and the US.18 Of course, no survey of cultural production is complete without referring to Todd Gitlin’s landmark Inside Prime Time, first published in 1983. This study is distinguished by the degree of access he had to prominent US television executives, writers, and producers, as well as by the depth and breadth of his analysis.19

The ethnographically oriented accounts above have been complemented by organizational analyses by individuals such as Paul DiMaggio and Paul Hirsch. These writers have taken a more macro-level approach in examining the “sociology of work” in the cultural industries; they evaluate cultural institutions in terms of how they deal with such issues as uncertainty and change.20 As John Caldwell discusses in his essay, collectively these strands of sociology and anthropology strongly influence the direction taken in scholarship on cultures of production. In addition, as explored in the next section, these studies provide useful counterpoints to the kinds of institutional analyses undertaken by media economists.

Media economics and industrial analysis

In contrast to the “bottom-up” approach employed by many anthropologists and sociologists, early researchers with backgrounds in business and economics examined the film industry through a “ top-down” perspective of industrial and organizational structures. This work includes The Story of the Films, a series of lectures at Harvard’s business school in the 1920s compiled by Joseph P. Kennedy; Mae Huettig’s 1944 study, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry; and Michael Conant’s Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis(1960). Economists have provided media industry studies with models for discussing both the macroeconomic (e.g., industrial organization and structure) and microeconomic (e.g., operations of individual firms and agents within the marketplace).21

Douglas Gomery has played a pioneering role in bringing industrial and economic analysis to the study of media industries.22 Drawing from applied neoclassical microeconomic theory, he offered a concrete framework for conducting economic analysis via a discussion of industry structure, conduct, and performance.23 Gomery’s Who Owns the Media(written with Benjamin Compaine, 3rd edn. 2000) represents an extraordinary effort to address matters of policy and economics across a range of media industries including newspapers, publishing, radio, film, music, and television. Who Owns the Media supplements its extensive survey of the media industries with an assessment of the amount of competition present both within and across sectors of the media industries.

The degree to which an industry is determined to be competitive by economists impacts the extent to which it is regulated – or deregulated. Since the late 1960s, the subject of media de/regulation has provoked debate from scholars around the world. The debates about media concentration have been conducted by “traditional” economists and political economists, as will be explored below in more detail. A significant portion of this work has focused on the arena of telecommunications,24 but there is also dedicated work on television (e.g., Mara Einstein’s Media Diversity, 2004) and media conglomeration (e.g., Marc Cooper, ed. The Case Against Media Consolidation: Evidence on Concentration, Localism and Diversity, 2006)25 that illustrates how productive economic analysis can be for media industry scholarship. The humanist aversion to statistics has loomed large in the somewhat strained historical relationship between media studies and economics, but recent work on the economics of creative industries (most notably that of Richard Caves) suggests how this disciplinary divide can be overcome with artful analysis and an emphasis on conceptual issues.26 In his essay, Philip Napoli productively bridges this historic divide, outlining possible ways in which media economics can be applied to a study of the media industries that are sensitive to cultural, political, and aesthetic issues.

Political economy and cultural studies

One of the most prominent ways in which the media industries have been studied is through the lens of political economic analysis. While initial concepts in political economy were formulated by “classical” political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its present-day “critical” orientation developed in the post-World War II period.27 The dramatic social, political, and cultural transformations around the world provided the backdrop through which many of these early ideas were formulated. Vincent Mosco’s comprehensive The Political Economy of Communication indicates the range of political economic approaches as well as the diverse means by which this framework has been applied globally. Though there are significant distinctions between approaches in Europe, North America, and the “Global South” (e.g., Latin America, Asia, and Africa), Mosco describes political economy as broadly concerned with the “study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources.”28 A central interest is with the way in which resources are allocated, how they favor some at the expense of others, and how greater equity can be obtained throughout society. As Napoli discusses in his essay, these approaches tend to find “traditional” economic analyses problematic for the degree to which they are seen as sustaining and supporting dominant modes of power and existing capitalist structures.

There are various strands of critical political economy, and each has contributed to scholarship on the media industries in notable ways. The European strand described by Graham Murdock and Peter Golding is “holistic, historical, and centrally concerned with the balance between capitalist enterprise and public intervention.”29 The primary objective of scholars working out of this tradition involves the pursuit of social justice. Social justice is a central goal of several contributors in this collection as well, including John McMurria, Toby Miller, and David Hesmondhalgh. However, while the European-based political economic perspective influences these contributors’ research, they all note that the approach is not sufficient in and of itself. Rather, each author identifies ways that a media industry studies approach might be integrated with other modes of cultural and institutional analysis.

The “Global South” approach to critical political economy emerged most prominently in Latin America, though a growing body of work has developed in Africa and Asia as well. This perspective, which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, has been shaped by the specific political, cultural, and economic inequalities that these regions have faced in relation to the “Global North” (e.g., Western Europe and the US). Early discussions here were framed largely in terms of “cultural imperialism” and “media imperialism.”30 These terms broadly suggested a coercive unidirectional flow of western – and especially American – media into developing nations. Members of less powerful and wealthy nations maintained that the “dumping” of Hollywood products (and western consumerist ideologies) prevented the development of their own local or regional media industries. The indigenous cultures and values of many of these regions and countries were seen as threatened by the arrival of American media. These views helped motivate local activism and impact policy-making in many countries around the world – a point Cristina Venegas explores in depth with her essay.

Along with Venegas, Michael Curtin and Nitin Govil acknowledge the continuing influence of the cultural/media imperialism framework. As they make clear, in spite of the fact that discussions of cultural imperialism have been replaced and complicated by more complex culturally based theories about global flows, these early political economic frameworks often serve as the baseline from which later analysis proceeds. Significantly, it was not only writers in developing nations who spoke about – and to varying degrees, continue to speak about – cultural imperialism. In fact, this perspective is also prominent in the North American strand of critical political economy as forwarded by scholars such as Herbert Schiller, Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney, and Edward Herman.31 It should be underscored that many of the early North American critical political economists began writing during the same historical moment, and within the same economic, social and political climate as those writing in the Global South.

Such work initially explored the expansion of (what were then) US-based media companies around the world; as the companies themselves transformed into multinational media conglomerates, scholarship shifted to address this development. However, as David Hesmondhalgh discusses in his essay, the underlying nature of this strand of scholarship has not changed significantly; individuals speaking from the “Schiller–McChesney” perspective, as he calls it, remain predominantly concerned with the ways in which a handful of media corporations have a homogenizing influence on media culture around the world. This line of research is criticized by authors in this collection for being reductive, simplistic, and too economistic, and many political economists working in North America have since taken more nuanced approaches to analyzing the structures and business strategies of major media companies.32

Scholarly efforts to incorporate political economy and cultural studies have been widely attempted in the last couple of decades. This “integration” generally has been conceived of as uniting political economy’s interests in ownership, regulation, and production with cultural studies’ interest in texts, discourse, audiences, and consumption.33 Supposed oppositions between these two approaches have been largely collapsed during the last two decades as a broad range of scholars including Douglas Kellner, Thomas Schatz, and Michael Curtin have reinforced how many of the same theoretical and political goals drive both perspectives.34 It is our belief that one of the many virtues of a media industry studies approach is that it marks a further step beyond the discussions of “how to blend political economy and cultural studies.” Indeed, that the integration of these two perspectives is vital to any productive analysis of the media industries in the twenty-first century is effectively axiomatic for authors in this collection (and fully explored by Kellner in his essay). The challenge, then, is to provide the most sophisticated models with which to undertake an inherently interdisciplinary and multi-methodological project. Any such undertaking must, from the outset, acknowledge the complexity and contradictions of media texts as well as have a respect for media audiences consuming these texts. Further, such a project must understand the histories of specific media – along with the ways that they have been studied previously – in order to fully engage with present discourses circulating about contemporary media industries.

Ideas developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s prove particularly useful for an emergent media industry studies. Several individuals influencing or affiliated with the Centre, including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall, helped develop scholarship that was taken up in the study of the media industries during the 1980s. A central contribution of this strand of cultural studies to media industry studies is its interest in the ways that cultural power is produced and reproduced, mediated and negotiated, circulated and consumed. Meaning is made – and by extension, cultural power is exercised – throughout the processes of making texts (“encoding”) and interpreting texts (“decoding”).35 Historically, cultural studies scholars have more readily examined the “decoding” process, considering the ways that audiences can read mass-mediated texts in unanticipated, potentially liberating ways.36 They have shown how, even if texts largely reproduce dominant ideologies (as per the Frankfurt School model, and a point of contention in itself ), the ways that audiences interpret and respond to these ideologies differ widely depending on factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and national identity.

While the “decoding” process has been of central interest to cultural studies scholarship for several decades, a number of scholars recently have applied cultural studies’ view of culture as a site of struggle, contestation, and negotiation to the industry itself.37

This shift in emphasis to cultural production (referring here to everything from production itself to distribution, marketing, and exhibition practices) has helped foreground the role of individual agents within larger media structures and further challenged notions of a monolithic industry, past or present. More recent work in the “cultural studies of production” has increasingly rendered this divide outdated.38 Meanwhile, other media scholars, including Elana Levine and Julie D’Acci, have continued to refine Hall’s encoding/decoding model (as well as Richard Johnson’s “circuit of culture”) in pursuit of more integrated approaches to media studies. These studies indicate how scholarship has further moved away from earlier linear or top-down models. In addition, recent discussions of the “circuit of media study” help to promote work that more fully brings together discussions of cultural production, artifacts, reception, and sociohistorical context.39

Journalists and activists

More “traditional” scholars based in academe are by no means the only ones to explore the role of media industries in a cultural context. A range of individuals – from trade publication writers and members of the popular press to journalists and scholars – offer valuable alternative perspectives on how the media industries operate and how they deal with change. Their articles, books, blogs, and websites are often used to nuance understandings of contemporary debates and to provide a sense of the prominent discourses circulating among various stakeholders at given historical moments. Given the proprietary nature (and extreme expense) of much industry data, these publications have proven especially valuable to media industries scholars. The essays by Thomas Schatz, Victoria Johnson, and Cynthia Meyers are examples of how such data can be effectively employed in constructing historical analyses.

Members of the popular press have published a wealth of material on the media industries. The access granted to journalists, as well as the financial resources available to them to conduct their research, often far exceeds what is available to scholars. A prominent example of this work is Ken Auletta’s Three Blind Mice(1991), which provides a look inside media corporations and the operations of their news divisions during a period in 1980s when they were in the midst of a radical structural transformation. Other journalists to have written extensively on various dimensions of media companies include Alex Ben Block on the formation of the Fox Network, Edward Jay Epstein on the transformation of the film industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Scott Donaton on the complex negotiations taking place between the advertising and entertainment industries in the early twenty-first century.40

These projects have been complemented by a range of first-person narratives from executives and creative figures who have worked in the industry.41

A variety of public intellectuals – activist scholars and journalists – have also taken a critical approach in their examination of the products, institutions, policy and power attached to media industries. As global media corporations have wielded more cultural and economic influence, critical voices emerging from a number of activist scholars and journalists have become more prominent. Notable work comes from Naomi Klein and David Bollier, who look at the growing prominence of brand management by global conglomerates; Eric Alterman and Eric Klinenberg, who analyze the conglomerate control and political bias of news; and Jeff Chester, who investigates the threat posed by new media policy to democracy.42 Media consolidation also contributed to the return of semi-retired journalist Bill Moyers to PBS. Bill Moyers’ Journal regularly explores such topics as concentration of ownership and bias in news reporting from a liberal perspective.

Though ownership and concentration remain concerns to many scholar-activists, with the rise of digital media many have shifted their focus to a wider menu of issues including intellectual property rights, network neutrality, democratic Internet access, and privacy protections for consumers.43

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s role in the formation of the Creative Commons movement is an example of how those studying the media industries can expand the impact of their research and influence broader cultural conversations. Lessig as well as media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan have recently generated a great deal of academic and public discussion about the intersection of digital technologies and intellectual property law with their work, demonstrating how researchers can serve as public intellectuals while at the same time making scholarly interventions.44

Film and television studies

The humanities-based study of film and television has offered industry analysis far more than merely an object of study or a disciplinary residence from which to work. In fact, film and television studies have produced, developed, taught, and promoted a great deal of the research and work on media industries in the academy. Contributions to media indus-try studies have come from industrial historians as well as textual critics and theorists. As it would be impossible to discuss all the relevant work emanating from this field in such limited space, Michele Hilmes’ chapter is dedicated to exploring this more fully. Here we limit the discussion to a brief overview of some prominent ways in which methods and frameworks developed in film and TV studies have been directed toward the study of the media industries. As the other sections of this introduction indicate, film and television studies have also drawn from other areas (e.g., political economy, cultural studies) and applied those areas to a study of different media forms.

A central site of analysis for film and television studies remains the text. As a methodology or focal point, textual analysis has not been associated with industry studies per se. However, many foundational studies have examined the intersection between industrial/economic factors and style. Out of cinema studies, a pioneering work was Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960(1985).45

Justin Wyatt’s High Concept(1994) was notable for examining the interrelationship between motion picture marketing practices and New Hollywood aesthetics.46 In television studies, John Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television(1995) showed how shifting production practices affected the kinds of programs aired on US television in the 1980s and 1990s.47 Studies of authorship represent another significant way that film and television studies have probed the relationship between industrial organization and individual agency while also retaining a close attention to the textual dimensions of these media. In their essays, Hilmes and Schatz both note how a central interest of humanities-based media industry studies lies in the creative input of directors, producers, writers, or studio executives. In film studies, the auteur theory has been applied most extensively toward exploring the relative influence of the director; with television studies, scholars have focused more on the role of the writer-producer. However, the idea of authorship has been applied by both film and television studies scholars at the institutional level as well.48

The relationships between industrial structures, cultural conventions, and textual practices have also been directly linked to genre analysis. There is a rich tradition of work in film studies that explores how a range of players – from industry to audience, critics to filmmakers – interact to shape genre conventions over time.49