ABSTRACT
Since its publication in 1980, The “Nationwide” Audience has played an important role in media studies, especially in Britain, western Europe, and Australia, not so much because of its inherent “informational” value, but because of its strategic position in the field of qualitative empirical research on media audiences — a field that has gone through a rapid development in the 1980s. The meaning and politics of Morley's turn toward empirical research of the television audience should be assessed against this critical background. It is first of all a procedure that is aimed at opening up a space in which watching television can begin to be understood as a complex cultural practice full of dialogical negotiations and contestations, rather than as a singular occurrence whose meaning can be determined once and for all in the abstract. However, to interpret these recent developments in audience studies in terms of such a convergence is to simplify and even misconceive the issues at stake.
