ABSTRACT
Since the end of the 1980s the development of theories of cultural globalization, in the Anglo-Saxon academic field, has resulted in a deep transformation in the ways of thinking media internationalization. The critical political economy of communication, which since the 1960s has played a key role in analysing media internationalization, has been supplanted by disciplines that until the late1980s had rarely addressed the international dimensions of media. Theories of cultural globalization, as we will try to show here, are the
product of a convergence in theory among cultural studies, anthropology and sociology, which regardless of their disciplinary differences tend to think of the cultural consequences of globalization along the same lines. As such, they propose a new dominant paradigm to apprehend the consequences of media internationalization – a paradigm which has deconstructed the perspectives of political economy and replaced them with a radically different vision. The aim of this chapter is to show, through some of the key texts, how
these theories of cultural globalization have emerged and to underline some of the major ruptures that they have entailed in the ways of thinking media internationalization.
