ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical review of formative research on the changing organization of communication industries and production as this was developed in Britain and Europe from the mid-1960s – when academic study of media gained significant academic momentum – to the mid-1990s. It presents the resulting work as a set of Russian dolls nested within each other with a synoptic political economy of the changing communications landscape providing essential framing context for intermediate analyses of specific media industries, organizations and occupations, and grounded ethnographies of cultural production. It notes the role of Pierre Bourdieu and Jurgen Habermas in providing conceptual resources and foci for analysis and explores the ways research engaged with a series of transformations in media industries and production. These include: television’s reorganization of the public sphere; the gathering crisis of representation prompted by the failure of experiments in popular program making and the continuing self-enclosure of professional enclaves around occupational ideologies and preexisting social networks; and the increasing impact of the neoliberal promotion of marketization and the ideology of consumption on both the strategies pursued by commercial media industries and on the ideal of communication as a public good providing resources for active and informed citizenship.
