ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the number of scholars working on (and students following courses in) media management and media economics has expanded dramatically. There are a number of reasons for this. The digital revolution has transformed both the shape and the scope of media businesses, accelerating the related processes of convergence and globalization. The simultaneous deregulation of national media industries has meant that the attention of both policymakers and media academics has shifted from political to economic issues. At the same time the media have become increasingly important as businesses and as potential employers of ambitious MBAs. Put these changes together and there are a number of new demands for teaching and research focused on the specific economic and management problems raised by media business practice. For media and communications studies departments, economics and management can no longer be treated as irrelevant. For economics departments and business schools, the media can no longer be regarded as marginal. For policymakers, the impacts of media companies on the national economy (on employment, on the balance of payments, on competitiveness and growth) are of increasing importance for economic management. For media entrepreneurs and executives, the problems ofmanaging talent and intellectual property, of retaining and buildingmarkets, of operating in a global economy, of responding or not to new technological temptations are ever more complex. Even consumers now face increasingly complicated decisions as to what resources to invest in what media product or experience, as choicesofwhat tobuyandhowtopay for it proliferate.Mediamanagement
and media economics may be relatively new subject areas and may have an uneasy relationship with their parent disciplines-economics and management science, on the one hand, media sociology, on the other-but their importance is undeniable, and there is certainly abundant opportunity now for researchers to develop knowledge and shape the analytic concepts of these emerging fields of inquiry.
