ABSTRACT
John Ellis (1977) takes up this problem, basing his position on Hirst’s arguments in Economy and Society, November 1976. He denies the sense of attempting to derive expectations as to ideological/political practices from class position, and denies the validity of any model of ‘typical positions’ (such as those embedded in the encoding/decoding model derived from Parkin). He argues that this is illegitimate, since: ‘According to the conjuncture, shopkeepers, for example, can be voting communist, believing in collective endeavour.’ (‘The Institution of the Cinema’: p. 58) So presumably, according to the ‘conjuncture’, shopkeepers can be decoding programmes in any number of different frameworks/codes, in an unstructured way.
