ABSTRACT
As McGuigan names John Fiske and Paul Willis as perhaps the most ‘guilty’ of uncritical cultural populists, this chapter outlines some of the key features of their work to explain what is at issue in what is so far a rather one sided debate. In order to facilitate this, it introduces two new concepts that have their provenance in the work of Pierre Bourdieu: the ‘cultural field’ and the ‘economic field’. Fiske argues that resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in Western societies takes two forms, semiotic and social. The first is mainly concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; the second is dedicated to transformations of the socioeconomic system. Post-Marxist hegemony theory at its best insists that there is always a dialogue between the processes of production and the activities of consumption.
