Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
1986
Publisher
Ablex Publishing / Bloomsbury
Abstract
The argument of this review is that communication studies in the U.S. are being influenced by a series of factors, both external and internal, that may help to proliferate if not directly change the paradigms that guide research in this country. The particular area of communication usually identified with the cultural industries (including all of the traditional mass media and many of the new technologies, and extending to a variety of nontraditional cultural enterprises like advertising and tourism) has ordinarily been dealt with, if at all, as a part of a political economy of mass communications. It is also identified as an area of concern for policy makers, and only incidentally as of theoretical import to international researchers (cf., Katz and Wedell, 1977; Lee, 1980; Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1979; Nordenstreng and Varis, 1974; Tunstall, 1977). What the review suggests is that, properly understood, a focus on cultural industries also encompasses two other traditions in communication studies that are making their presence felt in the U.S.: a cultural studies' approach (including both schools of "culturalists" and "structuralists," as Hall (1980) distinguishes them), and a sociology of culture and production of culture as espoused by Raymond Williams (1981) in England and sociologists like Gaye Tuchman (1983) or Paul Hirsch (1978) in this country. It is not suggested that this convergence of interests around cultural industries has made any real progress toward a theoretical synthesis, nor that issues raised by critical scholars (cf., special issue of Journal of Communication, "Ferment in the Field," 1983) do not make theoretical convergence very difficult in some areas. Rather, the issue is that, in order to comprehend a phenomenon like the industrial production and distribution of cultural products on a world scale that is now occuring, the variety of approaches suggested above will have to continue and expand and, hopefully, be brought into closer coordination with one another.
Recommended Citation
McAnany, E.G. (1986). Cultural Industries in International Perspective: Convergence or Conflict? In Dervin and Voigt (eds.) Progress in Communication Sciences. (vol.7). Norwood: Ablex.
Comments
Copyright © 1986 Bloomsbury Publishing. Reprinted with permission.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/progress-in-communication-sciences-volume-6-9780893913069/