Cultural economics is the branch of economics devoted specifically to culture and to the arts.

• Origins
  • Stems from neoclassical economics, which focuses on maximizing satisfaction
  • Mainstream cultural economics fails to address several issues of power
    • It is completely uninterested in the relationships between economic organizations and issues of textual meaning.

• An important tradition looks at the way that the impact of media has transformed political communication. This puts strong emphasis on the dangers for a society of the way that democratic processes are increasingly run via the broadcast and press media. Most people in society get their political knowledge from the mass media (usually television)
  • My personal note: audiences are passive! The media can generate political issues if needed by emphasizing certain news. E.g. the issue of hijabs while voting—it’s not really an issue.
• There is evident concern with how the cultural industries affect democratic processes and public life.
  • Structured forms of inequality and power are downplayed; different interest groups fight for their interests (e.g. the Israeli lobby)

Political economy approaches have a great deal more to offer than cultural economies in terms of analysing power in relation to cultural production.

• Political economy places emphasis on ethical and normative questions

• Some writers use the term critical political economy –> the concern of the increasing role of private businesses in cultural production. Such approaches are heavily critical of media and cultural corporations
  • These approaches are holistic, and see the economy as interrelated with political, social and cultural life
  • They’re historical, and pay close attention to long-term changes in the role of state, corporations and media in the culture
  • They’re concerned with the balance between private enterprise and public intervention
  • They engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good

Critical political economy approaches see the fact that culture is produced and consumed under capitalism as a fundamental issue in explaining inequalities of power, prestige and profit. It Examines the extent to which the cultural industries serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

What is political economy?

• Two particular strands of North American and European political economy approaches
• Schiller-McChesney tradition
  • Emphasizes strategic uses of power.
  • Liberal-pluralist communication studies—primary concern is with information media
• Cultural industries approach
  • Emphasis on problems and contradictions, on the partial and incomplete process of commodifying culture, provides a more accurate picture of cultural production
  • Combines interest in the macro level of relations between general economy and cultural industries (which is an important concern for the other tradition) with an analysis of what distinguishes industrial cultural production from other forms of industrial production (which is not an important concern for the other tradition).
  • Focuses on the supply side (on cultural production and circulation and their social and political contexts), but does not ignore the activity of audiences.
    • Production and consumption are not seen as separate entities, but as different moments in a single process.
    • The connections and tensions between production and consumption are more or less ignored in the other tradition.
  • Puts symbol creators (those responsible for creative input in texts, such as writers, directors, producers, performers…) in issues of market structure and how it affects the organization of cultural production (whereas the other tradition does not)
  • A more successful approach in the difficult task of addressing both information and entertainment
  • There is a lack of attention to textual analysis and meaning amongst writers drawn to political economy approaches to culture.

Cultural studies is a diverse field. It attempts to examine and rethink culture by considering its relationship to social power.

• Cultural studies argue that ordinary, everyday culture needs to be taken seriously.
• Cultural studies has provided considerable refinement of what we might mean by that difficult term culture.
• Cultural studies has raised vital political questions about ‘who speaks?’, about who has the authority to make pronouncements on culture.
• Cultural studies has fore fronted issues of textuality, subjectivity, identity, discourse and pleasure in relation to culture.
  • Subjectivity and identity, and the often irrational and unconscious processes by which we become who we are.

Political economy versus cultural studies is neither an accurate nor useful way to characterize approaches to the media and popular culture

Production versus consumption

• Political economy is often used as a shorthand term for ‘studies of production’
• Both these approaches treat entertainment as a mere distraction/diversion from creating a rational, participatory citizen.

Questions of epistemology

• Political economy writers tend towards realism; cultural studies writers towards constructivist and subjectivist epistemological paths.