Political economy and critical studies of advertising and media industries

This chapter discusses approaches and methods used in critical studies of the advertising and promotional industries and their interrelationship with media industries. The first part offers a brief review of approaches to the critical study of advertising industries including the Frankfurt School and various economic and cultural (para)Marxist approaches from the 1960s-1970s. Then it discusses how work, especially from the 1980s, began to examine the advertising industry in greater detail including global corporate restructuring, institutional practices and practitioners, lobbying and influence on governance and (de)regulation, as well as advertising finance and influence on media. This review will highlight the main strands and range of critical studies on advertising-media relations, which remains sparsely mapped, while focusing on the research methods and resources used, and the lessons and implications for future research. The second part develops this further by discussing how the critical analysis of governance can integrate important dimensions of the study of industrial arrangements and practices and the processes of rule-making and rule-shaping that contribute to structuring them. This advances an approach that seeks to integrate macro and micro levels of analysis, and expand beyond more formal legal-regulatory analysis to trade and general media, industry and stakeholder discourses and behaviour, using innovative research methods including Computational Data Analysis (CDA). The proposal for critical governance studies is outlined in general and is illustrated by reference to a current international research project led by the author examining the governance of branded content across comparable, ‘similar’ media systems in the Global North (US, Canada, UK, European Union, Australia).

The first book dedicated specifically to research methods in the political economy of media and communication, it provides a methodological toolkit to investigate the functioning of media, technology, and cultural industries in their historical, institutional, structural, and systemic contexts.

Featuring contributions from across the globe and a variety of methodological perspectives, this volume presents the state of the art in political economy of media and communication methods, articulating those methods with adjacent approaches, to study concentration of ownership and power, pluralism and diversity, regulation and public policies, governance, genderization, and sustainability. This collection charts the methodological innovations critical political economists are adopting to analyse a rapidly transforming digital media landscape, exploring ideology, narratives, socio-analysis and praxis in communication with ethnographic and participatory approaches, as well as designs for quantitative and qualitative methods of textual, discourse and content analysis, network analyses, which consider power relations affecting communication, including intersectional oppressions and the new developments taking place in artificial intelligence.

An essential text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students, and researchers in the areas of media, cultural and communication studies, particularly those studying topics such as the political economy of media and/or communication, media and communication theory, and research methods.

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