Meeting the challenges of media and marketing convergence: Revising critical political economy approaches

This chapter discusses and illustrates the challenges to revising critical political economy (CPE) approaches to media and advertising relationships so that they are adequate for the theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigation of contemporary media industries. The general arguments are developed and illustrated by considering the merging of media and marketing communications in branded content and the implications of media and advertising convergence. Following a review of CPE approaches and criticisms, the chapter maps out key challenges for analysis and how these might be addressed, drawing on recent media industries scholarship. The chapter outlines the significance of governance analysis for efforts to integrate studies of institutional arrangements and practices, and proposes critical governance analysis as an integrative approach for media industries studies. This argument is illustrated by mapping the governance of branded content across four our main sources: formal regulation, industry self-regulation, market power, and civil society action. The contribution of governance analysis to examining processes of normalization and contestation is discussed and the chapter provides a revised mapping for the study of advertiser influence on media that identifies the range of actors and processes through which governance arrangements are produced and sustained across material-discursive spaces. The chapter advances critical governance analysis as a tool for integrative and comparative analysis of communications practices, environments, policies, and problems.