Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News
Corporation, by Scott Warren Fitzgerald, provides an introduction to the
political economy of international media corporations. This text fills a
fundamental gap in the critical media studies field, expanding on the
relative paucity of academic studies. To ground the discussion,
Fitzgerald focuses on the growth of three specific media conglomerates:
Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation. Adopting an approach
rooted in critical political economy, the book explains the
corporations' growth through an engagement with broader social theories:
the wider conditions of capital accumulation (especially theories of
corporate competition and financialization); issues of institutional
logic and corporate strategies; and the role of states as regulators,
mediators of opposed interests, and facilitators of corporate expansion.
The first section presents debates in social theory, addressing issues
that pertain to cultural industries and dimensions in which they both
challenge and extend these wider social theories. The second section
presents detailed case studies of the three contemporary media 'mega
companies' across the range of operations they coordinate, both within
and outside the cultural industries. By analyzing the specifics and
complexities of different media industries, Corporations and Cultural
Industries examines how financialization processes re-gear the internal
operations of media corporations in a manner that pits one sector
against another. This book provides an in-depth study that can be used
as stand-alone teaching resources or as a valuable supplement to a
variety of media courses.
