Abstract
The last three decades have seen governments around the world pursue policies designed to extend the scope of market activity (by selling off public assets and opening monopoly markets to competition) and grant corporations greater operational freedom (by instituting more ‘business-friendly’ regulatory regimes). The leading communications companies have been major beneficiaries, seizing every opportunity to move into new sectors and expand their geographical scope. As a result, control over the core components of public culture has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a diminishing number of global, multi-media conglomerates whose owners are regular fixtures in the list of the world’s most wealthy. The ascendancy of neoliberal economic policies has allowed a handful of cultural industry capitals to amass extraordinary power to control their environment and has strengthened the class power of business elites.
Fitzgerald’s analysis of this process has two great merits. First, whereas most accounts present it as both relentless and unstoppable, he highlights the tensions and contradictions it generates. Second, rather than pursuing the well-worn path of delineating general processes, illustrated with selective data and examples, he grounds his analysis in a meticulously detailed comparison of how three of the biggest and most influential media conglomerates – Time Warner, News Corporation and Bertelsmann – have negotiated the shifting terrain opened up by neoliberal policies and technological innovation. Of the three, Bertelsmann has received the least attention in the English-language literature, but offers a potentially instructive contrast to the familiar pattern of Angelo-American enterprise.
These case studies alone make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the political economy of contemporary culture. As Fitzgerald notes: ‘what is striking when reviewing the individual and collective histories of these corporations is how often uncertainty, failure and crisis have marked their strategies and operations’ (p. 400). His exploration of these instabilities focuses on the impact of two major processes: the emergence of new technologies of distribution and the growth of financialization. He combines previously separate literatures to produce an analysis that is both provocative and original. This is the book’s third major contribution. Its fourth is the attention paid to the impact of company strategies on their operating divisions. Where most writers have focused either on general external trends or on internal company politics, Fitzgerald sets out to reconnect them.
He grounds his account of technological innovation in the established typology of ‘socioeconomic logics’ of cultural production. This distinguishes between ‘editorial’ logics, based on direct sales to customers and typified by the book trade and newspapers, ‘flow’ logics, represented by advertising-supported ‘free-to-air’ broadcasting, and the newer ‘club’ logic of subscription cable and satellite services. Most commentators have focused on the opportunities for ‘synergy’ presented by conglomeration as companies look for opportunities to distribute and promote their products across the full range of the platforms they control. While Fitzgerald gives due weight to this potential, he highlights the internal tensions that moves into new areas can generate, tracing the often problematic integration of contrasting logics as print-based corporate cultures make concerted moves into television. The increasing pressure for enhanced commercial returns placed on Bertelsmann’s book publishing division by the company’s expansion into broadcasting is an instructive example.
There is, however, a sizeable elephant in the analytical room. The period covered by Fitzgerald’s analysis coincides with the emergence of the internet as a mass utility. As Fitzgerald notes, all three case study conglomerates have had their fingers burned by unsuccessful online ventures. Time Warner’s acquisition of AOL and News International’s purchase of MySpace stand as textbook failures. Fitzgerald has some useful things to say about why, but a fuller analysis requires a longer look at why major competitors, most notably Google, have been so successful and what implications their rise has for conglomerates grounded in the logics developed around established print and audio-visual sectors.
Fitzgerald does, however, offer a sustained analysis of the other major process transforming the operating environment of communications companies. This shift, set in motion by the transformation of financial services following the deregulatory ‘Big Bang’, is now routinely referred to as ‘financialization’. This is an elastic term that, as he usefully points out, signals three separate shifts: the increasing role of financial institutions as corporate shareholders; the growing centrality of borrowing to company finances and of debt servicing in corporate decision-making; and the ‘rise of a “financial” conception of corporate assets which regards them as “liquid subunits that must be continually restructured to maximise the share price”’ (p. 391). The first of these has had the least impact on the case study corporations, with News International and Bertelsmann demonstrating the resilience of founder and family shareholder control. However, as Fitzgerald notes, the Mohn family’s move to regain absolute control of Bertelsmann has not stopped the company from becoming increasingly reliant on international debt markets or coming to see its operations in more financialized terms and increasing the pressure on its divisions to deliver returns. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch’s efforts to retain personal control need to be read against the background of the mounting pressures from ‘outside’ shareholders, thrown into sharp relief in the wake of the ‘phone hacking’ revelations around his UK-based tabloids and the subsequent decision to separate the print holdings from the audio-visual interests.
The hacking scandal has also revealed the extent of Murdoch’s links with political elites and senior figures in the police, and demonstrated how personal connections became conduits for favours and concessions. They confirm Manuel Castells’ (2009) notion of ‘networked power’, which sees influence stemming from personal connections and presents Rupert Murdoch as a master ‘switcher’, able to connect and move between networks in different domains. Fitzgerald does not deny the role of networks but he is at pains to stress that relational power operates alongside structural capacity. The revelations surrounding the Murdoch empire may have lost him friends in high places, but his central market position and the ability to determine company policy conferred by concentrated shareholding continues to give him enormous power to influence his operating environment. As Fitzgerald rightly argues, Castells’ focus on power as a relational achievement denies the role of structural processes and their grounding in class relations.
His trenchant critique of Castells is one of many illuminating commentaries on key arguments that this book offers. But it is the fact that they are deployed in the service of a genuinely illuminating and original analysis, combining wide-ranging conceptualization with fine-grained empirical investigation, that marks this book out as exceptional. This is a bravura performance from an author I look forward to reading much more from in the future.