Understanding media production: a rejoinder to Murdock and Golding

Garnham’s (2011, 2016) recent critique of the political economy of communications (PEC) has provoked a vigorous debate about the value of this approach. Garnham (2011) proposed that a satisfactory theory of cultural production would need to ‘go beyond’ Marxist concepts of the labour process, exploitation, alienation, ownership and control. This produced a strenuous defence of this approach from those who (with Garnham, 1979) founded the discipline, both in the United Kingdom (Murdock and Golding, 1973, 2016) and in the United States (Meehan and Wasko, 2013). Recently, Fuchs (2016) has described Garnham’s argument as both Thatcherite – in its ‘no alternative’ acceptance of capitalism – and erroneous because Marx’s concepts can be successfully reinterpreted to analyse ‘digital labour’.

Murdock and Golding’s (2016) response to my article (Dwyer, 2015) is part of their wider attempt to defend PEC against undermining from within (they describe Garnham as a ‘former political economy “insider”’) and encroachment, from ‘new’ approaches, without. They suggest my critique of PEC misunderstands and ‘fundamentally misconstrues’ its ‘central tenets’ – (crucially, the ‘central challenge’ of explaining the relationships between structural, sectoral and workplace levels of analysis).

A response to their argument requires a very brief restatement. My article analysed an approach to the explanation of changes in media production which uses Marxist concepts to connect this workplace level with sectoral and structural levels. I addressed what I take to be the consensus of researchers in this tradition. This is the very widely repeated claim that media production, across a range of industries (including film, broadcasting, newspapers and games), has followed a general transition in the capitalist mode of production from mass production or Fordism to flexible specialization or neo-Fordism (for references, see Dwyer, 2015). To subject this analysis to the best empirical test, I focused on Hollywood – by far the most well-documented sector – and argued that the evidence does not remotely support the claim that film production was organized according to Fordist mass production principles – routinization, deskilling and detailed division of labour. While the sector experienced fundamental change (the break-up of the ‘studio system’), this did not reflect a structural ‘crisis of Fordism’, nor did film production in the workplace then undergo a transformation from routinization to flexible specialization. Murdock and Golding call my analysis ‘a provocative rereading’ of these studies of Hollywood, but they do not say that they disagree with it.

My article concluded that since Marxist concepts did not help explain these changes at the level of production, then, drawing on Garnham (2011), we need to ‘go beyond’ these concepts to develop an alternative theory capable of articulating the ‘relationships between media markets, project organization, creative management and specific media styles and genres’ (Dwyer, 2015 cited in Murdock and Golding, 2016: 767). Murdock and Golding say they agree.

Thus, Murdock and Golding do not disagree with the detail of my argument and actively agree with its conclusions for theory. However, they are strongly critical of my decision to focus on Hollywood and ‘ignore’ other relevant studies of production:

there is already a considerable body of research and conceptualisation that has this as its core aim and … critical political economy has made major contributions to realising it. (Murdock and Golding, 2016)

They first attribute this neglect to ignorance – a charge I can refute. I was, like any passable media student, aware of these works, first citing them (when I read Garnham (1979) and Murdock and Golding’s own (1973) pioneering work) almost 30 years ago (see Dwyer, 1989).

Secondly, they suggest I ‘choose’ to exclude these studies as part of an academic and political project to undermine PEC. They suggest I join a class of authors (‘proponents of “new” media industry and “new” production studies’ make ‘the same basic case’) who are ‘erecting fences’ between media production and PEC in order to provide ‘support for claims for the novelty and centrality of their work’. Here, Murdock and Golding echo Meehan and Wasko’s (2013) defence of PEC against attempts by

emerging fields … to claim the study of media production in a palatable form for cultural analysts, policy wonks, and the media industry itself. In other words, an approach that isn’t necessarily heavily invested in (overtly) neoliberal economics or media economics, nor one that has the taint of Marxism or political economy or a truly critical approach to media industries. (p. 49)

Not Thatcherite, but close.

In fact, my decision not to discuss the works Murdock and Golding cite was driven by a desire to provide a fair test of PEC’s ability to explain production. First, I wanted to address the most detailed attempt to use Marxist concepts to explain cultural production – Hollywood. The works Murdock and Golding suggest I ignore deal primarily with UK television production which, as they note, responds to television’s particular markets, regulation, technology and cultural forms (although Fordism/post-Fordism accounts of television elide such sectoral differences).

Secondly, I did not consider production ethnographies, Weberian sociologies of media occupations and organizational accounts of ‘the production of culture’ to be typical of the PEC approach. Fuchs’ (2016) defence of PEC via reinterpreted Marxist concepts suggests he would agree. But Murdock and Golding claim PEC incorporates these approaches. They argue, ‘critical political economy analysis has been able draw on the evidence generated’ by these studies to try to rise to the ‘central challenge for theories of media production’, which is ‘to move between levels of analysis and to integrate them’.

Thus, when I propose, as an alternative to PEC, an analysis of ‘media production processes as responses both to common economic and organisational challenges and to media-specific creative and cultural influences’ (Dwyer, 2015 cited in Murdock and Golding, 2016: 766), Murdock and Golding claim that this too constitutes PEC: ‘our approach to a political economy of communications has always advocated exactly this’ (ibid).

This is the nub of the argument. I do have real difficulty in understanding how PEC integrates such diverse theoretical perspectives to meet the central challenge of explaining the relationships between structural, sectoral and workplace levels of analysis. And, indeed, the answer would seem to be that it doesn’t or at least hasn’t: ‘we are not arguing that the work we have cited offers a satisfactory solution to this challenge’ (Murdock and Golding, 2016: 768).

However, ultimately, Murdock, Golding and I agree on a number of key points. First, PEC does not offer a satisfactory solution to the challenge of explaining media production. Secondly, achieving such a solution requires a theory which draws on non-Marxist categories (they cite Weber’s (1978/1922) ‘market situation’, for example) to explain relationships between economic, sectoral and workplace levels. While they argue that PEC aims to do this (however unsuccessfully), I agree with Garnham that we require an alternative theory with greater clarity about the concepts to be used and how they are causally related. Murdock and Golding may call this PEC – others would not. But whatever it is called seems less important than the recognition that we need to get on and do it.