Introduction

1Once upon a time, in the late 1980s and 1990s, there were groups of people who were intellectually and politically affiliated with something called cultural studies, and others who were much more strongly drawn to something called political economy of communication (PEC), and those groups tended to disagree quite strongly about how to understand the media and culture. The two camps reflected different political positions. Cultural studies drew on a type of politics that viewed emancipatory politics as most forcefully located in struggles over social identity: gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on. Adherents of PEC tended to put more emphasis on powers of ownership, international geopolitics, and inequalities of resources. [1] The factions followed different research agendas. Cultural studies concentrated on the media, popular culture and everyday life, drawing on interviews and sometimes ethnography, and focusing on audiences and texts. PEC focused on concentrations and abuses of power, particularly as manifested in patterns of ownership and control. They placed greater emphasis on cultural production, industry and policy.

2The resulting polemics helped to create a misleading perception among some workers in the research fields of media, communication and cultural studies that critical analysis in their field was dominated by two antagonistic camps. Complex bodies of knowledge were excessively simplified, and other orientations and approaches were marginalised. Thankfully, this picture of the state of media, communication and cultural studies seems to have faded. But it remains of some interest as a moment in intellectual history and, like many simplifications, it had some basis in reality. And its effects still linger. The terms ‘cultural studies’ and ‘political economy’ are still widely used in Anglophone media studies, and tensions persist. However, one of the biggest transformations in cultural studies since the 1990s is that cultural studies-inclined researchers and teachers have shown an interest in questions of production, economy and industry that a previous generation of cultural studies analysts almost seemed to disdain. [2]

3Cultural studies approaches have provided a welcome reinvigoration of research on media and cultural production. But, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that they also suffer from important limitations. To provide a basis for the assessment in this article, the first section revisits the 1990s moment of ‘political economy versus cultural studies’ with the benefit of hindsight, distinguishing what I call the theoretical and populist modes of cultural studies. I then critically outline three ‘schools’ of cultural studies approaches to production and economy. The aim is not to revisit the polemics of earlier times by attacking cultural studies. I see my own perspective as equally influenced by political economy and cultural studies, and equally marked by a distance from the more problematic manifestations of each ‘school’. But my argument is that, in both its theoretical and populist modes, many cultural studies approaches to production and industry in the realm of culture suffer from a lack of attention to key normative issues regarding the relationships between economy, culture and media. I discuss this ‘normativity problem’ in relation to cultural economy, production studies, and creative industries analysis. In the final two sections, which discuss the turn to cultural labour and the concept of moral economy, I suggest how normative issues might be addressed in a more explicit way, potentially offering a more rigorous ethical grounding for important questions regarding the realm of cultural production. I briefly apply this to the problematic relationship between cultural goods and well-being in modern societies.

Two modes of cultural studies

4In retrospect, it is striking how the term ‘cultural studies’ was used in the 1990s to describe radically different entities. Leftist critics, some associated with PEC, often condemned the type of theoretical writing undertaken by key cultural studies figures, or the writers that those figures had drawn upon. [3] The difficulty of some cultural studies writing, and its engagement with questions of subjectivity and identity, seemed to some commentators to be a sign of disengagement with political struggle, or even a kind of bullshit; the famous ‘Sokal affair’ dramatized this for many. But cultural studies was also associated with another kind of writing, one which was much more transparent, and which took a much more optimistic approach to popular culture and everyday life in much continental cultural theory. It often sought to attack the elitism of mass culture criticism. The key figure here was English writer John Fiske, who became a byword for a kind of naïve political complacency, even as he drew on a canon of critical thinkers (De Certeau, Bakhtin, Barthes and many others). [4]

5There was a world of difference between Stuart Hall’s adoption of Althusser and Gramsci, and John Fiske writing about soap operas. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were plenty of people who saw both projects as helpful, in different ways, in countering what was then felt by a very large number of leftist intellectuals interested in culture, to be the main problem in the realm of culture: hierarchy, and the dismissal of ‘popular’ culture. [5] If political economy/PEC adherents had a particular dislike for the work of John Fiske (Stuart Hall was considered somewhat more acceptable), Adorno played a similar role for cultural studies aficionados. Adorno was misguidedly understood as a kind of political economist of media avant la lettre and so PEC was associated with a snobbish elitism. [6] It is almost embarrassing to recall it now, but Adorno versus Fiske became the basis of hundreds of lectures introducing students to media studies. [7] In countless everyday references in seminar rooms, conference bars and so on, people would make statements along the lines of ‘political economy does X, cultural studies does Y’: it was this vernacular common sense about the nature of the field where the polarisation mostly thrived. It rarely stood up to intellectual scrutiny. Yet when researchers actually attempted to address the issue, it seemed to make things worse. For example, Lawrence Grossberg (1995)’s well-known contribution (reproduced and translated in this issue of Reseaux), claimed to move beyond the ‘debate’, but then proceeded to attack, from a position strongly identified with one camp, a caricatured version of the other, thus entrenching the split still further.

6The vernacular academic idea of a PEC versus cultural studies split had numerous consequences, mostly negative. We need pedagogical simplifications, but the split simplified a whole web of disagreements and conflicts between many different approaches to culture and media. Eclectic and complex positions that did not fall neatly into either camp were marginalized or ignored. Simplified polemics often gain more citations and recognition than more nuanced considerations. Even the two ‘approaches’ themselves, to which entire fields of analysis were falsely reduced, were misrepresented in the so-called debates. Contrary to misperceptions, political economy was never equivalent to ‘studies of production’ and cultural studies never really consisted of ‘empirical studies of audiences’ or ‘studies of texts’. Similarly, it was wrong to think of political economy as concerned mainly with ‘structure’, the way that economic and other forces shaped the media as it were from above, and cultural studies as concerned with the agency of audiences and of political actors. But there was just enough truth in these simplified characterisations to make the misrepresentations resilient.

7As I have already suggested, underlying the silly distortions, which now seem so ridiculous in retrospect, were real and rather serious differences in political outlook. But it should not be forgotten that many people already, even in the 1990s, saw the choice between a politics of culture and identity and a politics of economic and state power as a false choice, viewing them as two necessary elements of an emancipatory perspective. The American feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser (1995) helped a generation to move beyond the false choice between these different modes of politics in an important article. [8] Very much inspired by her approach, I took issue with the ‘cultural studies versus PEC’ polarisation as part of an explanation of my own approach to culture and power (Hesmondhalgh 2002 and in the two subsequent editions of that book, in 2007 and 2012). My claim was that political economy versus cultural studies was neither an accurate nor useful way to characterise approaches to the media and popular culture. Rather than make a decision between the two approaches, declaring one’s allegiance to one or the other, I suggested that the challenge was to understand the potential contributions and limitations of the best versions of each approach, and to synthesise the best aspects of them with other perspectives congenial to a rich analysis of whichever aspect of the media one had chosen to address. This was a both/and rather than an either/or approach. Given that the context of my discussion was an analysis of the cultural industries, at the time of the first edition of my book (2002) a rather marginalized area of enquiry, I sought to convey to readers who might be more sympathetic to cultural studies some elements of the more sophisticated versions of PEC, and to differentiate them from what I thought were the weaker and reductive versions. Conversely, I tried to explain to readers who might be more sympathetic to PEC the potential contributions of cultural studies, and here again distanced myself from what I felt were weaker variants. For example, it seemed to me that Nicholas Garnham’s account of the specific dynamics of cultural production (Garnham 1990) could go beyond the jeremiads to provide an explanation of certain recurring features of the media landscape. Garnham was drawing on the work of Bernard Miège, and the latter’s approach (e.g., Miège 1989) offered an analysis of power and change in the media industries, while recognizing the complexity and ambivalence of cultural production. [9] But equally, I also argued, those drawn to PEC would be unwise to simplify the cultural studies project, and to miss the contributions of its best practitioners, which drew attention to questions of authority, subjectivity, discourse, pleasure, and so on. I had in mind the work of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and others within and beyond the rather fetishized and mythologized idea of ‘Birmingham’. For me, the work of Raymond Williams, although in the 1980s he was oedipally critiqued within cultural studies as a problematic ‘father figure’, exemplified a body of thought that made nonsense of the whole idea of choosing between cultural studies and PEC (and in fact Garnham was a close collaborator of Williams). Some of Williams’ work was more strongly ‘cultural studies’ in its careful attention to the messy politics of people’s efforts to make meaning of their worlds; some of it was true to a ‘political economic’ account that examined historically how cultural production was resourced (e.g., Williams 1981).

8Of course, if there had not been some real differences between a body of research identifiable as cultural studies, and another as PEC, then the split would have been less resilient. The formula both/and (as opposed to either/or) cannot and should not blind us to differences in perspective, and real disagreements about the most urgent priorities for research and teaching, and how best to meet them. One area where such differences were rather apparent was, broadly speaking, production. Even if equating PEC with production and cultural studies with consumption and texts wasn’t really accurate, it’s true that there were strong tendencies for each camp to favour those domains. But, as I’ve already pointed out, that began to change from the late 1990s onwards, as cultural studies influenced researchers turned their attention to concepts such as economy, production and industry, which had previously been the preserve of PEC.

Cultural economy

9The concept of cultural economy seeks to apply cultural theory, especially post-structuralist formulations, to production and to economic life in general. Cultural economy portrays the realm of economic practice – in all its various forms, such as markets and economic and organisational relations – as formatted and framed by economic discourses (du Gay and Pryke, 2000: 2), and makes this the starting point for analysis rather than placing it as a supplement to existing economic or political-economic analysis. Two key volumes (du Gay and Pryke 2000, Amin and Thrift 2004) brought rather disparate groups of contributors together under the banner of cultural economy, including some prominent cultural studies figures such as Angela McRobbie. [10] However, little of the research included under the banner of cultural economy concerned media/cultural production or the media/cultural industries. These have been at most secondary concerns. The concept of cultural economy certainly did not preclude analysis of media production, the cultural industries etc., and some cultural economy work on these topics (by Negus and McRobbie) was included in the volumes mentioned. [11] Negus’s accomplished research (1992, 1999), although his doctoral thesis was partly supervised by leading cultural studies author Paul Gilroy, owed more to sociology of everyday cultural production than to cultural studies in its theoretical mode. Why then address the concept of cultural economy in the present article, given its concern with cultural and media production per se? Partly because there is so much confusion surrounding the idea of cultural economy. It is often (mis)understood as some kind of rival to PEC, when it aims to do completely different things. It is worth examining cultural economy to clear up this confusion, but also because it indicates some of the problems surrounding the potential application of cultural studies concepts to cultural production.

10It is important to understand that cultural studies in its theoretical mode was always just one part of what in Anglophone countries is often known as ‘cultural theory’ or even just ‘theory’. [12] This seemingly all-encompassing but actually rather specific term – it tends to refer to particular sets of cultural theory rather than all - has changed its meaning over the decades. In the 1970s, the term was most likely to refer to neo-Marxism (Gramsci, Althusser, Poulantzas), critical theory (Adorno, Benjamin and Habermas), and various authors associated with post-structuralism and psychoanalysis (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva). Cultural studies in its theoretical mode originally applied these and other theoretical sources to the media, popular culture and everyday life. Elsewhere, the term was used to indicate the application of such theories to traditional ‘cultural’ or humanities disciplines such as literature, art history and music, usually involving a critique of the false universalism underlying certain hierarchies and canons. But by the 2000s, the theoretical mode of cultural studies had largely abandoned its founding concerns with media, popular culture and everyday life, and with destabilizing unreconstructed humanist notions of cultural value. A recent book by Grossberg (Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 2010) provides an example of a latter day version of cultural studies. Here, cultural studies becomes a set of theoretical resources for understanding the present conjuncture. Yet as Justin O’Connor (2012) points out in a generally rather kind review, it is not clear why one needs something distinctive called cultural studies in order to do this, given that ‘culture’ in the sense of signification and meaning is almost absent from the book. So too, it might be added, is the connection with political action that sustained the Birmingham project of the 1970s. Instead we have, in O’Connor’s words, ‘a free-floating search for the possibilities of the conjuncture’ (2012: 338).

11Grossberg’s book reflects the rejection by a great deal (not all) Anglophone cultural theory since the 1990s of anything tainted by Marxism or even explicit defence of social democracy. [13] Cultural economy also reflects this tendency, and Grossberg’s chapter on ‘economy’ in his book pays tribute to the cultural economy concept, but then seeks to go even further in deconstructing any notion of the economy. The only values that seem to emerge are against essentialism, and for multiplicity. The relationship to any actual political or ethical practice regarding economic life is radically unclear.

12The cultural economy approach encourages us to question simplistic dichotomies, such as those that some political economists and sociologists of culture draw between the realm of ‘culture’ and the increasing encroachment of ‘economy’ on that realm. However, the deconstruction of such binary oppositions sidelines crucial normative issues about the relationship of culture, media and commerce. For example: Are there potentially harmful effects to commodification? All societies reserve some aspects of the world – nature, personhood or culture, for example – from commodification. What aspects of culture might contemporary societies shelter from exchange and private ownership and on what grounds? These and other important normative issues regarding the place of culture and media in the modern world seem mostly to be missing from the cultural economy project.

Creative industries analysis

13A normativity problem of another kind is apparent in a rather different strand of research on production and economy, which owes more to the populist mode of cultural studies than to its theoretical mode. An Australian-based group of cultural studies researchers has strongly identified themselves with the idea of the ‘creative industries’. The basis of this is in the rather unusual turn that cultural studies took in 1990s Australia. There, researchers influenced by the French historian Michel Foucault began to apply critical analysis to policymaking in the field of culture. The governmentality approach, derived from Foucault’s analysis of what distinguished modern forms of government from previous forms, was being developed internationally at the time. There was a particular interest in the way in which diverse concepts and phenomena from citizenship to therapy, though seemingly benign, were bound up in distinctively modern forms of power. [14] The governmentality approach claimed, following Foucault, to offer a distinctive model of power, which saw it as more dispersed and less concentrated than did Marxist theory. The leading exponent of this approach in cultural studies was Tony Bennett, who, to give just one example of his research, analysed the historical development of museums in Foucauldian terms. [15] Unusually for cultural studies, Bennett’s approach was pragmatic in that it sought dialogue with policymakers, and was explicitly committed to programmes of reform. In the early 2000s, followers of this approach turned their attention to new forms of public cultural policy branded as ‘creative industries’. This did not include Bennett himself (who aligned himself more with cultural economy, and became co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy) but it did involve a number of his former students and colleagues, under the leadership of another Briton mostly based in Australia, John Hartley. Hartley was an ardent cultural studies populist, a former collaborator with the by now retired John Fiske. Turning his attention away from audiences to production from the late 1990s onwards, Hartley picked up the concept of creative industries from the newly elected UK Labour Party, who had taken the idea of cultural industries developed in earlier decades by left local governments, stripped it of its social democratic ethos as the party moved to the right and rebranded it as ‘creative industries’ (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015). Hartley was appointed Dean at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and its humanities departments were absorbed into a ‘Faculty of Creative Industries’. He gathered a group of researchers there, who combined adherence to centrist cultural policy with a form of digital optimism that celebrated the democratizing potential of new media (see Hartley 2005). In parallel, a leading US-based researcher Henry Jenkins, whose earlier work, influenced by Fiske, examined the activities of fans, was analyzing a wide range of practices made possible by new digital technologies, celebrating how they were ‘enabling new forms of participation and collaboration’ (2006: 256). Such digital optimism, at its peak in the digital and property bubble leading up to 2008, extended way beyond cultural studies. An army of journalists, authors, bloggers and academics from other disciplines, all of whom have inherited the countercultural belief that computers have the potential to liberate knowledge and creativity, have built a veritable industry out of optimistic appraisals of our digital future. [16] This greatly strengthened cultural studies in its populist mode in the early twenty first century. The ‘QUT School’ and Jenkins became hugely influential.

14However, there are reasons to think that creative industries analysis does not offer a good way forward for research on media and cultural production. The prestige of the concept in government relied, and still does, on inflated estimates of the economic importance of the sector. Creative industries have grown at above average rates compared with other sectors, but they are unlikely to be the basis of significant economic growth in themselves, except perhaps in a few particular cities with high concentrations of media activity. There is much loose talk about the value of ‘creativity’ but little sustained attempt to define it. Rhetoric about the role of creativity in modern economies has allowed many arts and media policy makers to claim that their areas are increasingly central to the economic action in modern societies. The downside of this is that the media and the arts are no longer able to operate as specialist domains, with their own dynamics, and their own distinct policy needs. As ministries of finance, trade and industry departments and tourism agencies have become more interested in the concept of creative industries, the artistic and educational value of culture has slipped even further down the policy agenda. The creative industries are often considered prestigious because of the idea that they might offer lessons to other sectors about how to manage and produce innovation. Underlying this is a neo-liberal emphasis on competitive efficiency and productivity. The danger is that policy aimed at protecting quality and artistic innovation and the promotion of social justice actually becomes less prestigious and less well-resourced when they can only be argued for by smuggling them in, disguised in the cloak of economics. More resources might be made available – for example, more money for museums and galleries - but with ‘strings attached’, including often quite burdensome audit requirements. Social, cultural and artistic qualities are seemingly valued only when they can be converted into economic indicators. [17]

15The creative industries researchers are not unaware of these dangers. They point out in response that there are also possible advantages when media industries such as television become incorporated into creative industries policy – links between culture and media, and their potential contributions to democracy. Yet for all their policy pragmatism, when creative industries researchers get round to addressing the benefits that might accrue from engagement with such policy, there is a ring of utopianism as resounding as any in the leftist and paternalist policy regimes they seek to move beyond. Cunningham (2004), for example, argues that ‘hitherto marginal programming could be significantly upgraded’, that ‘programming produced for and by regional interests might be as fundamental as the guarantee of a basic telephone connection to all’, and that ‘programming inclusive of demographics’ (such as content catering for young people and children) might be ‘as fundamental as free and compulsory schooling’.

16Some of the creative industries researchers have optimistically tied their research agenda to new conceptions of the roles that universities, arts and humanities education and cultural studies might play in these changing conditions. Terry Flew (2004), for example, advocates a creativity-centred ‘new humanism’ that would be directed neither towards training in a canon of great works nor the cultivation of critique but rather aiming to ‘impact upon the conduct of commercial enterprises, and the corporatizing public sector’, and to ‘align social consciousness and cultural awareness with enhanced economic productivity’. But what form such ‘social consciousness’ might take remains curiously vague. As James Donald (2004) asked Flew in a thoughtful and eloquent response: ‘is critique too outmoded to be redeemable? Has Cultural Studies become a subsidiary of the Business School?’ Donald rightly pointed out that it is too simplistic to accuse the creative industries researchers of an attempt to ‘depoliticise’ cultural studies and critical media research. But he spotted an evasiveness about questions of political value that is present in a great deal of research published under the creative industries banner. I would speculate that this evasiveness is a legacy of the equivocation about normativity in cultural studies. Here it leads not to an anti-essentialist obfuscation, as in cultural economy, but to pragmatist accommodation with new and old elites.

‘Production studies’

17A major development in recent research on media and cultural production research has been the arrival of a new generation of research that is consistent with a sociology of everyday cultural production (see Negus, mentioned above) but which builds on it using other theories and takes it in new directions. Some indication of the approach is provided by Mayer, Banks and Caldwell’s introduction to their collection of essays on ‘cultural studies of media industries’. Production studies ‘borrow theoretical insights from the social sciences and humanities, but, perhaps most importantly, they take the lived realities of people involved in media production as the subjects for theorizing production as culture’ (p. 4). According to Mayer, Banks and Caldwell, the empirical data gathered by such studies include routines and rituals, and also the political and economic forces that shape roles and technologies, as well as the distribution of resources according to cultural and demographic differences. Yet the research questions all this boils down to are rather narrower, and fundamentally concern representation: ‘How do media producers represent themselves given the paradoxical importance of media in society? How do we, as researchers, then represent those varied and contested representations?’ (p. 4). These questions of representation are important, and have been a central issue in cultural studies (see Hall 1997). The greater focus on representation is what most clearly distinguishes this new cultural studies of media industries approach from sociological and anthropological approaches, which after all tend often to be focused on ‘lived realities’ and ‘routines and rituals’. The problem is that to make representation the main object of inquiry in the way that Mayer, Banks and Caldwell suggest they want to do may ultimately serve to marginalise the ‘lived realities’ that the authors claim are also central to their approach. Moreover, like Caldwell’s otherwise extremely impressive study of the narratives and rituals of film and television workers in Los Angeles, this account of cultural studies of production leaves us wondering how we are ultimately supposed to evaluate what is being observed. We are back to the problem of normativity.

18The cultural studies researchers often claim to put more emphasis on the agency of workers than in rival perspectives, and to mediate between macro and micro, theory and empirical evidence (Havens et al. 2009); often Robert Merton’s term ‘middle range theory’ is used to describe this latter ambition (Havens 2006: 5). The emphasis is on the world of production itself as a ‘culture’, with its own codes and meanings. In some cases, this may involve close attention to the furnishings, clothing and rituals associated with particular workplaces, such as Nixon and Crewe (2004)’s entertaining accounts of homosociality among advertising creatives and men’s magazine writers. Elsewhere, the stress is more on the discourses of producers. Caldwell’s study of the Los Angeles film and television industries provides some rich instances; for example, he identifies a remarkable range of narratives and genres among the trade stories that practitioners tell among themselves. Among ‘below-the-line’ technical craft workers, he discerns ‘war stories’, where film and TV making are compared to military struggles, involving allegories of survival against all the odds. This seeks to establish a sense of mastery and mystique among workers. From directors, writers and producers, Caldwell hears ‘genesis myths’ where ‘practitioners muse on moments of seeming inevitability in which the industry is finally forced to recognize the centrality and broad significance of their given specialization’ (47). Here the function is to legitimate their occupations through a sense of pedigree and ancestry.

19Such studies are undoubtedly enriching the analysis of media production and media industries. But the emphasis on culture, codes, rituals, representation and discourse is yet to be integrated into an explanatory and normative framework of the kind associated with critical social science. The invocation of middle range theory may seem to mediate between theory and method but the danger is that this concept ‘smooths over rather than confronts directly the intellectual issues raised by specializations in theory, methodology and empirical research’, as Robert Alford (1998: 11) pointed out in relation to earlier uses of the term. Culture, representation and discourse are vital for analysis of the social. But systemic and structural factors still need to be considered in order to provide the kind of explanatory and normative orientations vital for any critical social science worthy of the name (see Sayer 2000). The goal for media production studies surely needs to be integration of these issues; otherwise, there is a risk that old sociological battles between institutional and interpretive approaches, which later re-emerged as political economy versus cultural studies, will simply be perpetuated in this sub-field of media and communication studies.

The turn to cultural labour

20These issues can be investigated further by examining cultural studies contributions to the recent ‘turn to cultural work’ in the social sciences and humanities. Much of this research has aimed to counter some of the complacency surrounding creative and new media work on the part of policy-makers (including creative industries policy) and of academics who extol the benefits of creativity and entrepreneurship. Cultural studies-critics of cultural labour have drawn, to varying degrees, on sociology and social theory concerning work and organisations. Gillian Ursell’s (2000) early contribution was significant because it paid attention to the particularly high levels of personal investment in creative labour – something that had increasingly been noted by sociologists of work concentrating on other fields (such as Kunda 1991). Building on groundbreaking studies of the formation of ‘consent’ in workplaces by Marxian sociologists such as Michael Burawoy (1979) Ursell acknowledged that processes such as union de-recognition and considerable reductions in labour costs and earnings provided plenty of evidence to support a Marxist reading, focused on exploitation and property. But she also noted ‘an intensification of the self-commodification processes by which each individual seeks to improve his/her chances of attracting gainful employment’ (Ursell 2000: 807) and analysed how television workers had, in the era of casualisation and increasing freelance work, come to take on the work of organizing their own labour markets. This element of ‘apparent voluntarism’ needed to be acknowledged, Ursell claimed, and she turned to Foucauldian theory not to dispense with labour process theories but ‘to approach them more substantially’ (Ursell 2000: 809). In particular, she drew on Nikolas Rose’s (1999: 145) idea that, in advanced liberalism, freedom is redefined as ‘a capacity for self-realisation which can be obtained only through individual activity’. Rose (1999: 244) also believed that work played an increasingly key role in modern identity formation, and that ‘subjective desires for self-actualisation are to be harnessed to the firm’s aspirations for productivity, efficiency and the like’. The reference to individual as opposed to collective activity is significant; here Rose’s Foucauldian approach shows some similarities with parallel developments in other branches of sociology that were also emphasising individualisation. But whereas writers such as Ulrich Beck (1992) emphasised the ambivalent results of such individualisation, in that it potentially frees subjects from the bonds and demands of tradition, Rose and Ursell took a more negative view: individuals were left to fend for themselves.

21Discussing how notions of creativity, talent and work are being redefined in those burgeoning micro-businesses of the cultural sector associated with young people, including fashion and design, but also entertainment industries such as clubbing, recording and magazine journalism, Angela McRobbie (2002: 523) echoed Ursell in pointing to the ‘utopian thread’ involved in the ‘attempt to make-over the world of work into something closer to a life of enthusiasm and enjoyment’, and in focusing on how this leads to a situation where, when things go wrong, young people entering these creative worlds of work can feel they only have themselves to blame. In this respect, McRobbie usefully broadened the study of creative work to include a wider set of conditions and experiences, including the way in which aspirations to and expectations of autonomy could lead to disappointment, disillusion and ‘self-blaming’. She also pointed to the gendered aspects of these conditions, with women now expected to find full-time work, uninterrupted by family commitments, satisfying and enriching (McRobbie 2002: 521).

22Similar issues have also been explored by other researchers in relation to work in the IT sector, forms of work sometimes unhelpfully blurred with creative labour in governments’ conceptions of creative industries. Andrew Ross, a major figure in cultural studies for nearly three decades, whose connection with political activism has constantly transcended the theoretical/populist divide I identified earlier, observed how, in the eyes of a new generation of business analysts in the 1980s, Silicon Valley ‘appeared to promote a humane workplace not as a grudging concession to demoralized employees but as a valued asset to production’. ‘New economy’ firms, he argued, aimed to provide work cultures that ‘embraced openness, cooperation and self-management’ (Ross 2003: 9). But this, showed Ross, was closely linked to long working hours and a serious blurring of the line between work and leisure. Whilst the dot.com working environments of the 1990s offered ‘oodles of autonomy along with warm collegiality’ they also enlisted ‘employees’ freest thoughts and impulses in the service of salaried time’ (Ross 2003: 17, 19). Tiziana Terranova (2000), from an autonomist Marxist perspective, provided an early analysis of the ‘free labour’ or unpaid work underlying the emergent digital economy, countering the optimistic visions of Marxian utopians who hoped that gift economies might undermine capitalism from within. Ros Gill (2002), in a study of European freelance new media workers, found evidence that features of the work that seemed superficially attractive, such as its informality and high levels of autonomy, were in fact particularly problematic for women because of the lack of clear criteria for evaluating work and especially because of the difficulties such informality caused when seeking new contracts.

23In a variety of different forms, then, these cultural studies-influenced authors laid the basis for a critical account of work in the cultural industries, whereby autonomy and self-realisation became tied to conditions such as self-exploitation and self-blaming. In the strongest version of such critiques, involving political-economic as well as subjective processes, self-realisation becomes a systemic requirement.

24But these debates were further enriched by another writer with a background in cultural studies, but also in an approach which I want to unpack further in the remainder of this essay, moral economy. Mark Banks (2007) partly endorsed the pessimism of many neo-Foucauldian accounts of creative work (and also, to some extent, critical theory and political economy accounts) but also qualified that pessimism, drawing on his own empirical work and on social theory. Drawing on Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001), Banks found hope that transformations in modern life had enhanced the possibilities of social action and reflection. Banks saw individualisation and reflexivity in a number of aspects of contemporary cultural production; signs that ‘social creativity and independent artistic production are actually on the increase’ (Banks 2007: 102) and that a willingness to explore counter-rational and radical creative impulses remained alive. Banks (2007: 108-15) also argued that the pursuit of internal rewards continued to provide a very important part of the motivation of cultural producers. Following moral economy writer Russell Keat (2000), he argued that there is enough variation within the institutions of contemporary capitalism that the pursuit of such internal rewards might endure in modern cultural production, and that internal and external rewards may not be quite so mutually contradictory as is implied by critiques that see markets as necessarily eroding quality. Firms could act as profit-satisfiers rather than profit-maximisers, and workers could do it for the love and not the money. This, he noted, could lead to self-exploitation, but it had another side, encouraging resistance to the pursuit of external rewards. Furthermore, Banks (2007: 120) claimed that moral systems of trust, honesty, obligation and fairness remained present in contemporary capitalism, and he provided examples of the resilience of social and cultural values amongst the creative workers he interviewed in previous research. Banks valuably suggested the possibility of a more balanced appraisal of the relationships between subjectivity and creative labour than that provided by the cultural-studies critics, and one that clearly forefronted a fundamental issue: quality of working life, and its relationship to well-being. [18] In so doing, Banks was drawing on the ‘moral economy’ approach developed by, among others, Andrew Sayer. This approach addresses the normativity problem in social science head on, and for this reason I turn to it in the next and final section.

Moral economy

25So what is moral economy? The concept refers to the way in which all economies are suffused with values and beliefs about what constitutes proper activity, regarding rights and responsibilities of individuals and institutions, and qualities of goods, service and environment (Sayer, 1999: 68). All economies, then, in this sense, are moral economies. A moral economy approach, among other things, would take this idea seriously, look at the moral values informing particular economic arrangements and institutions, and provide some kind of evaluation of them. Fundamentally, this is a matter of introducing ethical thinking into the study of economic life. The approach has tended to thrive most among historians, anthropologists and social theorists, rather than among economists. It is best understood as an aspect of critical social science in general, which pays particular attention to the need for normative clarity regarding the relations between ethics and economic life.

26The earliest widely-cited use of the term ‘moral economy’ appears to be in an essay by the eminent Marxist social historian E.P. Thompson, first published in 1971, which discussed the values underpinning the responses of the English poor to a period of food shortages in the late eighteenth century, concerning what constituted proper economic behaviour with regard to food. Thompson also examined the relations of such values to a newly emerging set of political-economic views about the benefits of commerce and free trade. According to Thompson, the emergent field of political economy placed less emphasis on the social values underpinning economic ideas and more on instrumental notions of efficiency and effectiveness.

27There were echoes in Thompson’s approach of Karl Polanyi’s arguments in his book The Great Transformation (1957/1944), about how the development of industrial capitalism led to the ‘disembedding’ of economic life from social relations, as a new self-regulating market society became dominant. Polanyi can be seen in retrospect as an exemplary moral economist. That is the way he was treated in an important article by political scientist William Booth (1994) which reviewed a ‘moral economic school’ that had flourished mainly among anthropologists, economic historians and classicists, and which was often Aristotelian in inspiration. Booth praised moral economy for its efforts to embed studies of economies in ‘the wider architecture of the community’ and for requiring that accounts of economic life should be centrally informed by the ‘question of the good to which the economy and its sustaining institutional nexus are … subordinate’ (663). But Booth criticised the tendency of Polanyi and other moral economists to portray pre-modern societies in romantic terms, neglecting the hierarchical social relations sustained by non-market forms, and understating the degree to which modern market societies were themselves embedded in a ‘sustaining institutional and normative nexus’, founded on formal (if not substantive) equality.

28More recent moral economy work has avoided some of the pitfalls identified by Booth. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, there has been a welcome revival of interest in ethical dimensions of economic life, especially the ethical implications of the expansion of markets and ‘market thinking’ under contemporary capitalism. Some of this work has crossed the boundaries between academic research and popular publishing (Sandel 2013; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012). But the most developed accounts of the potential contribution of moral economy to social scientific understandings of economic life, including capitalism as a system, have been provided by Andrew Sayer (2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2010) in a series of articles and book chapters that build on his earlier (sympathetic) critique of radical political economy (Sayer 1995). Here I draw on these writings by Sayer to make just five key points about moral economy approaches, and this will also indicate Sayer’s approach.

29First, moral economy approaches are strongly normative – they seek not only to identify moral principles but to make informed judgements about good and bad (and right and wrong). In this respect, in Sayer’s terms, moral economy approaches are part of a broader set of critical social science approaches that seek to combat not only the relativism and crypto-normativity of some post-structuralist writing, and the subjectivism and amoralism of much neo-liberal economic thought. This by no means implies that moral economy can or should ignore empirical studies.

30Second, there are of course various objections that might be made to such a normative project, from a variety of positions. There is a widespread belief in the possibility and desirability of value-free social science. There is also a somewhat different position that sees the fact that norms and values are embedded in particular social forms as rendering normative discourse redundant. Many postmodernists hold that defences of particular moral stances ‘universalize and therefore conceal the situated character of their origins’ (Sayer 2000b: 174). In his defence of a normatively-oriented critical social science, Sayer counters each of these positions. With regard to the first, Sayer observes that, while explanations are obviously valuable in themselves, they are inadequate unless they note when beliefs that help to constitute social phenomena are false. With regard to the second, Sayer remarks that ‘though a norm may be specific to a certain context, it is still important to consider what is good or bad about it’ (Sayer 2000b: 174). On the third, postmodernist position, while it is true that some normative theory is guilty of such false universalism, we might seek to avoid it, rather than dispense with normativity altogether. Sayer recognises that normative social science needs to avoid ‘empty moralizing’, and to consider carefully what is feasible, and that an emphasis on normativity need not crowd out good explanation.

31Third, moral economy approaches can be seen as variants of political economic approaches, and are not intended as attempts to replace critical political economy. Rather, at their best, moral economy approaches can serve to develop a more adequate and nuanced political economy by exploring normative questions that are often repressed or hurried over.

32Fourth, a moral economy approach should not imply a lack of attention to power. Sometimes, reference to ‘ethics’ can seem to displace considerations of power and politics. But there is no reason why moral economy approaches should not incorporate analysis of questions such as exploitation, inequality and domination. The moral economy approach needs to be linked to critical social science (Sayer 2000). A failure to address power and domination would seriously weaken the enterprise. On the other hand, the focus on normative grounding may encourage nuance, complexity and ambivalence. Some writers who might be labelled contemporary ‘moral economists’ are more careful to register the ambivalence and complexity of the development of economic forms such as markets than are many radical political economists.

33A fifth and further point about moral economy approaches is that they tend to show the influence of Aristotelian ethics, particularly the latter’s focus on the good life, and its efforts to construct more adequate notions of human well-being via the concept of flourishing (now the most generally accepted translation of the classical Greek concept of eudaimonia). Such neo-Aristotelian concerns inform the way in which moral economy approaches tend to question the simplistic utilitarianism that underlies much neo-liberal commentary and neo-classical economics, and also the nihilism or relativism that is arguably to be found in a great deal of post-structuralist thought. Flourishing is not an individualist or liberal concept per se, though it can undoubtedly be used in atheoretical or apolitical ways.

Moral economy (briefly) applied to media and culture

34But what of the media and culture? What has moral economy had to say about them? With some exceptions, the answer is, not much at all. The exceptions have tended to focus on much broader definitions of culture than the focus on media and popular culture that is our concern here. Conversely, within approaches to media and popular culture, the term ‘moral economy’ has only been sporadically employed (e.g., Jenkins, 1992; Green and Jenkins, 2009). And it has certainly not been well understood in cultural studies and cultural theory, with some exceptions, such as the work of Mark Banks, as noted above, and more recently Graham Murdock (2011).

35I want to close by considering two issues which might at least suggest how a moral economy approach might reinvigorate approaches to the media and culture by paying more careful attention to normativity with respect to media-culture-economy relations. The first is primarily empirical, and concerns how television and other industries come to ‘know’ audiences in the digital age; the second is primarily theoretical, and pays attention to normative questions concerning culture and human well-being.

36New ways of knowing the audience are increasingly at work in the contemporary television world. This is crucially related to developments in the advertising and marketing industries. There, as Joseph Turow has shown in his important book The Daily You, a host of agencies now seek to gather and disseminate knowledge about cultural consumers. Digitalisation has brought forms of monitoring developed in the internet industries into the world of television: digital fingerprinting, cookies, sentiment analysis and so on. These forms of digital surveillance are well outlined by Mark Andrejevic in his discussion of the dubious concept of ‘affective economics’. As Andrejevic points out, the purpose of sentiment analysis is not to listen to the voices of audiences, now called users, but ‘to aggregate and mine’ audience responses ‘in order to trace signals in the noise and to extract information to improve [….] marketing campaigns’.

37If moral economy approaches aim to consider the values underpinning economic activity, and to evaluate its goals, what values and ends can be discerned in the newly digitalised television business, where TiVO boxes and video game consoles are able to capture huge amounts of data about the activities and preferences of what used to be called audiences? The new industry and its academic cheerleaders appeal to values that undoubtedly have a positive flavour: individual choice, reciprocity, creativity, emotional engagement. They invoke a world where newly empowered users interact more imaginatively with television, and where viewing becomes more ‘personalised’ and therefore more emotionally engaged.

38However, a number of issues are raised by the new relations between production and audiences, and in particular by the increasing use of audience data for recommendations and for planning programming. I can only touch on some of them briefly here.

39A first issue concerns the implications for shared, collective experience of fragmented, individualised forms of viewing. As Nick Couldry and Joseph Turow (2014) have suggested, using the democratic theory of Pierre Rosanvallon, this is not about consensus, or even about picturing ‘society’ as a coherent whole, it is about how democracy has to be based on some notion of sharing. ‘If democracy is to remain a substantive term’, they observe, ‘it must involve some sharing of experience – of information, argumentation, clarification, empathy and celebration – across a range of social locations’. Personalisation takes us in the direction of a very different set of values and experiences than the ones named by Couldry and Turow here. Of course, personalised marketing techniques are unlikely to result in a full-scale atomisation of society. And it could be argued to intensify sociality by encouraging more intense involvement and engagement around areas of shared experience. But what is not clear is whether these communities will be able to talk to each other much.

40A second and related set of concerns about the new television environment, and the relations between producers and audiences at work there, concerns the commodification of sociality. A number of critics of the IT and social media industries have discussed the ways in which its profits depend upon a monetisation of people’s experiences of sociability and their feelings of trust in others. In return for such monetisation, users have available ‘for free’ new ways to express themselves and to connect with others. However, many people have become suspicious of the ways in which their interactions are monitored, and how their interactions are shaped by features of the platform (such as the ‘like’ button on Facebook). Yet because of the network effects of widespread adoption, whereby people share a sense of social media as a vital means of connection, exit becomes difficult. Importantly, as the data mining of social media interactions become more and more the basis of audience research in the television industry, the commodification of sociality becomes intensified, as one longstanding way in which people experience shared cultural forms becomes the basis of social media interactions, which are then turned into Big Data. The complexity of people’s interactions with television becomes reduced to statistics. The relations involved in television’s remarkable sense of shared experience is condensed into a set of graphs produced by algorithms. Something important is surely lost in this. Sociality becomes devalued, even as it is celebrated.

41A third issue concerns the relations between creativity and commerce, and the sense of what constitute appropriate boundaries between them. In some respects, contemporary television has been decommercialised. For example, playback and delay devices make it increasingly easy to skip advertising. Yet digitalisation has also led to the increasing power of advertisers and marketers vis-à-vis cultural industry companies, such as television networks. This has fuelled an erosion of the boundary between the metaphorical ‘church and state’, between editorial and advertising. This is more than obvious in the insertion of promotional material that looks like editorial material into contemporary newspapers. In television, it is apparent in the rise of sponsorship and product placement. Sometimes there are discreet labels that make clear the sponsored nature of the material, but as data mining increases personalisation, a more seamless insertion of advertising material is likely to occur. This is not to defend the traditional role of advertising as a cultural subsidy in the ‘old’ television landscape, which was rightly questioned by some political economists, not only for its ideological power, but for its effects on television programming. Nevertheless, such developments arguably represent an intensification of what Andrew Wernick famously called ‘promotional culture’, a condition whereby more and more of the symbolic expression in society takes the form of self-advantaging exchange.

42Now one doesn’t need to advocate or follow what I’m calling a moral economy approach to the media, or to contemporary culture, to make points like those that I’ve been making. But moral economy suggests that fundamental human needs for solidarity and sociality to be enhanced by cultural exchange are not being well served by these recent developments. And, importantly, moral economy provides a deeper, richer grounding for considering whether culture in the digital era is really enhancing human well-being and human flourishing. This can be explored further in relation to the second issue, moral economy’s (Arisotelian) treatment of well-being. Moral economist John O’Neill (1998: 33) has discussed an argument that some market advocates make: that societies where market mechanisms dominate provide better lives, without in fact making this their goal. This is based on a paradox whereby markets achieve good effects precisely because of their lack of any commitment to any particular notion of the good. Markets as it were inadvertently realise well-being. We might call this the ‘welfarist’ (as in ‘doing well’ rather than ‘welfare state’) justification for capitalist markets.

43The problem, as O’Neill points out, is that modern welfarist arguments for the market tend to be empty of content, based on formal notions of well-being defined as the satisfaction of preferences, rather than substantive ones which would specify the content of well-being. This shift from substantive to formal conceptions of well-being is rooted, O’Neill (1998: 38) claims, in the tendency in economic thought towards dubious subjectivist conceptions of well-being, whereby ‘the content of a person’s well-being is determined by their desires or beliefs about what is good for them’ - as opposed to the obviously correct and uncontroversial subjectivist point that the content of well-being changes from person to person. The market liberal focus on subjective preferences makes it vulnerable to the vital empirical objection that in spite of the massive increase in the variety of goods and services that consumers can buy – supposedly because commercial markets meet consumer preferences -, ‘there is no corresponding reported increase in satisfaction’ (56). Sources that indicate this fundamental problem of well-being in modern capitalist societies include Lane’s The Market Experience (1991) but also the more recent ‘happiness economics’ (Layard 2006). The latter in particular uses a utilitarian notion of well-being radically at odds with the Aristotelian position associated with moral economy, but even this approach at least opens up the question of the systematic failure of modern capitalist markets in terms of human flourishing. One reason for such dis-satisfaction, suggests O’Neill (1998: 57), is that many of the goods people seek through markets are positional goods, and he gives the examples of luxury holidays and educational qualifications ‘in so far as they are valued as a means to employment’. The problem is that the implied promise to each individual that a good will make them better off is not realised if everyone has it or even if many people have it.

44There is a direct link to cultural goods here. It can be cogently argued that a great deal of cultural consumption is positional. Goods and services based on aesthetic-artistic experience can make a very positive contribution to flourishing, and we will come back to this issue later. But they can also contribute to negative forms of anxiety and dis-satisfaction. Bourdieu’s is the most famous analysis of the competitiveness involved in cultural goods. Even if, as many have argued, Bourdieu excludes other more positive aspects of cultural consumption, he usefully draws attention to how much contemporary culture is associated with status competition. Cultural goods in modern markets are not only positional, but they seem often to be deeply connected to modern processes of self-identity and possessive individualism (see Honneth 2004, Hesmondhalgh 2013). What’s more, cultural goods have a tendency to encourage the consumption of positional goods in general, including other cultural positional goods. In this respect, O’Neill’s moral economy account more firmly grounds this problematic aspect of marketised cultural consumption than dismissals of (cultural) consumption per se. Satisfying desires through the market only leads to greater happiness or flourishing if those desires are good ones.

45It needs to be recognised however that there are more sophisticated subjectivist approaches to well-being at work among some market advocates. These more advanced approaches define well-being in terms of what we would value if we were fully informed about the merits of particular products. This is not so incompatible with the objectivist view of well-being held by moral economists, Aristotelians and classical economists such as Adam Smith. But, for O’Neill (1998: 48), what even this more sophisticated subjectivist view misses is the way that ‘improvements in well-being come through public deliberation and education of our preferences, not simply by satisfying those we have’. The need for moral economy to address culture as knowledge and aesthetic-artistic experience, including media, becomes glaringly obvious at this juncture, given the vital importance of cultural goods for such public deliberation and education of our preferences. This needs to be addressed in future work, as part of a larger project, whereby ethics and values are integrated into the heart of studies of the relationships between culture, economy and media. It is precisely this issue, I have argued in this essay, which has been neglected by most recent contributions by cultural studies (and indeed most PEC) to the study of cultural production. Moral economy provides a more cogent and meaningful conception of well-being than is provided by the advocates of capitalist markets, and therefore helps us to see that real well-being is not necessarily, or not truly, advanced by the expanded remit of markets in the realm of media and culture. I have tried to indicate in this essay why I consider this to be an advance on the ways in which both political economy and cultural studies have treated questions of production.