Class Analysis of Communication, or the Critique of its Political Economy

Abstract

In the assessments of the field of communication studies there is consensus that what came to be known, once it achieved the status of a sort of subfield, as the political economy of culture and communication, emerged later than other perspectives. César Bolaño, Guillermo Mastrini, and Francisco Sierra (2005: 18) outline a regional frame of references of its development. They assert that the “two main groups” that gave it a disciplinary presence were the “North American school” of Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller, and – though they believe that one cannot in a strict sense speak of a school – the European group: on the one hand the British academics Nicholas Garnham, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock, and on the other the French theorists Patrice Flichy, Bernard Miège, and Dominique LeRoy, among others. The authors also include the Latin American contribution, despite its greater diversity and more diffuse focus, tracing it back to the Econcomic Commission for Latin Ameridca and the Caribbean (CEPAL in its Spanish acronym) economic analyses, with stops at the questioning of the developmentalist perspective by the dependency theories and the Latin American contribution to the debate about the New World Information and Communication Order