Lexington Books Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation (Critical Media Studies)

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. Review Scott Fitzgerald's study of three of the largest media companies in the world may appear to be the same old story: powerful mega-corporations dominating cultural industries by mergers and profit-seeking strategies. But even if you're tired of hearing that story, I would recommend a closer look at this book, which presents a nuanced and theoretically sophisticated discussion of corporations and cultural industries. ... This book makes an important contribution to the understanding of this complex terrain. The study is an empirically solid and theoretically impressive analysis of these three super media companies. The extensive survey of current and past literature that has been dedicated to analysing the political economy of media and cultural industries in itself makes this book useful and important for anyone interested in understanding corporations' involvement in media. And in light of the continuing corporate presence in media developments worldwide, this should include all of us.--European Journal Of Communication Several authors have previously explored the concept, nature, and functions of the cultural industries. Fitzgerald makes a most valuable contribution to this body of literature with an excellent theoretically informed and empirically rich account of a particular section of the cultural industries: corporations. Critical, rich in data, and historically insightful, this book contains a wealth of information for researchers and students of the cultural industries. Corporations and Cultural Industries. . . is a must read for any serious scholar in the field.--Cultural Trends The last three decades have seen governments around the world pursue policies designed to extend the scope of market activity and grant corporations greater operational freedom. 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