Making Media Production Visible

Vicki Mayer

Media production is frequently the most invisible aspect of our relationships with the media. In the storm of media messages we encounter, we rarely consider where they came from, who made them, and how. The reader who is scanning my words now probably has not considered the creation of the text – the formation of the argument, the production of the book, the reproduction of the book in print and digital formats – much less the politically liberal context for my authorial voice, the economic drives of the academic publishing industry, the continuing culture of individual authorship in the humanities, the ethics of mental labor, and so on. This volume attempts to foreground some of these issues in the study of media.

Even in the annals of scholarship on the media, production and producers frequently take a backseat to other, more primary concerns about the effects of technologies or contents, consumer preferences and user access, or the functionality of the media for democratic or cultural spheres. Although many canonical critiques of mass media addressed production in their criticisms of propaganda (Lippmann, 1922), mass consumerism (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972), gender (Mulvey, 1989), or racial representations (Du Bois, 1926), subsequent generations have distilled only select fragments about content and consumption from these holistic arguments. At the same time, production mattered to early scholars of media. Some thought about the role of media producers in democratic governance, advocating for media production policies and rules that would foster an informed and educated public (Cooley 1918; Dewey, 1927; Follett, 1924). Others aimed to understand production processes in order to hone them for efficiency and effectiveness (Lasswell, 1927; Lazarsfeld & Stanton, 1979; Schramm, 1964). Still others (Habermas, 1991; Schiller, 1969; Thompson, 1994) considered the mode of production itself as indicative of changes in the popularization and industrialization of culture – the long revolution, according to Raymond Williams (1961). What the authors of the following chapters share is the effort to foreground media production as central to answering questions about political governance, economic processes, and cultural transformations.

In this introduction I offer structure and agency as axes for the interdisciplinary theorizing of media production. I do not pose these as exclusive categories. There have been a good many debates over what media production research is based on: false dichotomies between administrative and critical research in the 1970s and 1980s (Lazarsfeld, 1941; Smythe & Van Dinh, 1983); political economy and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s (Garnham, 1995; Peck, 2006); as well as current comparisons of what has been called media industry studies and production studies (Havens, Lotz, & Tinic, 2009; Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell, 2009). Indeed sophisticated media production research draws on all of these traditions. This section is followed by discussion of the current conjuncture for research on media production. From there, I outline the rationale for the book through a more detailed investigation of its organizing themes and sections.

As with any collection that claims to represent the world from the armchair of the editor, there are undoubtedly numerous lacunae in the following pages. Although the chapters presented here span a range of political economies, industries, countries, and peoples, this volume does not claim to cover all the topics that could be germane to the study of media production. The digital age, for example, has transformed our phones, cars, appliances, and even our clothes into media that communicate with us, with the world, and with each other. Nor does this volume cover every possible method. In particular, some forms of economic and statistical sociological analysis have been omitted from the present book, not only because of the specialized languages of these fields, but because they are not representative of a scholarship engaged with the questions of politics, culture, and society that define media studies.¹

Structure and Agency in Media Production Research

The word “production” infers both a basic human quality and a social process. The history of media production charts the ways humans have transformed their abilities to produce and to mediate their thoughts, as well as the ways these are embedded in larger societal transformations. Students of media production, by and large, have emphasized the relationship between human agency and social structures in the making of media contents, whether this is creating news, recording a song, generating a commercial genre, or marketing media technologies.

By “social structures” I am referring to patterns developed in modern societies – such as the bureaucratic state and industrial capitalism. These structures frame media production within markets and nation-states. In many societies, media production has been structured by a bureaucratic state that manages people and their institutions in order to accumulate capital, organize citizens and workers, and maintain a monopoly over the use of force and violence. Modern social structures for media production thus are steeped in histories of colonialism and imperialism (Mattelart, 1978; Schiller, 1969; Tunstall, 1977). At least since the nineteenth century, writers have focused on the ways media production may help or hinder nation-states in accomplishing their goals. The sociology of the production of culture, consolidated by the late 1970s, systematized the study of media production through six facets: technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational career, and market (Peterson & Anand, 2004, p. 313). Structural critiques of the production of media technologies, the commercialization of culture, the disfranchisement of media labor, and the routinization of production have implicated the roles of the state and market in what is called the military industrial complex for media production (Schiller & Phillips, 1970). The emphasis on structural frameworks for media production has tended to assume that industrialization is the singular starting and ending point for understanding media production, its organization and operations, and producers' roles, activities, and motives.

As a result, in accordance with a generalized critique of capitalism, scholarship on media production has tended to focus on the media with the greatest reach – for instance film and television – from the most centralized production locations – such as Hollywood or London – and with the most concentrated labor forces; and on professionals such as journalists. This is a feature of media studies in general. As communication historian John Nerone (2003, p. 102) notes: “If any media technology is proto-industrial, the age of industrialization marks the key moment for the formations of the organizations we now think of as the mass media.” The overwhelming tendency to focus on mass media production, for example, has resulted in fragmentary accounts of amateur media production such as scrapbooks (Tucker, Ott, & Buckler, 2006), home movies (Zimmermann, 1995), community media production, for instance indigenous media making (Wilson & Stewart, 2008) or, more recently, zines (Duncombe, 2008). While these types of media production are not outside of industrialization, they highlight the need to examine the social structures that do not always conform with the processes inferred by industrialization, for example through their embedding in domestic life, their collective ownership, or their participatory rules for producers and consumers. Indeed these structures have become more important to the understanding of forms of media production not sponsored by the military industrial complex (see Spigel, 2009; Turner, 2008).

If the focus on social structures has implicated the modern state in the study of media production, the focus on the agency that people exert over media production implicates them in the modern project to create enlightened subjects who can embody, perform, reflect on, and actually become media producers. The invention of different forms of media professionals, from the advertising professional (Lears, 1994) to the professional jazz musician (Becker, 1951), is a prime example of the modern subjectivities associated with media production institutions and practices. A good deal of scholarship on media production has examined the ways people interact to create these institutional sectors of the labor force, systematically developing routines for creating, distributing, marketing, interpreting, and instructing their practices (Ettema & Whitney, 1982; Hirsch, 1969; Turow, 1984; see also Ryfe in this volume). Although this work can be descriptive or critical in nature, the focus on the joint actions of people within media production and with roles in it stands in contrast with a set of texts that focus on the agency of singular individuals involved in production. Quasi-biographical if not autobiographical, the earliest accounts of media production were frequently offered by people involved with media production as journalists (Park, 1923; Steffens, 1931), screenwriters (Rosten, 1941), or musicians (Becker, 1951, 1953). Although some of the texts that focus on particular media producers, such as film auteurs (Jacobs, 1969) or “quality” television producers (Newcomb & Alley, 1983), have overemphasized the genius or unique characteristics of particular individuals, the orientation toward producers' agency foregrounds people's creative abilities within the constraints imposed by organizations, markets, and regulatory environments.

The study of the people who produce media seems to be rooted in the desire to understand producers' relationship to ideology, or the commonsensical ways we understand and communicate the world inside our heads. Observers of media production most frequently have expressed these concerns through inquiries into authorship, control, and autonomy. As a result, studies of media production have tended to focus on the people most directly involved in the production of media content, who are often located at the top of production hierarchies. The consolidation of media industries, for example, led many to question the power of corporate media owners to censor media contents (Bagdikian, 1983; Herman, 1981; Thomas & Nain, 2004), particularly news. Studies of gatekeepers – editors, publishers, directors, showrunners, and music and television producers – outpace studies of other kinds of workers, such as the numerous kinds of agents and publicists involved in production. Recently scholars have investigated the activities of those who are involved in other stages and aspects of media production, such as technology creation and production (Mayer, 2009b; McLaughlin, 2007), the manual or technical labor of production (Banks, 2007; Caldwell, 2008), and the marketing of media products (Acosta-Alzuru and Vanstrom in this volume), though more can be done to understand agency in the seemingly invisible processes of media production – such as programming for Amazon's mechanical Turk or gold farming for videogame virtual markets (see Striphas, 2009; Nakamura, 2009).

Though there have been many debates as to whether other scholars privilege structure or agency in the study of media production, all seem to agree on the need to understand and balance the relationship between the two (Golding & Murdoch, 1991; Grossberg, 2010; Miller, 2006). Each of the authors in the following chapters integrates questions of structure and agency into his or her discussion, though their research questions and thesis statements may be oriented more toward one axis or another. In doing so, they pay a large debt to those who have preceded them, while managing to move the study of media production toward ever more nuanced considerations of geography and temporality, human agency, structural conditions, and their contexts.

The Zeitgeist for Media Production

The chapters collected here reflect various changes in the production of media over the past century, and these changes have entered media production scholarship under a series of hefty, overlapping descriptions, such as “flexible accumulation” (Harvey, 1991); “network society” (Castells, 2000); and “digital capitalism” (Schiller, 2000). Rooted in critical political economy and social theory, these concepts grappled with the transformations in capitalism since the mid-1970s, each one being, in turn, catalyzed and affected by policies broadly construed as neoliberalism. Each of these phrases multiplied as these transformations could be seen in cultural formations. With neologisms such as “convergence culture” (Jenkins, 2006), “network culture” (Terranova, 2004), and the “flexible personality” (Holmes, 2001), scholars observed how structural changes impact media producers and workers, from the blurring of traditional spatial and temporal boundaries for media production to the generation of a new workforce, which gives private information to media industries both freely and without compensation.

The visibility of these issues is of critical importance today, as media production regimes adapt to the changes elicited by crises in the global political economy. Following the downturns precipitated by Fordist modes of production in the 1970s, media production scholars are looking at the recent past of economic bubbles and meltdowns with trepidation for the future. On one hand, the press seems unable to resist the new formation – whether because of its own shifts in priorities for news production or because of its own complicities with what C. Wright Mills (1956) once damned the “power elite.” At the same time, new resistive sites seem evident. Hearkening back to the Great Depression instructs that downturns in one media market have led to growth in other industries (McAllister, 2010). New rents and markets accompany new methods of seeking control over the flows of commodities, the valuation of workers, and the commercialization of everything.

It is important to note, however, that these trends become articulated differently across different times and spaces. As Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (2004, p. 4) have argued through their use of the phrase “global assemblages,” the broad and often abstract transformations associated with globalization need to be located some-where, among real people in their material, collective, and discursive relations. The case studies offered in this volume present the multiple manifestations of globalization as it affects the structures, technologies, and people involved in media production. Hence the meanings of neoliberalism or citizenship resonate differently across the chapters. For some, the privatization of national media industries and the liberalization of media markets opened the public sphere to democratic communication and to a cosmopolitan consumerism. For others, private media industries have crowded out democratic communication, which would allow public media or alternative forms of media production. These standpoints reflect not only national contexts formed through colonial histories and contemporary imperialisms, but also the disciplinary agendas of studying media production.

The sections that follow in this book highlight a series of concerns that have developed historically in the study of media production. Their interdisciplinary roots reinforce that, despite differences in the authors' influence and case studies, there have been shared attempts to look at media production regimes and infrastructures; industries and organizations; product flows and counterflows; the nature of production work, workers, and cultures; and the ethical need to consider all of the above. While each chapter presents its own approach to a specific manifestation of the global assemblage, as parts of a section they enter a broader dialogue about the ways to understand media production and to engage in its study.

Production Regimes and Infrastructures

Government, the formal set of institutions for the enactment of laws, establishes the framework for the ways we think about media products, their production, and their producers. In other words, it is the role of governments to determine whether and how media products are resources or commodities, whether and how media production is a public trust or is market-based, and whether and how media producers are laborers or consumers. Infrastructures, according to the anthropologist Brian Larkin (2008, p. 5) are “the institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense.” Whereas regimes set the rules and norms for governmental operations, infrastructures connect regimes to people via technical and cultural networks, from fan-based file-sharing groups to underground immigrant economies. Infrastructures thus extend beyond national boundaries, while still reflecting the regional characteristics that give rise to regimes.

The long march toward the transnationalization of media production began in the 1970s, through small steps toward a market-oriented regime that would consider increasing numbers of goods as commodities and laborers as consumers. Scholars have taken these steps, from international trade policy reforms to national judicial rulings favoring convergence, as a whole in order to mark the path from a liberal regime for media as a public service to a neoliberal regime for media as a commodity.² The chapters presented in Part 1 take this paradigm shift as the starting point for asking questions about how governments structure media production through formal systems of policy and regulation and through informal infrastructures of technical and cultural networks.

To start this part, Katharine Sarikakis and Patrick Burkart and Lucas Logan look at the regime shifts happening on the watches of policymakers in the European Union. Taking bird's-eye views on the international dimensions of these shifts, the authors show how changes in Europe need to be read in light of global convergences in the regulation of media production and information trade. As stated by Sandra Braman (2006, p. 94), economic competition, and not the freedom of speech or the public interest, is the “most important explanatory variable” in justifying this encroaching legal globalization. At the same time, economic competition has been a buzzword to justify the removal of authorship rights, the weakening of labor unions, and the institutionalization of casualized work-for-hire laws (Stahl, 2009). Focusing on how the new regime merges legal definitions around media producers and consumers, Sarikakis reveals that, even if anyone can be a producer in the digital age, not all the producers are equal under the law. Despite the rhetoric that claims to empower media consumers as digital producers, she shows how copyright laws strip these prosumers of their rights over the music and videos they download, remix, repost, and exchange. Moving from the national struggles over the legal regime to monetize, own, and control culture to the infrastructure of amateurs who work within these regimes, Sarikakis reveals the ways policy structures affect one's agency over media production. For Burkart and Logan, it will take the mobilization of civil society groups to force the return of media, monopolized as it is by corporations in the “celestial jukebox,” back to media producers.

In the struggles over the global governance of media production, communication and media production scholars have not always been aware of the role that governments play in sponsoring media production. Military investment in media technologies has a long record of boosting the competitive advantage of US media companies in broadcast (Meehan, 2005; Smulyan, 1994) and web-based media (Abbate, 1999; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009). In his chapter on the most recent articulation of military power, Jonathan Burston looks at “militainment” as key to a government strategy of winning consumers' hearts and minds through popular culture. For example, he argues that the US military's investment in videogame technologies with hawkish war-game themes operates on two levels, as a form of “soft power” (Nye, 2004) in international relations. First, the financing of new technologies assists in the competition for property creation. Second, the contents for these new technologies support the ideological extension of the US empire. The federal investment in the production of media and media technologies – as also discussed by Mari Castañeda (in this volume) – could be read simultaneously as market domination and as ideological domination.

Despite these mechanisms, in which regimes try to dominate media markets through production, the chapters in Part 1 also present sites of infrastructural opposition. Whether it be through the formation of international movements to press for labor reforms (Mosco & McKercher, 2008) or through the constitution of alternative internet commons to fight digital enclosures (Benkler, 2006), the hegemony of neoliberal reforms across policy spheres has met with networks of resistance. In their chapter, Burkart and Logan point to the rebellious tactics of the “pirate party” – clusters of Internet activists – to subvert European property law. In her chapter, Castañeda refers to the potential power of women of color, who have militated for environmental safety and healthier working conditions in the production of media technologies everywhere. Grounded in social bonds of labor and class and articulated through shared cultural identities of gender and race, these infrastructures present the resources to challenge regimes from margins to core.

The notion of struggle is crucial to the evaluation of governmental regimes and of the infrastructures that cut across them. In the final chapter of Part 1, John McMurria's comprehensive review of media ownership policy in the United States reminds us that governments are not just in the business of serving citizens; they also set the frameworks through which citizens are defined. Through a comparison of the discursive lenses for arguments about media ownership regulation, McMurria shows how each discourse implicitly undergirds a vision of the citizen in a democratic polity. Superseding the simple binary liberal/conservative, so commonly misused in discussing American politics, McMurria's analysis encourages us to place policy arguments in the historical contexts of their authorship.

To this end, readers might ask what has caused the problems that plague the current political economy of media production. Are these regulatory problems, for which governments can set a new policy agenda? Conversely, are these systemic problems inherent to capitalism, and thus beyond a fix without a regime change? These questions would likely bring contradictory answers (Fuchs, Schafranek, Hakken, & Breen, 2010, pp. 195–197), but they are of central importance for media studies to understand how we might emerge from the crises that mark the present conjuncture.

The Cultural Industries and the Organization of Production

Following the changes that have pushed production regimes, the chapters in Part 2 implore us to consider the continuities and modifications in the organization of production roles and resources across diverse media industries. From the book publisher to the music distributor to the film exhibitor, the key roles for media production have shifted, in response to the conglomeration, liberalization, and globalization of media markets as well as to the availability of digital technologies and to the convergence of their contents, delivery, and production. These shifts accompany the perennial struggles in media industries around labor, notably about the discipline of a skilled but cheap workforce, and about the ability to control the production of new commodities, especially data about audiences and consumers. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, the transformations in production regimes have not erased organizational hierarchies and goals so much as spread these hierarchies centrifugally, to encompass ever more people in a web of profit motives.

It was not so long ago that media production scholarship envisioned the organization of media industries as being unique to these industries' specific goods and contents. Sociology and communication scholars took a leading role in distinguishing between various kinds of industrial structures for the effective organization of production. From them, students of media production inherited both the terms to describe production roles and the relations of power that governed their interactions with each other. By the 1980s, these “power roles” (Turow, 1992) seemed fairly stable within national industries. Scholars observed the progressive development of a professionalized workforce in each industry that could balance the tensions between commerce and art within a political framework for managed economic competition. Critical scholars added to this corpus by noting the tendencies toward market monopolization, which were in fact natural to capitalism but also accelerated through the liberalization of media markets. While much maligned for its generalizing assertions, the notion of a “culture industry” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972) was in fact a useful tool in mobilizing the humanities to consider the philosophical implications of the organization of production in the study of commercial cultural objects. As increasing numbers of freelance writers and artists, information managers and data miners, amateurs and fans become key players in the organization of plural yet overlapping “cultural industries” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007), the authors of these chapters ask what kind of power different people have in these far-flung production chains.

Ethno-musicologist Timothy D. Taylor begins this inquiry with an introduction to the transformation that took place in music industries under the broad umbrella of the “new capitalism.” Pointing to specific landmarks on the path to a global capitalist order, Taylor focuses on “world music” as a genre that captures the impacts on the organization of musical production. The rising centrality of the figure of the music supervisor, national music industries, independent record labels, and the spread of marketing roles throughout production chains have exerted downward pressures on musicians and composers to do more and to serve multiple masters. Meanwhile the imposition of commercial aims over artistic production has surfaced in industry-wide debates over race and authenticity in the construction of a genre that infers, at once, a global everywhere and a “non-Western” space for cool middle-class consumption. This colonial dynamic in search of a consumable “Other” makes the new capitalism not so new after all.

The mantra that the more things change, the more they stay the same seems to resonate in the book industry as well. Laura Miller charts the advent of the electronic book industry as the latest articulation of entrepreneurialism in publishing industries. The ability of authors to circumvent agents, printers, retailers, not to mention outsource editorial functions, has put new pressures on publishers to maintain their professional standing as legitimate gatekeepers of many forms of knowledge production and cultural authority. The result, she argues, is “a two-tiered system in which the truly popular books and the authors committed to traditional standards go with professionals, and large numbers of amateur publishers see their books produced but not widely read” (p. 187). Maintained through an expansive notion of copyright, professional publishers may wield more control in a winnowed market of publishing giants by chasing falling numbers of book buyers and at once by disciplining would-be self-publishers through new technologies, such as ePub and Ipub.

In adopting the perspective of the television producer in the overcrowded attention economy, Shimpach presents his own approach to studying the television industry in the form of four “Ts” (travel, translation, tethering, and tantalization) that describe programmers' motivations in a multimedia universe. These strategies simultaneously push programs globally while aggregating audiences together for sale to advertisers, media distributors, and ancillary content providers. Shimpach's organizational model is most germane for explaining the rise of global fan franchises, which tie television to films, illustrated books, music, clothing, and branded places through still other social networking media and games. As Shimpach and others in this volume relate, the global organization of production reflects hegemonic struggles over the creative process and has led to the proliferation across media contents of what Justin Wyatt (1994) called “high concept” in film in the 1990s. Aimed at younger and predominantly male middle-class audiences, these media contents feature more special effects and less dialogue, in worlds filled with other brand products.

Push strategies also have contradictory pulls on workers and consumers. Whereas Miller and Shimpach are more sanguine about industrial transformations that potentially empower labor and consumers as active artists and as collaborative participants, Joseph Turow reminds readers of the political implications of media producers' commercial imperatives. Focusing on media buying as an intermediary industry between clients looking to target consumers and media industries aiming to sell advertising space, Turow notes a disturbing trend and an offense to citizens' privacy rights in a democratic society. Behind the promise of individual freedoms and personal choices offered in cyberspace lurks an economic infrastructure dedicated to tracking, marketing, and predicting individuals' consumer behaviors. Through an eerie echo of a Fordist economy in which industries saw employees as their own consumer base and as part of the profit cycle, many of those same companies now trade their employees' personal consumer data to tailor better websites selling to them. As this marks the dissolution of boundaries between workers and consumers, it perhaps needs little imagination to understand how the Italian theorist Maurizio Lazzarato implicates media industries in making a “social factory” (cited in Wright, 2002).

Product and Content Flows

Whereas studies of the organization of media industries have centered, typically, on corporate operations in a few select metropoles worldwide, studies of media flows have focused, historically, on the distribution and exhibition of these industries' products. The concern over media flows has a geopolitics that coincides with widespread discussions of decolonization in the twentieth century. In those discussions, critics claimed that the distribution, if not the wholesale dumping, of media products from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern hemisphere and from Western countries to those in the East echoed imperialistic and militaristic tendencies of the industries' base countries. They further drew parallels between the imposition of foreign goods, together with their production infrastructures, and the recolonization of peoples in countries that are developing their own national identities and cultural industries. In a series of international forums organized through the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), officials in developing countries throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia asserted the need for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that would be supported through national media industries and regional alliances, particularly for news distribution. Although the global political discourse around imperialistic media flows has declined since the early 1980s – no doubt with the assistance of US and UK budget cuts to UNESCO (McPhail, 2009) – the debate over the need for a NWICO continues to frame international media production scholarship (Chakravartty & Sarikakis, 2006) and to animate international political movements such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the non-governmental organization (NGO)-sponsored Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) Campaign.

The first two chapters of Part 3 continue these discussions of media flows, starting in many respects from their historical precedents. Dal Yong Jin presents both those who have articulated a thesis of cultural imperialism in communication research and those who have subsequently called for its abandonment. In evaluating these positions, Jin brings together a wide range of empirical data on Asian media industries to demonstrate that, while Japan, Korea, and China develop their own film industries and media exports, the balance sheet for cultural imports is still tipped in favor of transnational media industries based in the US and, in the case of Sky-TV, in Australia. The development of national music television (MTV) networks across Asian countries emphasizes the ways in which foreign multinationals extend their reach through global economies of scale. In the following chapter, Tamara Falicov illuminates possible reasons for the continuities of such foreign interdependencies. Focusing exclusively on national film industries in Latin America, Falicov delves into recent trends in cinematic co-production and co-distribution, which complicate national legislative initiatives to fund indigenous film production or to establish exhibition quotas. Her exposition asks the million-dollar question (p. 265) that pervades debates about media flow inequalities and imperialisms: “Do countries such as Mexico and Argentina thrive, or do they get exploited under these conditions?” The emergence of Mexican and Argentinian film auteurs at the expense of cheaper production labor in those countries suggests that some people thrive through the global media economy at the peril of others (as illustrated in Castañeda's chapter in this volume).

It should be remembered in studies of media production that the keyword glocalization derived from Japanese marketing strategies in the 1980s (Robertson, 1994). These strategies stress the ability of producers to adjust media products so as to import and export locations as both an economic and a cultural imperative. To wit, Lothar Mikos and Marta Perrota, in their chapter, address the television format trade as a study of “glocal” media production. The international licensing of formats requires that producers adapt the concept and premises for television contents to the local sites of reception. While this process seems relatively simple in the reproduction of licensed game shows and reality programs, the global transport of narrative-based television programs has been less common historically, which became one of the primary grounds in the refutation of cultural imperialism claims (Straubhaar, 1991). The transnational market for the telenovela (soap opera) has, however, introduced the possibility of glocal media flows, which are based around universal melodramatic themes and adaptable narratives. In their comparative study of several national productions of Yo soy Betty, la fea (Ugly Betty), Mikos and Perrota illustrate the strategies that television producers use in order to adapt the story paying heed to consumers' cultural differences. Their research conceives of media flows in terms of the cultural interconnections between producers and audiences across national boundaries.

Perhaps these disparate interconnections demand new approaches to media flows. Grounded in an anthropological approach, Katrien Pype urges scholars to frame the local and the global flows of media in terms of key scenarios – that is, the ways in which texts employ symbolic meanings toward a shared narrative of culture. Drawing on her fieldwork in the city of Kinshasa, Congo, Pype traces the common religious and political meanings that circulate through popular film and television programs in spite of their differences in origin, creation, distribution, and reception. Whereas Mikos and Perrota's work reflects how we might understand cultural differences through the production of a shared narrative, Pype's work urges scholars to understand the ways shared key scenarios follow the migratory flows of various media, their producers, and their audiences.

This section also illustrates the degree to which entertainment and audiovisual industries have displaced news and print industries in academic research on media flows and cultural trade. Beyond questions of technology and form, there are many possible reasons for the shift in attention related to news production: the overall economic decline of print and newspaper industries, together with the expansion and conglomeration of television and film industries; the expansion of viral citizen journalism outlets – and so on (Shirky, 2008; Zelizer, 2009). While these trends suggest that traditional news flows have perhaps been diverted to other media, it remains important that scholars understand how production and distribution trends impact the flows of cultural meanings and information that citizens need for democratic deliberation and participation. In the post-news era, what are the media industries responsible for creating a global class of “cultural citizens” who, aside from consuming media, also use media toward political ends?³ Who are their producers? Where are the centers and peripheries for their production practices, goods, and audiences? These questions are of vital importance for interpreting not only the formation of collective memories across borders but also the instigation of global social movements in the future.

Production Work and Practices

Scholarship on the routine work of producing media sets itself apart from the numerous quasi-journalistic accounts of particularly successful workers whose names have emerged from media industries into the public sphere. Whereas popular accounts have portrayed the creative process through celebrity biography, sociological, economic, and communication researchers in the mid-twentieth century undertook the tasks of understanding the organization of media production, the roles of media workers in the organization, and the routines of the creative process that led to familiar genres and largely predictable outcomes in market terms. It's no small coincidence that the growth of interest in production work after World War II accompanies the standardization of media production within industrial modes, as well as to the growth of schools for the professionalization of media production.

Today the integration of ordinary people into media industries is what Graeme Turner (2010) calls the “demotic turn,” and it has widespread implications across media types and labor markets. From the news blogosphere and its attendant citizen journalists to YouTube and its home-taught video producers, digital media and an army of “do-it-yourselfers” (DIY) have transformed media production work. On one hand, they seem to dispel the notion of the media professional as constituting an elite faction with a monopoly on creative skills, resources, and talent. On the other hand, they raise questions about the credibility and legitimacy of all media production work. The political, economic, and organizational changes discussed in the previous sections have caused crises not only among government policymakers, business industrialists, and media executives, but also among media workers themselves. The chapters in Part 4 put changes in media workplaces into context, both for the workers in those sites and for media researchers concerned with long-standing issues about authority and control in media production.

David Ryfe provokes us to look at continuities in the production of news, despite the challenges of digital DIY news. Ryfe recalls classic studies of news sociologists in the 1970s, who found that professional journalism relied on the successful internalization of production routines that helped workers negotiate the complexities of their workaday worlds. At the same time he builds a definition of routine that emphasizes both its commonsense appearance and its flexibility. This definition builds on the relationship between the routine and the normative, showing that socialization, far from being just a process of rote learning, involves an intersubjective sharing of ideals about what journalism is. As Espen Ytreberg shows (also in this volume), media professionals train to embody this social knowledge through performances, so that even the most seemingly spontaneous chatting between news anchors follows highly managed schemata.

Ytreberg's work on the production of realism across a wide variety of media genres – including talk radio, broadcast news, sporting events, and reality programs – shows how linguistic, temporal, and spatial conventions function as ways of providing order and control over media performers. Drawing on a body of literature often associated with the presentation of the self in everyday life à la Erving Goffman (1959), Ytreberg adds Michel Foucault's (1977) insight that self-regulation serves a disciplinary function in society. From this readers may ask to what extent production work lives up to its promises of creativity, autonomy, or self-realization.

In an attempt to operationalize the ways production workers experience the creative process and its workplace constraints, Carolina Acosta-Alzuru offers a longitudinal study of the making of a telenovela in Venezuela during – and despite – national political unrest and economic turmoil. On the basis of Richard Johnson's (1986/7) model for a “circuit of cultural production,” Acosta-Alzuru demonstrates the multiple pressures that production staffers faced every day – from network ratings wars to tabloid columnists – in addition to the threat of military invasion and censorship. Her account avoids reducing the production process to a mimetic reflection of the political scenario, while showing how the political polarization of Venezuela could be represented through popular entertainment. At the heart of her study, Leonardo Padron remains the program's author and creator. Reminiscent of the auteurist tradition in literary and film studies, Acosta-Alzuru is mindful of Horace Newcomb's (1974) definition of television as a popular art, and thus as a legitimate site for evaluating the producer both as an artist and as a production manager.

If Acosta-Alzuru's case study stresses the creativity of the auteur in media production, the research conducted by John Caldwell and his co-authors shows the ways creativity is distributed throughout production chains in film and television. Focusing on a bevy of workers who are invisible to most consumers but essential to the production of entertainment media, this group of researchers demonstrates the unequal burdens carried by workers who earn less, work under shorter and more time-intensive contracts, and receive virtually no credit for their inputs. These invisible laborers and their assembly line-like tasks emulate the “degradation of work” (Braverman, 1975) in what researchers have called the “creative economy” (Hartley, 2005) or the “new television economy” (Mayer, 2011) in the twenty-first century.

Adding to the host of constraints on media producers, Alexandra Juhasz closes Part 4 by examining the production medium itself. Juhasz's brilliant experiment in teaching media production via YouTube not only counters popular notions of artistic freedom and self-expression in the digital age; it also demonstrates the inbuilt limits of the technologies for work and play (Wajcman, 2004). Her method of study, which follows in the footsteps of a liberatory praxis (Freire, 1970), demonstrates how her students – and, by extension, her readers – may gain critical consciousness by testing the limits of a supposedly democratic web-authoring site. Her rules for how to produce on YouTube and for its impositions on producers may well be read as the rules of engagement for the web 2.0 generation.

Participant observation as a method has been central to the constitution of scholarly knowledge about production work (Alvarado & Buscombe, 1978; Cantor, 1980; Dornfeld, 1998; Grindstaff, 2002; Johnston, 1982). Whether joining the newsroom for a time, like a beat reporter such as Ryfe, or drawing on years of experience, like a Hollywood assistant such as Hill, the authors in this section recognize the importance of practice to the formulation of theory. Acosta-Alzuru and Ytreberg get unprecedented access to production practices and texts generally kept confidential – namely the making of a politically charged telenovela in authoritarian Venezuela and the production “bible” for the wildly popular reality television program Big Brother in Norway. From their vantage points, participant observers not only gain access to people and places but also can empathize with the time-crunch principles and resource roadblocks that drive media production and creative decisions. Their looks behind the scenes into trade practices usually kept from public view, whether to avoid competition or censorship, militate against the industry's adage that in television “nobody knows.”⁴ At the same time the focus on workers as laborers, performers, and creative artists frequently implicates the authors themselves in these roles, raising questions not just about the complicated nature of research on human subjects, but also about the boundaries of media production work itself. In what ways are academic work and media production work similar? How do their routines inspire or constrict knowledge creation and creative action? Might these similarities lead to solidarity or dissent in the future politics of labor?

Production Cultures

Delving deeper into the politics of production work, Part 5 is dedicated to the cultural construction of media producers. If studies of media production have diligently documented the political and economic structures that frame the organization, flows, and practices of production work, it is not always apparent how media production intersects and reflects the structures of feeling that the social theorist Raymond Williams (1977) located in ordinary everyday life. For, at the same time as they produce cultural objects and texts, media industries also produce the communities of people known as “producers.” Each with its own rituals, traditions, and ways of seeing, these communities generate “production cultures.” Part 5 offers various modes for understanding structures of feeling within work-specific production cultures, from the ways in which group members form their work identities and locate themselves within intercultural hierarchies of gender, race, and nation to the affective politics of production work.

Hortense Powdermaker's (1950) decision to observe Hollywood and its denizens in the same ways she approached her subjects in Papua New Guinea (1933) marked a disciplinary turn for anthropologists – a turn to examining cultural “islands” in their own society. Looking at the personal networks of people living and working on this “island,” which is defined by big capital and by egos larger than life, researchers (Caldwell, 2008; Gitlin, 1983) have understood the creative process as essentially conservative and as based on the preservation of social hierarchies and individual reputations more than on the exaltation of revolutionary change or singular genius. “It's not what you know but who you know,” the cliché resounds throughout production cultures – though in Hollywood the opaque functioning of a success also gives rise to the adage that “nobody knows,” as discussed earlier. Even as Hollywood has become the location of global investment, labor, and capital, its culture has worked historically to promote select cadres of individuals – individuals who tend to be white, male, and educated in a select grouping of schools – for employment positions associated with the creative direction of US film and television production. While these cultural dynamics are by no means universal across media industries and media capitals (Ganti, 2012; Streeter, 2010), the study of the politics of inclusion and visibility within the work settings for making media reveals in this section how media makers preserve an identity amidst the global media flows that threaten fragmentation.

Beginning with the question of queer invisibility, television historian Quinn Miller asks us to understand how Hollywood's production culture operated and what its limits were in terms of labor and representational politics. Although it has been long understood that Hollywood attracted large numbers of Jewish, gay, and lesbian workers who saw this enclave as a safe space for employment (Gabler, 1988; Gross, 2001; Hoberman & Shandler, 2003), scholars have interpreted the lack of the representation of these identities in media contents as evidence of the culture's homogenizing effects. In other words, the labor market and its outputs seemed to operate according to different logics of identity; whereas Jews and gays socialized openly in the studios, their identities never appeared on screens, except in the most stereotypical ways. Historians of media production and reception have altered this perception, pointing out the subtle and yet persistent ways in which ethnic and sexual identities can be read into media contents aimed at mass audiences (Bial, 2005; Hansen, 1991; May, 1980). Arguing that producers relied on the knowledge of insider communities to identify the queer performance, Miller aggregates a wealth of early US television performances that could be interpreted through dual lenses. Using a combination of trade materials and biographical accounts, Miller alters our perception of a production culture that excluded others, making us see instead one that allowed for a range of playful tactics within the still amorphous boundaries of the early medium. This account shows that, even as Hollywood could consolidate disciplinary control over its workforce through unfair contracts, intellectual property regimes, and blacklists, it could also allow a flexible range of creative activities that would be impossible in other spheres and industries.

The word “flexibility” resonates differently for those who study media production regimes and for those who study the producers within their cultures. For the former group of scholars, flexible production points to the changing means through which managers control their workforce, offering shorter contracts, fewer benefits, and less stable employment to satisfy the just-n-time nature of manufacturing for global markets. For the latter group of scholars, however, flexibility can be simply a way of life. Working in the post-Fordist fishbowl, media workers today hardly know the ways media executives co-opted the ideologies of freedom and authenticity from revolutionary social movements into their own precarious workplaces (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). These contradictions are central to production cultures globally, as Serra Tinic and Sylvia Martin demonstrate in their respective investigations of Canadian and Hong Kong film and television workforces. Further illustrating the need to see the local dimensions of global assemblages, Martin and Tinic excavate very different subjective responses to the transformations evoked by flexible production regimes.

For Tinic, the ebbs and flows involved in the runaway film production economy in Vancouver, British Columbia, have re-emphasized producers' feelings toward their identities as Canadians. Reflecting a physical geography that pretends to stand in for anywhere in the world, the cultural geography of film production is one in which producers connect and identify with local, national, and international production cultures. While some might suppose that these connections alienate producers, who become handmaidens to stories located elsewhere, Tinic reveals that they can also be used as a cultural strategy, to straddle both sides of the border. Highlighting the oeuvre of a successful showrunner, Tinic demonstrates how Canadian producers may wager their success in “Hollywood North” to launch innovative projects in the US. Understanding these production ecologies, Tinic argues, may be important for building a Canadian creative labor force, though the ecologies would inevitably focus our attention on a few exceptional workers at the top of labor hierarchies.

Through a thick description of people located in the Hong Kong film industry and of its diasporic workforce, Martin sheds light on the anxieties threaded through production cultures. As she shows, making a living has not been easy within an industry suffering a series of economic and political crises. In response, workers have developed their own cultural narratives in order to explain and defend the unique value of their industry and their contributions to it. In this precarious environment workers are quick to promote their adaptability, their hard work ethics, and their ability to do more for less as values organic to the cultural community, even if this means self-exploitation or it replicates colonial associations with the pliant Asian laborer. Caught between traditional cultural norms and international market pressures, Martin's layered account of Hong Kong's production culture reveals how workers' gender and class identities are shaped in relation to national and foreign discourses about the industry and the respectability of its laborers. These kinds of ethnographic insights are important for understanding the ways production cultures reproduce social hierarchies even as they respond to a shifting political economy (Gill, 2007a; Mayer, 2011).

These social hierarchies are also at stake in production cultures that form themselves in resistance to mainstream media production spheres. Situated in the educational spheres of media literacy, youth media production, and a praxis-based pedagogy, Lora Taub-Pervizpour reflects on the challenges involved in creating a production culture that foregrounds the creative impulses of low-income young people of color. Raised within a scholastic environment that demanded complicity, the young producers who participated in a community video project began to question authority through the production process. At the same time, Taub-Pervizour recognizes that, in the process of giving young people a public voice through media production skills, adults must also take responsibility to assist, protect, and even defend this vulnerable voice, for the “processes that attempt to value the voice of the youth will be threatening to those who hold traditional forms of power over them – the very power that functions by denying them an effective voice in their community” (p. 522). Ultimately she contends that, in order to sustain an egalitarian production culture, adult and youth participants alike must critically reflect on the means of inclusion and exclusion in the processes that surround not only the production, but also the distribution and exhibition of their resulting projects. Taub-Pervizour's concerns with the diversity of voices in production cultures could easily extend to all production cultures that continue to be unequally accessible to their potential members.

The Ethics of Production

The final set of chapters in this collection concern the moral dilemmas that surround media production, from the orientation of policy regimes to production work abd to the study of media production itself. Whereas in much of the world governments have enforced media production rules, codes, and standards through formal public service obligations, professional credentialing, and censorship regulations, at least two global changes have impacted the implementation of media production ethics. First, the privatization of national media industries and the liberalization of national media markets have weakened industrial codes of conduct in the face of market competition. Second, the explosion in distribution venues for amateur-produced or user-generated media has hindered governmental efforts to establish or enforce ethical guidelines, especially across national boundaries. Nevertheless, public pressures for media production ethics have hardly dissipated, as is evidenced by outcries over the public dissemination of government documents related to war and diplomacy via the website WikiLeaks. Whereas the public call for media production ethics has been largely motivated by moral panics and cynicism (see Balio, 1985; Bracci, 2003; Murray, 2007), the authors in this final Part 6 maintain a sense of optimism in foregrounding the ethical considerations that need to be considered in media production scholarship.

Dafna Lemish, to begin, investigates definitions of quality among children's television producers in order to improve the genre, not to eliminate it. Her interviews with producers show their attempts to negotiate cultural distances between globally circulating television representations and locally situated young audiences. These negotiations involve ethical concerns in establishing the distance between the self and the other, or the familiar and the foreign, which forms the basis for tolerant understandings of humanity (Silverstone, 2007). In the process, her cross-cultural and transnational study interrogates normative definitions of childhood and vulnerability, as well as perceptions of gender differences and cultural imperialism in production values and programming practices. Overall, the concurrence among producers that children's television should feature strong, complex, and diverse characters in ways that support local cultures and tolerance speaks well of television professionals, who are frequently maligned as aiming for the lowest common denominator in society (Berger, 2003, pp. 89–100).

By the same token, Ellie Rennie implores us to question the need to celebrate community media production as inherently more progressive, participatory, or meaningful to its local producers or audiences. Taking a variety of case studies of youth-oriented media production as examples, Rennie illustrates that the “community'” of community media can be just as exclusionary as mainstream media, and that neither of these media sectors is free of the political limits of the nation-state or of the economic constraints of global capitalism. In advocating a more practical approach to community media, Rennie looks to policy options for stabilizing nonprofit and non-governmental media production as a third sector of the communications landscape. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of a long tradition of media scholars who have acted as either policy advocates or policymakers (Bennett, 2006; Braman, 2003; Cunningham, 2009). Her suggestion of an independent labeling system for community media, akin to fair trade labels, not only shifts ethical questions from media production to media consumption, but also echoes those in community media who see media literacy and consumer education as vital to creating alternatives to purely profit-driven media systems (see Goodman, 2003; Howley, 2010).

The commodification of the self, the erasure of limits between work and leisure, and the endless anxiety discussed by so many of the authors in this volume as characteristics of commercial media systems and of creative industry work raise ethical questions for David Hesmondalgh and Anna Zoellner. After all, if work is exploitative, jobs unstable, futures uncertain, what is good work any more? This question looms for critical media scholars to explain why so many aspirants line up, indeed compete, to become media producers. In evaluating the ethical issues inherent to judging good work, the authors make the case for recognizing the elements of “autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-realization, work-life balance, and security” that comprise good work as philosophically un-alienated labor (p. 570). These elements were prominent in the authors' interviews with practitioners in British and German television documentary projects, and they form the basis of a grounded politics of media labor that would account both for the pains and for the pleasures involved in media production. These dualities of experience thus overcome the polarities of techno-utopianism and the precariat's pessimism in thinking about media work ethics (Gill, 2007b); they also demonstrate the need to continually re-theorize social theories of alienation in the context of contemporary media work realities (Mayer, 2009a).

The need to revisit social theories of production is also explicit in Rick Maxwell and Toby Miller's project of bringing in the environment as a central theme in media production research. Warning against the implicit celebratory tone that frequently accompanies discussions of media users) mobilities and flexibilities, the authors remind readers that every technology is the product of a Faustian bargain with the environment that must be labored, mutated, and spoiled for modern conveniences. In doing so, they underscore Nick Couldry's (2006) call to “decentralize” representation as a primary focus in media ethics in order to look more closely at the differences that the media make in the material conditions of everyday life. These differences, they argue, affect most dramatically and unethically those media producers and receivers who lack the political voices through which they could defend themselves – namely the millions of workers who serve multinational information and communications technology (ICT) corporations through mining, factory assembly, and salvage recycling. Maxwell and Miller's urging to consider the environmental impact of these activities is part and parcel of an emerging field of communication ethics that recognizes “the principle of ecological recriprocity, our obligation to support the ecosystem that supports us” (Mackin, 1997, p. 2).

Each of the chapters in this section perceives the social impacts of media production research – although, taken as a whole, the contributors in this section present an interesting dilemma on the subject of how to conduct that research. On the one hand, they stress the importance of listening to media practitioners in order to understand media harm or exploitation – whether to young audiences for children's television in Lemish's study or to the contracted employees of independent documentary productions in Hesmondalgh and Zoellner's research. On the other hand, they promote a critical understanding of media production that stresses the ethical need to question received assumptions, for example about definitions of community, participation, and progressive politics (in the case of Rennie), or even about the primacy of texts and contents in media studies (in the case of Maxwell and Miller). The balance between ethical listening and ethical critique is a challenge for all the students of media production, and indeed for all responsible citizens. They further illustrate that, beyond media industries and their practitioners, ethical considerations of media production implicate all of us – producers, consumers, workers, and researchers.

Producing the Field

The chapters that follow here share the conviction that researching production is an essential element in media studies. As such, they illuminate the people, processes, and institutional structures that have tended to be invisible to media users and consumers. As the political economic forces and cultural articulations of the digital age construct these users and consumers as producers and prosumers, it is vitally important that media studies continue to explore production through the trajectories offered in this book. For, while there will always be newer technologies and corporate entities, realignments in the geopolitics of regulation, and shifts in the organization of work and in the definitions of media workers, the categories for the analysis of these developments and of their historical concerns remain. If anything, this volume shows that the concerns over commodification and authenticity, control and autonomy, capitalism and its alternatives have become more pressing.⁵ Knowing the diverse approaches to studying media production will hopefully help generations of researchers and students, producers, and activists not only to understand the changes in light of these concerns, but also to formulate strategies for action.

NOTES

1 This definition of media studies runs throughout the 2009 special issue of Television and New Media entitled My Media Studies.

2 Even in the United States, where corporate forms of capitalism first took hold over media production, the commonsense point of departure for production was grounded in the notion that government worked on behalf of the public good to manage markets. Discussions of the liberal state's role in US media production abound; they include McChesney (2008), Braman (2006), and Grossberg (2005).

3 I recognize the ambiguity both of the phrase “cultural citizen” and of the kinds of politics that may be attributed to citizens' activities in the sphere of media consumption (Hartley, 1999; Hermes, 2005; Miller, 2006).

4 The phrase “nobody knows” has typically been used to express the uncontrollability of television markets due to the high level of uncertainty over the success of the economic product – that is, uncertainty as to whether a program will recover its sunk costs (see Caves, 2000 for a discussion of this economic logic). Participant observation of media production shows, on the contrary, how much media practitioners do know and can ensure the economic viability of a program.

5 Returning to the seemingly invisible process of creating this text, one of the very concerns over media commodification and control is embedded in the text via an editorial decision to use the uppercase “I” in the term “Internet,” a spelling that media scholars increasing see as connoting branding and ownership of a public good (Schwartz, 2002).

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