Graham Murdock

The GM debate: risk, politics and public engagement

This book tells the story of an unprecedented experiment in public participation: the government-sponsored debate on the possible commercialization of ‘GM’ crops in the UK. Giving a unique and systematic account of the debate process, this revealing volume sets it within its political and intellectual contexts, and examines the practical implications for future public engagement initiatives. The authors, an experienced team of researchers, produce a conceptually-informed and empirically-based evaluation of the debate, drawing upon detailed observation of both public and behind-the-scenes aspects of the process, the views of participants in debate events, a major MORI-administered survey of public views, and details of media coverage. With innovative methodological work on the evaluation of public engagement and deliberative processes, the authors analyze the design, implementation and effectiveness of the debate process, and provide a critique of its official findings. The book will undoubtedly be of interest to a wide readership, and will be an invaluable resource for researchers, policy-makers and students concerned with cross-disciplinary aspects of risk, decision-making, public engagement, and governance of technology.

Theories of Communication and Theories of Society

Mass communication research has grown into a vast academic enterprise. Our current conventions are testimony to its emer. gence as a fully fledged occupation, replete with the institutional apparatus of a mature discipline. University departments and schools of mass communications, journals devoted to communications, mass communications, human communication, and the media constantly spring up as the field grows, becomes specialised and differentiated. In our view this growth has be-

Past the Posts Rethinking Change, Retrieving Critique

This article takes issue with three central ideas in contemporary writing on communications and change – postmodernity, the ‘digital revolution’ and cultural globalization – arguing that they overvalue the ‘new’ and take insufficient account of historical continuities, structural inequalities and the scale and scope of economic restructuring. It suggests that analysis needs to start from the globalization of capitalist imperatives and its shifting relations to state logics and go on to explore the variable and contradictory ways this process is reconstructing communications systems as industries, cultural formations and everyday resources.

'Terrorism' and the state: a case study of the discourses of television

The legitimacy of the liberal-democratic state is no settled question. At the best of times, when peace and prosperity might appear to be the natural order of things, the state seems unshakeable, and the mobilization of popular consent through the medium of representative institutions to be an adequate expression of its solid foundations in civil society. This smooth functioning, however, is sustained by a considerable and continuous process of ideological labour-one which is thrown into relief as we enter a period of crisis. In the present period of profound economic dislocation dating from the early 1970s, Western capitalist democracies are undergoing complex and manifold processes of recomposition of the state and civil society. The question of how ideological processes work to sustain the legitimacy of the social order is now of especial interest. Within liberal-democratic political thought, the state is usually understood to derive its legitimacy from its constitutionality, from fair and free elections, its foundations in rational-legal norms respecting individual rights, and an adherence

Young pioneers: Children and the making of Chinese consumerism

Abstract This article explores the cross-cutting forces shaping the emergence of consumerism in contemporary China through a detailed study of the craze for the Transformer range of toys among Chinese children in 1989, drawing on original fieldwork and translations from Chinese sources. It argues that rather than viewing the craze as evidence of an accelerating trend towards ‘cultural imperialism’ and Americanization, it should be understood as the product of a complex interplay between three cultural formations: the long-standing and still active legacy of Confucianism; past and present experiences of ‘actually existing’ Communism, and the emerging potentials of the new market oriented economy. The detailed evidence collected for this study suggests that ‘cultural globalization’ is a highly uneven process that must be investigated with proper regard to the specific historical and social dynamics of particular situations.

Review Article: Debating Digital Divides Benjamin M. Compaine (ed.), The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 357 pp. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 303 pp. Anthony G. Wilhelm, Democracy in the Digital Age: Challenges to Political Life in Cyberspace. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. 184 pp

Benjamin M. Compaine (ed.), The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 357 pp. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 303 pp. Anthony G. Wilhelm, Democracy in the Digital Age: Challenges to Political Life in Cyberspace. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. 184 pp.

NOTES FROM THE NUMBER ONE COUNTRY

Herbert Schiller, one of the most important cultural critics of the American postwar Left, has been little read in cultural policy circles. This article sets out to introduce the main themes in his work and to argue that far from being passé, his analysis is now more relevant than ever. Writing from the United States, where public deliberation and intervention was continually pressured and often captured by commercial lobbies and interests, he was one of the first to analyse in detail both the ascendancy of market thinking and the quickening migration of key decisions from public committees to company boardrooms. He was also one of the first to grasp that the locus of global power in the postwar era was moving from the appropriation of territory to the annexation of imagination, and to analyse in detail the connections between American‐mediated culture and the new global economic order.

Radical drama, radical theatre:

* Centre for Mass Communications Research, University of Leicester, UK. The last two decades or so have seen a more or less continuous debate on the nature and prospects for radical drama. The emerging arguments have been fundamentally shaped by the rise of television as the central dramatic medium and by its shifting relationship to the theatre. As a result, a good deal of the debate has centred around the relative merits of television and theatre as alternative sites for the development of new forms of play-writing and presentation. This paper sets out to pull together

Following the Money: WikiLeaks and the Political Economy of Disclosure

In a pivotal scene in All the President’s Men, the Oscar-winning film about the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward, an ambitious young reporter on the Washington Post, goes to meet his anonymous, shadowy, informant, “Deep Throat,” in an underground car park. Woodward hopes the encounter will offer clues to possible connections between the burglary at the Watergate Hotel and malpractice in President Nixon’s re-election campaign. He is told to “follow the money,” a trail that eventually leads to Nixon’s impeachment and ignominious departure from office.

Authorship and Organisation

Commentators who have considered the role of the writer in television drama have tended to start either from notions of authorship and creativity, or from the organisation of production. The first approach stresses the writers’ relative autonomy and their pre-eminent role in shaping the final text. In this version they are assimilated to the romantic stereotype of the artist ‘working alone to carve a personal vision out of the marble of his sensibility’.1 Organisationally-oriented approaches, on the other hand, present writers as relatively powerless and enmeshed in a web of ideological and economic pressures which curtail their choices and channel their work in certain directions. In these accounts they appear as craftsmen rather than creators, professionals on a par with journalists and copy-writers, working within well-understood constraints to turn saleable ideas into shootable scripts. The text is no longer the unique expression of the author’s sensibilities, but a collective product manufactured by an industrial process and subject to the insistent pressures of time, resources and market competition.