ADM570 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION
Course Content
Political economy is a major perspective in understanding the media of modern capitalism, which extensively operate as "cultural industries". The structure and operational logic of these organizations exhibit both similarities with and differences from other industries. Their common features with other areas of commodity production signify the fact that cultural industries are increasingly integrated into the general industrial structure and they explicitly operate within the field of economics. However, it is also obvious that the commodities they produce are extensively divorced from the commodity form produced in classical sectors of manufacturing industries. In other words, the commodities produced by cultural industries appear as symbols, which can be evaluated as one of the primary means in organizing the images and discourses through which people signify their own or others´ life. Through introducing the main perspectives in the political economy of communication and conveying how political economies approached to particular problem areas within the field, the ultimate objective of this course is to present a critical analytical framework of understanding the relation between symbolic and economic dimensions of cultural commodity production within contemporary capitalism.
