Market Killing
What the Free Market Does & What
Social Scientists Can Do About It
Edited by Greg Philo & David Miller
Oct 2000
Pearson Education / Longman
ISBN: 058238236X
280 pages, Illustrated
$59.50 Paper original
This book shows how the release of the free market in the last part of the twentieth century produced a rise in inequality and violence, the development of a huge criminal economy and the degradation of social and cultural life.
It questions the silence of academics in the face of these changes and asks how much they have been incorporated into the priorities of commerce and governments. Many academics in the social sciences, media and cultural studies have avoided critical issues and become occupied in obscure theoretical debates such as post-modernism. The effect was to draw intellectuals and students away from the engaged and empirical work needed to identify key social problems and possibilities for change.
The authors of this book point to the need for independent research which can criticize political policies and reveal their effects. They show, for example, why contemporary policies on drugs and education are creating more problems than they solve. The book features contributions from a wide range of academic disciplines including mass communications, sociology, politics, geography, philosophy and economics, and points to new directions for radical science. It also examines the possibilities for a free and democratic media and calls for the development of critical and open debate.
Contents
Cultural Compliance: Media I Cultural Studies and Social Science. Greg Philo
and David Miller, Glasgow Media Group Contributions and Commentaries. Disciplinary
dead-ends and alternative theory
1. What is wrong with science and rationality? Noam Chomsky
2. Life after the science wars? Hilary Rose
3. Film Theory and bogus theory. Derek Bouse
4. Free market feminism, New Labour and the cultural meaning of the TV blonde.
Angela McRobbie
5. The 'Public', the 'Popular' and media studies. John Corner
6. The emperor's new theoretical clothes, or geography without origami. Chris
Hamnett
7. Political economy. Andrew Gamble
Theory and practice
8. Media research and the audit culture. Philip Schlesinger
9. Corporate culture and the academic left. Barbara Epstein
10. Privatization: Claims, outcomes and explanations. Jean Shaoul
11. Media regulation in the era of market liberalism. James Curran
12. Alternatives in the media age. Danny Schechter
13. Political frustrations in the post-modern fog. Hilary Wainwright
Index
Features
• Highly topical and controversial text from a high profile group -
it attacks post modernist and textual approaches arguing that these are inadequate
at the level of both theory and methods. These approaches have also encouraged
a decline in empirical work and this has reduced the capacity of academics
in the area to comment on developments in their own society. It argues for
a media and cultural studies which is critical and engages with key public
issues.
• Distinguished list of contributors - including Raymond Tallis, University
of Manchester; John Corner, University of Liverpool; Chris Hamnett, King's
College, London; James Curran, Goldsmith's College, University of London;
Angela McRobbie, Goldsmith's College, University of London; Andrew Gamble,
University of Sheffield; Peter Golding, University of Loughborough.
• Includes a commentary on Communications and the New World Order by
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Review
'Market Killing is an invitation to reflect on what type of liberation we
are engaged in, and what type of knowledge we want to produce'.
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Vol 13, No 1, January
2003