Nota

The "democratization of consumption''

The broader social and ideological context within which mass communication research is conducted and exchanged has altered significantly in the past decade or so. The rising appreciation of the importance of media literacy and the pace of corporate concentration in the communications sector had seemed, only recently, to herald an emergent popular understanding of the critical public function of communication resources and practices. Now this concern has been displaced by vigorous deployment of the language of private commerce in public affairs. Neo-liberal claims about the efficiency and accountability of the private sector, the fiscal necessity of privatizing public institutions and deregulating trade and industry, and the imperatives of technology, globalization, and ``national competitiveness'' have rapidly become the privileged categories for mass media discussion of the public interest in all sectors.

With regard to their own sector, the globally integrated private communication industries present themselves, unsurprisingly, as exemplars of the rightness of these claims, even as the concentration of ownership in the media marketplace continues to accelerate. In disregard of these developments, the media portray popular or scholarly criticism of private-sector control of public information processes and espousal of expanded public or community control of the media as incomprehensible absurdities, when they are addressed at all.

The mass media's embrace of the commercial tropes of globalization has also obscured their own obstructive role in the development of international public institutions and an international public sphere. ``Trade in services,'' ``free flow of information,'' and the ``Information Superhighway'' are now the defining media categories of international communications policy and governance in the global information society. Hidden beneath this rhetorical shift, the emerging institutional and electronic structure of global civil society is, apparently, being pruned and shaped so as to attenuate public communicative entitlements in new, mediated international political spaces and to swell the private usufruct of the global oligopolies, led by the media and information industries.

This policy momentum justifies itself by recitation of a convenient and comforting nostrum: that the internationalization of commercial culture, with electronic media technology as its vehicle, will unfailingly act to ensure the development of democracy and human rights. In this ``Whig interpretation of communications history'' (Carey, 1981, p. 77) the development of communications technology becomes a story of unfolding progress towards freer and more democratic, better-informed, and more literate societies -- ``the story of the progressive liberation of the human spirit'' (p. 77).

More information is made available and is made to move further and faster, ignorance is ended, civil strife brought under control. In this version of the rhetoric of the technological sublime it is the machines that possess teleological insight. (Carey, 1981, p. 78)

In contemporary Canadian journalism, Gwynne Dyer's recent work is a good example of ``the rhetoric of the technological sublime.'' Dyer recapitulates, in truncated form, the institutionalist argument that the spread of the printing press and literacy made it possible for the mass societies of Europe, a few centuries ago, to evolve mass democratic institutions out of their ``authoritarian, hierarchical, patriarchal'' antecedents (Dyer, 1996, p. D5). On this basis, Dyer's technological-determinist conclusion is that the world's other mass societies, ``because they are now permeated by mass media too,'' are also and therefore now abandoning their own tyrannical histories and unleashing ``an avalanche of democracy'':

`Westernization'...is not a plot by Coca-Cola. It is a process that happens in any mass society that democratizes....Which means that it is legitimate to talk about the emergence of a global culture....All we are doing is to democratize consumption. (Dyer, 1996, p. D5)

Of course in its blurry outlines this story is appealing -- and even convincing if we use a sufficiently restricted notion of democracy and if we accept that processes of competitive market exchange and collective self-governance are governed by the same micro-economic logic. The ``global democratization of consumption'' does not seem to imply, for example, any matching plenipotentiary democratization of the workplace. Indeed, regional and national differentials in regimes of worker discipline and the resulting opportunities for labour cost-reductions represent major strategic resources for global capital.

Nor is consumer culture necessarily accompanied by an expansion of civil and political rights. The new wave of assaults across the OECD countries (and their dependent states) on long-standing institutional arrangements fought and won by the labour, civil rights, and women's movements, such as those upon public education, health care, and family support, appears to be driving the welfare state only in the direction of a coercive and retributive ``night-watchman'' for property. In the sense that they are formally representative and legally constituted, perhaps the outcomes are democratic; but they are hostile to democratic participation and to established normative institutions of self-governance in community life.

Finally, if the free movement of skilled labour and commodities is in fact connected to the spread of these restricted forms of democratic order (and by the evidence of neo-liberal policy with respect to the de-linking of trade and human rights and to the international treaty rights of refugees), this connection seems to have no implications that ensure even the most vestigial civil rights entitlements to the world's exploding diasporic populations. Only by the most egregious doublespeak can the current international private-sector attack on public institutions be construed as an expansion of collective self-governance.

If, as Carey suggests, communications technology is the displaced subject to which these policy choices are being attributed, it is only in order to shield from view the transnational corporate beneficiaries of neo-liberal policies. Nevertheless, among the theorists of the public choice momentum, a few forthrightly admit that the central item on the agenda of globalization is projecting a global regime of laissez-faire commerce, not democracy and human rights. The Canadian business media are not too shy to reprint instructive and improving commentary from corporate-funded think-tanks, such as Stanford's Hoover Institute, to this effect:

Democracy, the selection of leaders by competitive elections, is often practised in the same places where there is also protection of human rights, property rights, the rule of law, and free markets for goods and services. Therefore democracy is sometimes construed as a necessary condition and guarantor of a liberal economic order....[But] the existence of multiparty elections tells us little about the characteristics of the political systems that preserve free markets. The missing link that unites democracy with economic performance is liberalism. Liberalism...is the key to distinguishing those nations that succeed economically from those that fail....If multiparty elections do not necessarily generate a liberal economic order, then East Asian leaders should not apologize for failing to develop Western institutions during the transition to a market-based economy. (Root, 1996, p. A13)

Communities of media scholarship

Struggles over communication policy have emerged as central in the postwar system of international power, and the communications industries as among the largest stakeholders in the public choice model. Thus, as Hamid Mowlana states, ``communication study is largely the outcome of global and national forces that have propelled the communication process to the centre of domestic and international attention and concern'' (1994, p. 354).

Fortunately, alternative perspectives on democracy and alternative traditions of international media research and practice continue to be available in this changed context. The International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) has been a major locus of critical activism for almost three decades, and the numerous researchers affiliated to this organization have established its central role in the continuity of public interest-oriented media scholarship. Its members' collective body of research documents an international community of effort in long-term participant observation and systematic evaluation of international communications policy development, with a distinct focus on the perspectives of the economic south. As a result, the IAMCR has drawn together a broad and ecumenical community of researchers and activists with intimate knowledge and involvement in the whole chain of postwar international policy struggles over communication resources and practices.

The recent publication of festschrifts for two highly prominent teachers and researchers in this field, both of them veritable ``insiders'' in these struggles and both founding members of the IAMCR, offers an appropriate occasion for discussing some potential strategies of resistance to the neo-liberal discourse on globalization and commercial culture (Hamelink & Linne, 1994; Wasko, Mosco, & Pendakur, 1993). Dallas Smythe, who died during the time of preparation of his tribute volume, was known by all as an intellectual pioneer ``who made a committment to democracy... the core focus of his life'' (Dervin, 1993, p. 402); James Halloran's distinguished reputation stems only in part from his 18 years as the President of the IAMCR. Together these two volumes go a long way towards summing up the progress and setting a future research agenda for those parts of the terrain of critical mass communication research (MCR) first surveyed by the personalities to whom they are dedicated.

Certainly there are important differences in the approaches of Smythe and Halloran themselves to their work. Now a major research field, the ``political economy of communication'' is an investigation inaugurated by Smythe and thematized at the core of all of his own research as the dynamic study of the use of communications resources in maintaining or contesting structures of social power. Halloran's approach to MCR exhibits a somewhat more functionalist theoretical grounding in media effects theory, media education, and journalism studies, but advocates a no less consensual and empowering communications practice. The contributions in each volume that address questions concerning the definition of the field closely reflect these differences in approach (see Babe, 1993; Dervin, 1994). At the same time, the substantial overlap of contributors and the frequency of their references to one another's publications attests how far working definitions are held in common in this constituency (Dervin, Gerbner, Nordenstreng, and H. Schiller have contributed to both volumes).

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the relevance of these volumes in the current context is visible in the number and profile of the colleagues and students of Smythe and Halloran who have contributed and in the integrative breadth of topics they address. Each contribution provides an angle of critical insight into the globalization of commercial culture which is glossed over in the neo-liberal account of the ``democratization of consumption.'' Taking these together, the field of investigation of this research community is seen here to encompass at least the following areas of concentration: the political economy of the communications industries, mass communication policy and international communication, science and technology policy and planning, communications policy history, the ``information society,'' development communication, environmental communication, political communication, audience analysis, journalism and media education, public opinion research, evaluation research, effects research, and studies of media representation.

The contemporary ideological ascendance of neo-liberalism and the role of the mass media in promoting this development are topics very much in the forefront of the work presented in these volumes. In the Smythe festschrift, to take a few examples, relevant and detailed discussion is provided about the emerging pattern of institutional development in the global information economy (Mansell, 1993; Mosco, 1993); the role of regional trade pacts in securing industrial integration in the information-communication sector (Samarajiva, 1993; D. Schiller, 1993); and the global restructuring of the communications industries (Mattelart, 1993).

The Halloran festschrift contains several illuminating first-hand historical reports on the process by which the existing policy and institutional framework for international communication has developed (see, for example, Hamelink, 1994; Hancock, 1994; Nordenstreng, 1994). In addition, some contributors have drawn direct and pointed conclusions about the implications of corporate dominance in the creation of global civil society, and the surplus of communicative rights enjoyed by corporate speakers. For example, Herbert Schiller focuses on the role of the mass media ``as the most powerful instrument for creating and channeling consumer demand to fulfill corporate marketing needs and objectives...'' (1994, p. 340).

All else follows from this increasingly globalized institutional pattern....It has to be expected that if recognition of this relationship does develop and remedial changes are proposed, the systematic response will be to accuse the challengers of seeking to infringe on freedom of expression. But freedom of expression and personal liberty are human rights and enjoyments [and were originally won by labour and its allies]. Corporations exercise these rights to an ever-increasing extent only because their enormous influence has enabled them to shape the legal system to their benefit and to the disadvantage of the bulk of the population. (H. Schiller, 1994, p. 340)

Rather than generalize further about the informative scholarship in these collections, in the remaining space I concentrate instead, and by turn, on two critical issues which have been raised among several contributors in each volume, bearing on questions of communicative resistance to the neo-liberal agenda.

Towards an immanent critique of neo-liberal discourse

The particular strength of the Halloran tribute volume, in my view, is the effort of several of its contributors to place larger methodological debates in the social sciences on the mass communication research agenda. These debates revolve, in part, around the status of media effects theory in all its forms. While this is the only one of the two collections to devote explicit attention to discussing media effects theory (see especially Dervin, 1994; Gerbner, 1994; Noelle-Neumann, 1994), it is also the only one in which a number of contributors critically engage the effects model and offer alternative theoretical models (see, especially, Gitlin, 1994; Mowlana, 1994; Murdock, 1994).

Vigorous methodological debate potentially marks a ``field'' off from a ``discipline,'' as Gitlin observes: ``A field, in the sense of high-energy physics, is a territory through which high charges work. It radiates around a set of charged questions...and if things work well, it illuminates'' (1994, p. 53). Gitlin points to the methodological influence of media studies as such an illumination, especially in its attention to ``the workings of media institutions and to the histories of those institutions and the cultural forms they have sheltered and excluded'' (p. 54). The great diversity of critical approaches to the study of media, he says, challenges the social sciences to reflect on the ``totality of society'' and pushes us collectively towards questions of ``how...we shall understand a society that routinely, profusely traffics in images; of the part played by technology in transforming human consciousness (and unconsciousness)...of the meaning and limits of the globalization of culture'' (p. 57).

Graham Murdock raises similar methodological questions, but perceives a ``damaging division'' in communications studies between the political economics, sociologists, and political scientists, whose major interest is in the organization of [communications] systems and their links to wider social, economic and political formations...[and] the practitioners of cultural studies, who approach [these systems] as key sites for the rticulation of public discourse and are mainly concerned with the way meaning is organized....(1994, p. 171)

I want to argue here that because of this methodological ``bifurcation'' (Murdock, 1994, p. 171), the ``critical-functionalist'' stream of research represented in these collections faces a major disadvantage in its effort to contest public choice theory's dominance in the communications policy domain. Public choice theory is an interdisciplinary approach to public policy questions, based on a thorough and sanguinary extension of Cartesian micro-economic assumptions to the analysis of socio-political policy dilemmas from other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including political science, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and moral philosophy (see Becker, 1986). The familiar assumptions of public choice theory, drawn from neo-classical economics and from game theory refinements to it, postulate an atomistic social world populated entirely by opportunistic and self-interested ``utility-maximizers.'' On this basis, public choice advocates claim to make objective predictions of how, in the aggregate, these actors will calculate and enact strategies in pursuit of their exogenous preferences (see Babe, 1993; Melody, 1993, for further discussion of these postulates), and of how, therefore, a restricted and utilitarian set of public interest objectives can best be secured.

In this model, social interaction routines and other enculturated communication processes are insignificant factors in analyzing public policy choices because they are epiphenomenal to the presumed innate characteristics of instrumentally rational economic and political actors which determine their preferences and intentional acts. Aspects of this ``methodological individualism'' are shared by the effects paradigm in communication studies, and this is the basis of most critiques (see, in these collections, Mowlana, 1994; Murdock, 1994). Since the very ubiquity of the atomistic micro-economic assumptions of public choice theory makes them appear settled and largely self-evident, they have acquired the status of well-rehearsed and ``common-sense'' epistemic propositions for individuals enculturated to them within the institutions of consumer society and positive science. A matching jurisprudential privileging of the autonomous and metaphysicalized subject is also built directly into the discursive structure of the liberal civil-rights regime (e.g., the ``free marketplace of ideas'') where the political-economic conflicts which do reach the public sphere are managed.

In mass communication research, in contrast, there is a distinct lack of articulation to alternative contemporary theoretical underpinnings in the social sciences at the same level of abstraction. Building bridges to communications research from critical social theory, contemporary language philosophy, and cultural studies perspectives would enable an emancipatory, as well as a critical, program of research: a means to contest the normative purposes, as well as the empirical outcomes, of the neo-liberal agenda.

Clear historical and conceptual links exist between these traditions. The critical institutional analysis of the MCR tradition has its historical roots in Weberian economic sociology and American philosophical pragmatism, stemming especially from Veblen's and Dewey's investigations of the cultural embeddedness of economic processes and technological systems. And philosophical pragmatism is also the intellectual origin of symbolic interactionism and Pierceian philosophy of science. Both of these fields have been integrated into critical theory (see especially Habermas, 1984, 1985).

Murdock and Mowlana, who also take the critique of the effects model as their entry point, suggest that the MCR field needs to move away from the methodological individualism of the effects model and in this hermeneutic direction. They emphasize MCR's lack of theoretical integration and continuing unresolved debates. Mowlana prescribes a ``radical departure from the premises of the old perspective about the role and effect of media'' (1994, p. 355):

A more elaborate theory for the interaction of change in social structure, change in communication patterns, and change in culture is needed in communication research. Implied in this assertion is a new research perspective in which the focus is shifted from communication as social control to communication as integral to sociocultural change. Therefore a different set of disciplinary methodologies must be formulated to operationalize this type of research. (pp. 355-356)

Mowlana identifies the theoretical stance taken towards rationality as the issue at the centre of the methodological dispute in mass communication research. Unfortunately he inaccurately groups critical theory and ``laissez-faire doctrine'' (p. 363) together as co-tenants of the assumption of instrumental rationality. In trying to advocate a position ``attacking the authority of reason'' (p. 361), he also wrongly attributes this postmodernist position to Habermas. He is correct, however, that the form or forms in which reason experiences itself (and even an anti-rationalist position must convince us by its reasons) -- and the distinction on this point between critical theory and laissez-faire doctrine -- are at the core of the methodological debates in mass communication research.

Critical theory and public choice are more usefully treated as rival research programs: ``Their main point of difference lies in the public choice belief that rationality is synonymous with its instrumental variant'' (Dryzek, 1995, p. 112). Game theory provides powerful tools for public choice in performing accurate descriptive analyses of instrumental rationality, but in doing so it reconstructs ``only one human competence. The capacity to act instrumentally or strategically may be a universal human competence, but other competences can exist too'' (Dryzek, 1995, p. 113).

The critical theory position is that there are multiple, observable forms of rationality and logics of action (for instance, ``instrumental,'' ``strategic,'' ``normative,'' ``dramaturgical,'' and ``communicative'' rationalities and action-orientations are discussed in Habermas, 1984, 1985). Most of these forms of rationality are linked to tacit competences at initiating, maintaining, and altering different kinds of relationships with other actors, and for establishing and contesting meanings, standards, rules, and intersubjective agreements within those relationships (Wellmer, 1992, pp. 171-220). That is to say, they are the basis of a range of collective action competences (see also Offe, 1985; White, 1987). These tacit competences are the basis of successful actor co-ordination in all economic and political interactions and are linked to variations in the economic performance of different societies. A ``methodological interactionism'' can be posited on this basis, which displaces the instrumental Cartesian subject from the centre of its epistemology in favour of forms (and logics) of communicative interaction. ``Methodological interactionism'' can thereby contribute to ``liberating [public choice] from self-misunderstanding'' (Dryzek, 1995, p. 111). In light of this immanent critique, public choice theory is reinterpreted as a ``critical theory that tells us what happens when instrumental rationality runs wild'' (Dryzek, 1995, p. 114, emphasis added).

In its attention to transactions and organizations, ``habits of mind,'' and cultural contexts and histories, critical institutional communications research is already a multilevel investigation of collective action competences. It is missing only the connection, through critical theory, to a communication-centred micro-economic theory grounded in the logic of collective, rather than individual, action. This internal theoretical link between the political economy of communication and the pragmatics of communicative interaction reveals the contemporary study of communication as the locus of an integrated critical model of economic action. For this reason, it is a key site for the critique of public choice theory and thus for discursive resistance to the neo-liberal policy agenda. The fundamental problem, not only of communications policy but of economic policy in general, ``then becomes one of designing institutions to curb strategic behaviour and to promote communicative rationality'' (Dryzek, 1995, p. 115).

In the contemporary context, the stakes for mass communication research on these issues are axiological, rising at the centre of its self-identity. MCR has a pivotal role to play in the emergence of global culture. Without understanding social communication as prior and prerequisite to individual choice and action, a globalized commercial culture can understand itself only as an expression of technological determinism and the ``Whig interpretation of communications history'':

With the advent of new information technologies, the established powers are strengthened, new dependencies are created, and new social discrepancies are brought about. The situation is worsening day by day....This is because the ethical questions have been subsumed under the banners of science, progress and development. (Mowlana, 1994, p. 360)

The network economy: Integrating critical theory and mass communication research

A strength of the Smythe festschrift is its sustained attention to the role of new electronic network technologies in the globalization of commercial culture. This issue, which I want to take up here, also serves to illustrate the methodological argument sketched above.

Vincent Mosco points out the importance of the issue succinctly: ``electronic services are vital to capital...as an instrument of the organizational control necessary for global expansion'' (1993, p. 149). Mosco, too, draws a connection between the methodological debate in MCR and the study of the technological and institutional development of the information economy: ``One of the more important goals of political economy should be to incorporate this area [new communication technologies] into central concerns of its scholarship and praxis, to understand the relation between transforming telecommunications and transforming social life'' (p. 149).

His prescriptions for accomplishing this are, first, to disregard market assumptions and focus instead on systematic assessment of communication skills and competences and the design of the appropriate technological armature to support them; and secondly, since ``we know that reliance on marketplace solutions is undermining this principle...to renew a committment to universality of information services...as a fundamental right'' (p. 148).

Robin Mansell investigates the global strategic stakes in telecommunications technology innovation, emphasizing the manner in which the neo-liberal agenda in international telecommunications planning and policy ``neglects or excludes the interests of major segments of the user population'' (1993, p. 194). Mansell concludes that Smythe's concept of ``cultural screens'' is a useful way to conceptualize the role of telecommunications policy in safeguarding social and economic development goals: this includes ``border control of the movement of information as well as the technical artefacts that support the marketing and exchange of telecommunication services'' (p. 193).

Such proposals for the differentiation of new public institutions in the communications sector recall Dryzek's problem of ``designing institutions to curb strategic behaviour and to promote communicative rationality'' (1995, p. 115). William Melody notes that institutional change and communication systems have a complex inter-relationship:

Institutions reflect the patterns of interaction between and among individuals acting within or between groups, or through formal organizations. Patterns of interaction may be determined by custom, law, organizational role, or some other guideline for behaviour.... Changes in the pattern of interaction bring about changes in institutions....New communication systems often introduce fundamental changes in the structure of information flows and the quality of the information communicated. (1993, pp. 65-66)

Quoting Friedrich von Hayek, Melody explains that the communication of knowledge ``is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process...or of designing an efficient economic system'' (Hayek, 1945, cited in Melody, 1993, p. 74). Melody asserts that for this reason communications policy, and planning and design for communication systems, must be understood as central to the diffusion of wealth and the promotion of economic development.

When information is treated as a market commodity, Melody points out, two kinds of information markets arise: those in which returns are maximized by widespread low-cost replication of information products (for example, marketing information), and those in which ``maximum market value is achieved by restricting information to specialized users who value its scarcity'' (1993, p. 77). The former kinds of information markets tend strongly toward centralization of control and monopoly, due especially to the spread between first-copy and replication costs; ``thus,'' he says, ``competitive forces in many information markets are likely to be rather weak'' (p. 78). And for the second type of information market, the inherent characteristics of information as a commodity create opportunity costs, quality-control problems, and misinformation risks. Additionally, information commodity markets tend to distort flows of knowledge between socio-economic groups and regions, with wealthier economies dominating in the production of low-cost, widely diffused consumer information for poorer economies, and in the control of scarcer and more valuable information about them (Melody, 1993).

These are some of the ``negative externalities'' accruing to the commodification of information and communication processes, and to the development of a ``network economy'' following the public choice model. While the new technologies are clearly adopted by many economic actors with rational, opportunistic intentions in the direction of their private goals and preferences, and in competition with other actors, much of their expected gain may be cancelled out in any case if other actors also become equipped with higher information-processing capabilities. Indeed, in light of the attending increases in available information, the spatial and temporal flexibility of the technology, and the ramifying patterns of interconnection among actors conferred by its use, the electronic network technologies may well make rational calculation more difficult and lead to rising uncertainty about action-outcomes for many users. Increasing the rate of data collection and processing increases the rate at which that data is fed back, in the form of goal-directed actions, into the environment from which it is drawn, thereby also transforming that environment and the conduct of actors in it at an accelerating rate.

In this respect, the emergence of telematic networks illustrates the inherently reflexive and inter-subjective character of social action, consisting in part in the fact that ``the knowledge claims [actors] produce...become revised in a practical sense as they circulate in and out of the environment they describe'' (Giddens, 1990, p. 177). Objective measurements of the use of knowledge and communication resources are at the same time subjectively meaningful inputs into social practices, and these ``are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character'' (Giddens, 1990, p. 38).

Instrumental strategies of reasoning are confounded by this reflexive character of information processes, as by other interdependencies arising in the use of communication systems. It is well known, for example, that switched networks exhibit large positive externalities: inasmuch as communication networks are valuable fundamentally because they connect users to one another, the value of network resources to users is increased by other users' access to the same resources. These positive externalities have implications for the universal access rights to information services for which Mosco calls: these rights are not some species of public charity, but powerful means of supporting overall economic performance.

A fundamental reason electronic networks are inappropriate objects for neo-classical micro-economic analysis is that transactions in networks are not market transactions. This is due to the underlying characteristics of network ``connectivity'' and ``addressability'': all users of a switched network are physically connected by it, on a continuing basis, and have an ``address'' through which other users (as well as network operators) can communicate with them (e.g., telephone numbers in a voice network). To the degree that new software applications stimulate a migration of economic transactions into network environments, this feature of ``addressability'' becomes part of a network-driven transformation of the intrinsic characteristics of transactions themselves. The standard economic description of a market transaction is that it consists of the offer and acceptance of an exchange between anonymous parties of standardized goods, with no presumption of its recurrence. The matching description of an addressable network transaction is that it consists of parties who have significant knowledge of one another completing an agreement for the exchange of increasingly differentiated and non-standardized goods and services as one event in a continuing sequence of transactions recurring between them.

The continuity of this relationship, the patterns of interaction that arise between the parties, and the fuller knowledge they acquire of one another's preferences, values, and intentions mean that alternative transaction-partners are only imperfectly substitutable, and that repeat transactions within the relationship can be processed at lower cost. It also means that goods and services are more readily customized and that, for both parties, information about new transaction-partners and their relationships become factors in decision-making. This bears no resemblance to the neo-classical model of pure market competition in which fully substitutable goods and transaction-partners exist for each anonymous transaction and prices give complete decision-making information.

Viewing the economy as a process of co-ordination between economic actors, it becomes apparent that the economic performance of a network is closely tied to its ability to generate and support forms of economic co-operation. What critical theory can contribute to the political economy of electronic networks is a framework for detailed analysis and evaluation of these collective action competences, in terms of their implications for the structure and performance of a network economy or organizations within it. Collective action competences can be understood as communicative forms of social capital, largely tacit but becoming visible in the course of (and also as barriers to) technological rationalization. It is crucial, in considering the kind of political and economic spaces we wish to build in a global civil society, to ensure that our shared treasury of social capital is not destroyed by promulgation of a misunderstanding of the economic process itself.

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Nota

This review essay discusses some of the themes raised among the contributors to these two recently published collections:

Illuminating the Blindspots: Essays Honoring Dallas W. Smythe. Edited by Janet Wasko, Vincent Mosco, & Manjunath Pendakur. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1993. 435 pp.

Contributors: Robert Babe, Jorg Becker, Brenda Dervin, Roque Faraone, George Gerbner, Edward Herman, John Lent, Robin Mansell, Armand Mattelart, William Melody, Eileen Meehan, Vincent Mosco, Karl Nordenstreng, Jelena Polic & Oscar Gandy, Colleen Roach, Rohan Samarajiva, Dan Schiller, Herbert Schiller, Harry Trebing, Janet Wasko.

Mass Communication Research: On Problems and Policies. The Art of Asking the Right Questions: In Honor of James D. Halloran. Edited by Cees J. Hamelink & Olga Linne. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1994. 417 pp.

Contributors: Paul Ansah, Nelly de Camargo, Brenda Dervin, K. E. Eapen, Cecilia von Feilitzen, George Gerbner, Todd Gitlin, Cees Hamelink, Alan Hancock, Anders Hansen & Olga Linne, Olof Hulten, Keval Joe Kumar, Gladys Lang & Kurt Lang, Len Masterman, Denis McQuail, David Morrison & Howard Tumbler, Hamid Mowlana, Graham Murdock, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Karl Nordenstreng, Gertrude Robinson, Rafael Roncaglio, Herbert Schiller, Colin Seymour-Ure, Tamas Szecsko, Robert White.