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ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

Theme 2 Research Projects

(1) The BBC, Its Business Model and Dilemmas of Public Sector Reform

Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver, Richard Philips, Karel Williams

This project explores the strategy and business model of the BBC and the reasons for its recent defensive restructuring. It starts from the position that we understand much less about the pressures and constraints around public organisations than we do in the case of giant private firms. We then developed a distinctive public sector business model which explains the BBC’s behaviour by considering sources of revenue, composition of costs and the ability of management to control costs before relating these material limits to the socio-cultural expectations and responses of stakeholders who help shape the operating environment.

(2) Hollywood’s Business Model

Adam Leaver

Leaver made significant advances in revising our understanding of Hollywood's business model. He offers a ‘different take’ from that of critical social science which supposes that Hollywood has reorganised and resolved its cost recovery problems. Leaver highlights how the power of cultural elites restricts corporate profitability and encourages endless restructuring because their pay demands claim a disproportionate slice of turnover, and so the Hollywood business model remains uncertain.

(3) The Independent Sector: Promise, Outcome and Complication

Adam Leaver, Farida Vis, Karel Williams

This project develops a distinctive cultural economy analysis of the trajectory of the independent TV production sector in the UK and highlights a major discrepancy between promise and outcome. In the 1970s, the sector’s growth was encouraged in the belief that it could liberate ‘creatives’ who have been stifled in vertically integrated organisations like the BBC.; but the end result is a rapidly consolidating independent sector where the major corporate players pursue income through property rights. They explored the discrepancy between a vision of the broadcast producer as a creative individual in pursuit of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the realities of working in a sector where large ‘super-indies’ dominate and smaller producer/owners become rich by selling up.

(4) British Media and Cultural Policy after 1997

David Hesmondhalgh

This project examines New Labour media and cultural policy using documentary sources and policy reports. CRESC research support from Vis also contributed to updating specific industry and policy data for the second edition of my monograph The Culture Industries. CRESC also contributed to supporting the preparation of a successful bid for an AHRC project on Creative work in the Culture Industries.

(5) Internet Governance. A fourth way?

Richard Collins

This project seeks to establish an empirical basis for assessing how far network, or self-regulatory, governance co-exists with governance through markets which, in neo-classical theory, tends towards self-regulating homeostatic equilibria and hierarchies. Empirical work has been centred on the UN World Summit for the Information Society and its pendant Working Group on Internet Governance and on furthering understanding of Internet governance in the UK.

(6) Defining PSB and Broadcasting Governance

Richard Collins

This project examines the circumstances, nature of and possible consequences of changes in BBC governance. The Hutton Report, competition policy concerns and a more general reassessment of public sector governance has thrown into question the BBC’s governance, transparency and accountability. A collaborative comparative project with Vis compares Dutch and UK broadcasting systems has also been generously supported by CRESC. A workshop presentation on this research in April 2004 will be developed into a jointly authored journal article to be submitted in late 2008-early 2009. These matters have been explored through case studies and interviews with key informants.

(7) Digital/Television: The Institutional, Aesthetic and Social Implications of a Medium in Transition

Helen Wood

CRESC sabbatical has also supported empirical work on the uses of digital television. This project has tested an innovative methodology for capturing media ‘user flows’ in the home with the aim of exploring the dynamics of textual navigation in relationship to everyday life. This fed into a single authored book entitled Talking with Television, and the preparation of a book proposal on ‘Digital/Television’ to be submitted to Polity early spring 2008. Wood also completed the empirical stages of an audience research project. A further audience research project involved in depth interviews with 40 women from south London about their reception of reality television and its relationship with
moral economies and class practices. This is part of an affiliated CRESC project funded by the ESRC, Making Class and Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios with Skeggs at Goldsmiths University. This research has also contributed to a co-authored book. Both projects have resulted in a series of journal articles and other publications.

(8) Jazz Musicians, Cultural Policy and Creativity

Jason Toynbee

Toynbee has used his CRESC supported research to undertake the ground work for a project on black British jazz musicians, cultural policy and creativity. This led to a bid in the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ programme. The outline bid was short-listed (25 short-listed out of 132). The full bid has been submitted and 9 out of 25 projects will be selected.

(9) Always On Broadband

Hugh Mackay

A CRESC sabbatical supported this project on broadband in the home. A literature search was completed with CRESC support from Vis. A literature review was then undertaken and in depth ethnographic fieldwork in 6 households was conducted. This was supplemented by interviews with key actors in relevant organisations. Data analysis challenges the notion that the arrival of ‘always-on’ Internet is potentially a moment of epochal change for the uses of mass media. Rather what is surprising in the speedy stabilisation of Internet genres and forms and their evident embedding in preexisting media and communications. This research has resulted in a feature in the CRESC newsletter, several conference presentations, and book contract and the manuscript will be submitted at the beginning of 2009.

(10) Media and Social Theory

Dave Hesmondhalgh, Jason Toynbee

Sustained examination of how social theory can inform media studies was a project that was long overdue. Media and Social Theory (eds. Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee) does just that. This timely volume is based on a selection of papers from CRESC’s very successful annual conference held in 2006. An introductory agenda-setting chapter establishes a new agenda for the sociology of culture and media.

(11) The Media and ‘The War on Terror’

Andrew Hill (Research Fellow in Visual Culture)

The role played by the media in covering ‘the War on Terror’ has been the subject of extensive commentary and analysis. Much of this has focused upon the question of  the relationship between ‘what actually took place’ and media coverage of events, along with questions of media bias - or, to put it another way, ‘how the media gets things wrong’. In my research - and the forthcoming book Re-imagining the War on Terror (Palgrave, 2009) - I have sought to extend the analysis of the role played by the media in this conflict by looking at a series of other issues, including questions of visual desire, the coverage of spectacular events (including the September 11 attacks and the ‘Shock and Awe’ assault on Iraq), and debates around how seeing functions as a source of knowledge.

Underpinning this research stands the broader question of whether in the case of the War on Terror we have witnessed a substantive increase in the significance accorded to imagery - in regard to both how the conflict has been fought and how it has been understood by publics around the globe. This question is tied up with a further issue, that of how the emergence of an environment in which the recording and dissemination of imagery has been made possible in ways which were previously inaccessible - through above all developments in digital technology and the internet - has come to reshape the terms in which we see the world and think about it.   

(12) From Empire Radio Service to Arabic TV Service: The Political Functions of the BBC

Andrew Hill (Research Fellow in Visual Culture)

My work on the BBC’s Empire Service (the original World Service radio station) and the launch of the BBC’s Arabic television channel addresses overlapping themes. The two services date from quite different historical moments. The Empire Service operated from 1932-38, and the Arabic channel was launched in 2008. In both instances, I am interested in exploring the reasons behind the establishment of these services and their political functions. The Empire Service was launched with the specific intention of helping to hold the British Empire together - at a moment of growing anxiety about the break-up of the Empire. Similarly, the launch of the Arabic channel presents a response to the fear that the BBC has been overshadowed by other broadcasters in a region regarded as being of huge geopolitical significance at the opening of the twenty first century.

The Empire Service and BBC Arabic television have each employed different approaches to pursuing their aims. At one level this is relatively obvious - the Empire Service was a radio only service and the Arabic television channel is linked to radio and internet platforms. Other differences are less obvious. The Empire Service above all assumed the role of seeking to tell its audience about the state of the empire and the world. In contrast, the Arabic channel has sought to emphasise the participatory nature of its output - the way in which in provides a forum for audience discussion and debate. A key issue this research addresses is why this type of change has taken place, and what this tells us about changing media audiences.        

(13) Media Representations of Political Conflict and Natural Disaster

Farida Vis

I have been developing my PhD research on representations of the Israel/Palestine conflict in UK and US print media. The research examines the ways in which Israeli and Palestinian victims and perpetrators are represented following acts of political violence. I found that Israeli perpetrators are attributed multi-dimensional personalities and feature heavily in the coverage. In contrast, their Palestinian victims are largely absent. The reverse is true for Palestinian perpetrators and their Israeli victims. The US press strongly favour Israeli perspectives while the UK press incorporated a wider range of views. A combined methodology of content and frame analysis was developed in order to analyse both text and image. The research also considered how representations of the conflict need to be contextualised within a wider socio-cultural and historical discursive framing. A subsequent project focuses how mainstream media represented different groups of victims in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The project examines the spontaneous online political engagement of ordinary citizens and their responses to mainstream coverage. It argues that online news media necessitate a re-thinking of the concepts of the audience, public sphere and ideas of deliberative democracy.

(14) Diasporas, Media and Identities

Marie Gillespie

This project has four interconnected strands: a) reconfigurations of news audiences and changing cultures of news production b) the implications of diasporic and transnational audiences-publics for the politics of insecurity, democratic participation and social inclusion and c) international broadcasting public diplomacy and cultural exchange d) South Asian diasporic media, culture and politics.

CRESC support and a sabbatical enabled the preparation of three special journal issues, each of which are outputs related to specific affiliated CRESC project: ‘Transnational Television Audiences After 9/11/2001’; ‘Shifting Securities: news cultures before and Beyond the Iraq War 2003’ and ‘The BBC World Service 1932-2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad’. A CRESC sabbatical in 2006 allowed for the preparation of an AHRC bid Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service. CRESC support also permitted Vis to carry out a literature search as part of the preparation for the bid. Gillespie (Principal Investigator) and her CRESC collaborators were awarded £496,476.00. CRESC has offered generous support to Toynbee and Vis (Migrating Music) and Woodward (Sports Across Diasporas), each for one day per week for the duration of the project) to participate in the Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at the BBC World Service.

CRESC facilitated a further bid in 2008 to the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ research programme (with Gillespie as co-applicant). The outline bid ‘Consuming Bollywood: Performance Aesthetics among Postcolonial Diasporas’ was short-listed (25 short-listed out of 132). The full bid has been submitted and 9 out of 25 projects will be selected.

(15) Copyright, Culture and Media Production

Jason Toynbee

The troubled relationship between copyright and culture is explored in a study that focuses  on the way property rights in symbolic goods establish a regime of 'enforced originality' and prevent media making in which the central principles are iteration, association or commentary rather than Romantic expression from within the artist. A key outcome will be a book for Polity entitled Copyright and Culture to be published in early 2011.

(16) Religion, Media and Socio-cultural Change

David Herbert

This project consists of two strands. The first is concerned with what the study of on-line forums which discuss topics related to religion, society and politics can tell us about how diverse audiences understand these topics, accept or challenge the conceptual frames provided by global news corporations, and reveal about processes of social change in the contexts and systems from which comments emerge. This enquiry is closely connected to the Religious Transnationalism strand of Tuning In project, which is researching on-line forums connected to the BBC World Service, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya. 

The second is dedicated to developing an international forum for the interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between religion, media and socio-cultural change. This met for the first time in London in January 2007, and brought together scholars from Europe, America and South Asia. Selected papers from the conference are under consideration for publication in a 2010 issue of The European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Contact: David Herbert (d.e.j.herbert@open.ac.uk

(17) Creativity, Communication and Performance

Ruth Finnegan

My research focuses on the anthropology / sociology of artistic activity, communication and performance (especially ‘oral’ literature and music), as studied both ethnographically and in cross-cultural perspective, interacting with on-going debates about orality, literacy and multimodality in human communication. My focus is especially on the amateur, ‘hidden’ and ‘ordinary’ dimensions of such activities (including knowledge production).

At present I’m in the early stages of a small study of local radio overseas (in Fiji and/or an African country) linking with colleagues’ work on ‘migrating musics’ and the BBC World Service, also working on a longer-term interdisciplinary book on ‘quoting’, arising in part from a commissioned Mass Observation directive on ‘Quoting and quotation’ (autumn 2006).


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