Graham MurdockLoughborough University | Lough · Department of Social Sciences
Graham Murdock
BSc Sociology First Class Honours London School of Economics
About
127
Publications
58,606
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,601
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (127)
This book presents the collectively authored Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto and accompanying materials.The Internet and the media landscape are broken. The dominant commercial Internet platforms endanger democracy. They have created a communications landscape overwhelmed by surveillance, advertising, fake news, hate spee...
In this interview, Graham Murdock reflects on the most recent transformations in capitalism and the contribution of the Political Economy of Communication to understand and transform them.
The article is an invited contribution to the special issue to mark the anniversary of the publication of Jim McGuigan’s ‘Cultural Populism’. Drawing on work on authoritarian populism produced by the scholars grouped around the Frankfurt Institute of Research during their war-time exile in the Unites States, this article explores the right-wing pop...
The idea of a shared culture can be understood in two very different, opposed, ways. It can, and often does, refer to the values, identities, and ways of life that those in a position to impose their views promote as the defining attributes of a society or group. This directive, top‐down, impetus, constructs a “common culture” marked by essentialis...
There is now incontrovertible evidence that the accelerating rise in the earth's temperatures and its associated environmental impacts, which begins with the emergence of an industrial capitalist order reliant on fossil fuels, has initiated a new phase of human and geological history. This phrase we call the Capitalocene, rather than the more commo...
A eleição de Donald Trump como presidente dos Estados Unidos e a bem-sucedida campanha do referendo para saída da União Europeia no Reino Unido provocaram um interesse renovado nos desafios impostos à democracia deliberativa pelo populismo de direita. Este artigo retorna à pesquisa sobre o autoritarismo desenvolvida pela Escola de Frankfurt, na Ale...
This reply piece is a response to the article by Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos, “Re-imagining the Left through an ecology of the commons: Toward a post-capitalist commons transition”. In it, Graham Murdock argues that while developing a commons for contemporary conditions is a core requirement for a post-capitalist social order, it is not in itself...
This chapter argues that despite a communications environment increasingly organized around digital networks, there is a compelling case for extending the BBC's public service remit. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, successive cuts to public expenditure have seen a major contraction in the public information and cultural facilities previo...
A guide to the nature, purpose, and place of public service television within a multi-platform, multichannel ecology. Television is on the verge of both decline and rebirth. Vast technological change has brought about financial uncertainty as well as new creative possibilities for producers, distributors, and viewers. This book examines not only th...
The infrastructures and assemblies of machines that constitute the digital communications environment are constructed from a range of resources, which are transformed into artefacts through chains of production, maintenance, and disposal. These background conditions of everyday use, however, remain a blind spot for much mainstream communications in...
Donald Trump’s election as American President and the successful referendum campaign to exit the EU in Britain have prompted renewed interest in the challenges posed to deliberative democracy by right-wing populism. This paper returns to the research on authoritarianism developed by the Frankfurt School in Germany and the United States, and particu...
Up until recently media analysis has paid little attention to their material bases in assemblies of machines and infrastructures and global chains of labour. This is now changing. The multiplication of always/on, always/there, tablets and smart phones has coincided with accelerating climate change and greater awareness of the globalisation of econo...
Despite being written almost 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains the best known cautionary tale of the risks and damage that may follow from human intervention in fundamental natural processes.
A series of publications and events in March 2017, when this volume was being prepared for production, provided comprehensive new evidence that the climate crisis was accelerating, underlined the growing strength of the struggles around it, and gave formal status to an alternative framework for thinking about a viable future built around a reassert...
This entry traces the evolution of McLuhan's approach to media effects, from his early work on advertising and the engineering of consumption through successive stages in the development of his later argument that “the medium is the message” and that the most important and far-reaching impacts of media are attributable to way their core technologie...
Recent years have seen the idea of mediatisation promoted as a unifying concept capable of overcoming the increasing specialisation and fragmentation of communication research and addressing the increasing ubiquity and centrality of media across all areas of institutional and intimate life. Advocates present it as media centred but not media centri...
This entry traces the evolution of the encoding/decoding model of audience activity from its origins in early information science through its application to cultural analysis in the work of the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco to its elaboration in the influential schema proposed by Stuart Hall and developed in research on TV audiences conducted at...
This volume examines the role of communication in contributing to and contesting the current climate crisis. There is now widespread agreement that even if increases in carbon emissions are kept to the current international target the climate crisis will continue to intensify. This book brings together, for the first time, state-of-the-art research...
This is a response to an article by Paul Dwyer in this Journal which makes several claims about the nature and impact of the political economy approach to the analysis of media and communications. We argue that Dwyer’s article misunderstands or is unaware of the history of this approach, and quite fundamentally misconstrues its central tenets. Our...
Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews with educated women working in the contemporary Chinese publishing industry, this article details the deterioration in their living and working conditions produced by the combination of conglomeration within the industry and the erosion of the state-supported welfare system. It pays particular attention to...
Taking Marx’s analysis as the point of departure, and drawing on a range of concrete examples, this article argues that rather than concentrating on the “new” forms of social and economic intercourse animated by digital media, and especially internet-enabled mobile devices, critical analysis needs to trace the ways in which digital consumption is i...
This tripleC-contribution is a podcast of a talk Graham Murdock gave in the Communication and Media Research Institute's (CAMRI) Research Seminar Series at the University of Westminster on October 15, 2015.
Abstract
Recent developments in the organisation of capitalism have given renewed urgency to critical political economy’s core concern with th...
Political economy is an intellectual project, and effort to develop a model of social order and change. Political economy set out to understand how capitalism worked and assess its consequences for the organization of social and political life. The central question that a political economy approach asks is how public communications' embedded in a c...
The European Community is currently facing the worst crisis in its history. Pessimistic observers see it as possibly terminal. For Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former student activist and now a member of the European Parliament, the European Community is now ‘so weak that its mere survival is at stake’ (Cohn-Bendit, 2013, p. 3). What is at risk is not the ‘...
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...
Resumo
This article puts forward the fundamental lines of thought on the Political Economy of Communications and the Media, since the development of capitalism up to the present day. Clarifying the distinction between Economy and Political Economy, this work examines the central split between two traditions within Political Economy: the Classic ap...
Economics, as it emerged as an academic discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, claimed to offer a scientific basis for the study of economic affairs. Its dominant form presented capitalism as a network of markets, regulated by rational self-interest, whose organization and outcomes could be modeled mathematically. Empirical inquiry was fe...
Over the last decade, political economy has grown rapidly as a specialist area of research and teaching within communications and media studies and is now established as a core element in university programmes around the world. The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications offers students and scholars a comprehensive, authoritative, up-to-dat...
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 implicatio...
Over the last two decades both the landscape of risk and the organization of public communication have been substantially transformed by the intersection of two processes: the digitalization of media systems and the acceleration of marketization. Taken together, these shifts raise a series of conceptual and research issues for work in risk communic...
During many years, media and communication studies shared a common conception with other knowledge fields: the conception of social class. Little by little, this conception was replaced by others that looked for standing out not the invariances, but the singularities between social groups in conflict. The strict vertical outlines of the social clas...
Quando a União Soviética entrou em colapsou, proponentes da nova ordem neoliberal rapidamente lançaram as idéias de Marx na lixeira da história. Este julgamento se provou de todo precipitado, e os anos recentes testemunharam uma grande revalidação de suas análises e sua aplicabilidade para as condições contemporâneas. Este trabalho identifica três...
Theorists have long argued that the world is becoming more secular as modernitys celebration of scientific and technological progress displaces religious systems from the centre of institutional and imaginative life. This assumption is increasingly untenable. All the worlds major religions see their support increasing. This continued vitality is du...
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...
Tras la publicación en el vol. 1, n.º 3 del Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory (otoño de 1977) del artículo de Dallas Smythe sobre los agujeros negros del marxismo occidental, Gram. Mudock elabora en este texto una respuesta a estas ideas. Si bien compartiendo su perspectiva de que hay que devolver a la economía al centro del análisis...
The last decade has seen a sustained debate about the limits and biases of traditional fieldwork practice. The same period has also seen the launch and adoption of a range of new digital information and communications technologies (ICTs), including CD-ROMs, the internet, digital photography and film, and multi-function mobile phones. Investigating...
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 su...
This chapter responds to the challenge from the proponents of the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) a decade ago, that future research should focus on the interaction between risks (as conventionally calibrated) and “the psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes” which generate interpretations that may “heighten or at...
Crime and Social Change in Middle England: Questions of Order in an English Town, Evi Girling, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks, London: Routledge, 2000, £16.99 pbk, xiv+211 pp. (ISBN: 0-415-18336-7) - - Volume 35 Issue 1 - GRAHAM MURDOCK
Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz, (eds.) The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997, $39.95 (paperback $15.95) x+244 pp. (ISBN 0-252-02261-0 hbk; 0-252-06561-1 pbk). - - Volume 33 Issue 3 - GRAHAM MURDOCK
This article charts 2 parallel movements in the communications sectors of the United Kingdom and Europe: the ascendancy of marketization policies within both the European Union and its major member states and accelerating convergence of the computing, telecommunications, and audiovisual industries. The contradictory character of policy at the Europ...
Before breathalysers introduced a degree of chemical calibration to the measurement of inebriation, people arrested on suspicion of being ‘over the limit’ would be taken to the local police station and asked to walk a white line painted on the floor. If they managed not to deviate or stumble, they were free to go. If they veered off in eccentric di...
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 accelera...
Responds to an article in the same issue of this journal. Suggests that the author is unwilling to establish an entry point in the realm of culture because he privileges the moment of production over that of consumption. Suggests disregarding the demarcation lines separating cultural studies from critical political economy, and both from the sociol...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
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 romant...
This paper is concerned with the treatment of crime and criminal justice in the British national news media. It begins by proposing a break with 'media-centric' approaches to the study of relations between news sources and the media which have tended to ignore the conflicts within and between social institutions. It moves on to illustrate the argum...
Der var engang, hvor enhver dansk medieanalyse indledtes med en oblikatorisk indgangsbøn, der lige indplacerede analyseobjektet i den Habermas´ske offentlighedsteori og -model. I de sidste ti år har offent- lighedsteorien så for nogle stadig udgjort en nødvendig, men implicit forståelsesramme for medieanalysen, mens den for andre har været et irrel...
Projects
Project (1)
New collection-co-edited with Benedetta Brevini - out from Palgrave later this year-bringing together researchers and activists to explore the role of communications in climate crisis as both sites of struggle over contending accounts and arrays of infrastructures and machines that consume resources and energy in their construction and use and contribution to waste and pollution in their disposal. Contributors include: Naomi Klein, Jodi Dean, Vincent Mosco, Rick Maxwell
