Ida Willig’s research while affiliated with Roskilde University and other places

Media agencies have become one of the key actors in the contemporary media industry: by channelling marketing budgets to some media and some platforms and not to others, media agencies play an important role in creating the digital media infrastructure and laying the tracks of the public sphere. Yet we know very little about these commercial middlemen between advertisers and audiences, what they do, and how we should understand their role in the digital media ecology. This article discusses the role of media agencies in relation to platformization with a focus on the news media sector. Based on interviews, publicly available material and trade journals, the article depicts an industry deeply engaged in digitizing, tracking and commodifying media audiences, while at the same time aware of ethical challenges of the digital media infrastructure. This leads to a call for more political attention and critical research on the democratic implications of the new value chains between platforms, advertisers, audiences, media agencies and news media as well as the many tech companies providing derived digital services and products.

This article presents a study on special ministerial advisers examining their careers beyond their role in the machinery of government. Applying a theoretical framework derived from the literature on the sociology of work and the transformation of the organization of politics in the Nordic welfare states, we make two theoretical points. First, special advisers are part of an emerging group of partisan policy professionals, and second, the characteristics of this group are best analyzed through the lens of the boundaryless career. By combining these two positions, we contribute to studies on special advisers by offering a longer career perspective, and we contribute to studies on the boundaryless career by analyzing a job market other than the dot-com and cultural industries. Mapping the entire career paths of all Danish special ministerial advisers from 2000 to 2017 ( n = 144), we show that the position of special adviser serves as a stepping-stone to a new labor market that typically culminates with a position in private public relations. This conclusion lends fresh support to concerns about the privatization of politics changing policy formation in the Nordic welfare states.

The growth of PR in Scandinavia is linked both to the mediatisation of politics and to the decline of corporatism. Studies in Sweden and Norway suggest that one consequence of these changes is the increasing number of politicians who find new careers as lobbyists in the private sector. In this study, we have constructed a data set of all members of the Danish Parliament who have left politics from 1981 to 2015 (n = 613) and identified the number and type of job positions they have taken up subsequently (n = 1,094). We find that, especially from the 1990s, we can register revolving door activity. Still, 89 per cent of all the registered job positions fall outside of lobbyism. 11 per cent of the job positions fall within the wider field associated with the emerging field of policy professionals (including lobbyism), while lobbyism on its own accounts for two per cent of the job positions.

In this article introducing the theme of the special issue we argue that studies of new media practices might benefit from especially Pierre Bourdieu’s research on cultural production. We introduce some of the literature, which deals with the use of digital media, and which have taken steps to develop field theory in this context. Secondly, we present the four thematic articles in this issue and the articles outside the theme, which includes two translations of classic texts within communication and media research. This introduction article concludes by encouraging media scholars to embark on more studies within a field theory framework, as the ability of the comprehensive theoretical work and the ideas of a reflexive sociology is able to trigger the good questions, more than it claims to offer a complete and self-sufficient sociology of media and inherent here also new media.

The present article summarizes the findings of a survey among first-year journalism students in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway. The survey covers a wide array of subjects including social recruitment, motivation for studying journalism, preferences regarding future journalistic working life, views on the role of journalism in society, attitudes toward the profession, journalistic ideals and ideas about what are the most important traits for journalists. The study reveals significant differences between journalism students in the Nordic countries. The analysis appears to support a ‘nation type’ interpretation of attitudes among journalists, linked to different national traditions, in explaining the differences found. Our results clearly indicate the importance of traditional sociological explanations of behavior for the understanding of journalistic preferences and ambitions. For example, the choice of preferred topics is strongly gendered and appears as the sexual division of labor sublimated into journalistic preferences.