contrasted with a ‘formal’ economic rationality – of the kind usually modelled by economists – concerned with quantitative calculation of means and ends. As Çalişkan and Callon (2009: 374) note, to adopt a formalist approach to the economy in a field like anthropology (or indeed media studies) is essentially to engage in ‘the continuation of economics by other disciplinary means’, because it replicates economists’ definitions of the terms and purpose of the field of study. A more properly sociological or anthropological approach is one that engages with ultimate values and emphasizes the fact that much of what we call ‘economic action’ is, at some fundamental level, continuous with other kinds of social action. This might mean looking beyond traditional topics (e.g., firms, hiring practices, price setting and market design) to things like student loans, therapy bills, art galleries and branding practices. But the emphasis on the meaningfulness of economic action has also led sociologists after Weber to be much more interested in where the desire for particular ‘utilities’ comes from, or how the various means chosen to meet and satisfy those needs and preferences come to be socially meaningful rather than simply efficient or functional. Perhaps the most well-known example of this approach comes from Viviana Zelizer (e.g., 1994, 2005), whose work has been concerned not only with the way people combine intimate relationships with economic ones, but also with the way that economic transactions can be used to organize and comment on social relationships. But this approach to the social meaningfulness of economic action can also be seen in Daniel Miller’s longstanding insistence (e.g., 1987, 1998, 2001) that the meaning of consumption and provisioning cannot be simply read off from the mode of production within which goods were produced.5
I will draw out the implications of these sociological and anthropological definitions of the economy for media researchers in more detail in the conclusion, where I outline some of the potential sites for a reconfigured approach to communication and economic life. In the rest of the book, I draw most explicitly on these insights in chapter 2, where I offer a preliminary account of the symbolic or communicative dimensions of relatively mundane aspects of economic activity (such as payment) and artefacts (such as monetary tokens and prices). Sociological accounts also influence the choice of examples in later chapters – the focus on, for example, debt discussion boards, small-scale investor clubs, online reviews and ratings or audience discussion shows are all ways of emphasizing forms of provisioning and the way these are communicated or mediated, rather than ‘the economy’ and how it appears in news and current affairs. Finally, I draw on these fields throughout the book in my use of the term ‘economic life’ rather than ‘the economy’ (see, e.g., Spillman 2011; Wherry 2012). To focus on economic life is to deliberately distance oneself from definitions of ‘the economy’ as only the macro economy, and to attempt instead to capture the breadth and diversity of economic activity, beyond capitalism, and even beyond markets (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Instead, it takes as its objects of study those processes of provisioning where both ‘economic’ and non-economic values collide, mingle and influence each other, and in which the meaning-making activities of ordinary people are as important as the calculating activities of more powerful institutional actors.
Communication, media and economic life
The book’s focus on communication and economic life is motivated not only by this expanded conception of ‘the economic’, but also by a particular approach to media and communication. Media and communications research is a broad field, with many different kinds of scholarship, but in Britain it has historically been concerned primarily with media texts, institutions and technologies rather than with the more obvious – and much larger – category of communication and communicative practice. This is no doubt partly due to its coexistence alongside a powerful cultural studies tradition, in which the idea of ‘communication as culture’ (e.g., Carey 1989) has been well developed, and in which there is correspondingly a wider sense of what counts as ‘media’ for communicative practice. However, to the extent that media and communications has an identifiable sub-field of economic communication, it has been overwhelmingly focused on the way that ‘the economy’ (understood in the limited ways outlined above) is represented in media texts or genres such as ‘the news’ and, less commonly, film and television. As such, it has tended to overlook a broader range of ways that economic activities, practices and beliefs are constituted communicatively.
Why does a focus on (usually mass) media texts and institutions, rather than a wider array of communicative practices, matter? One reason is simply that it leaves out a great many empirically interesting and consequential aspects of how economic life is constructed communicatively. These include the way people talk about economic matters to family, friends and partners, the way they use computers or phones to research goods or make financial plans, what they learn about money from reading books and magazines, or from watching plays, the way they present themselves at work, the way they choose a hairdresser or how they decide when to make a meal from scratch rather than buy it from a supermarket or restaurant. It also ignores a good deal of the communicative activity that goes on inside businesses and firms, such as meeting, reviewing, complaining or gossiping. As we have seen above, leaving such practices out of our accounts of economic communication may also mean replicating dominant definitions of ‘the economy’, rather than understanding that these definitions are contested, or the outcome of a process. It also means ignoring the wider sociological and anthropological traditions that explore the symbolic dimensions of economic life and its subjective meaningfulness for those who participate in it.
Another reason to avoid a sole focus on mass media texts such as news is that it leaves the field open to the charge of media-centrism. As Nick Couldry notes, this is a real problem for media and communications scholars because, by assuming the importance of media, we bypass the question of ‘how central media actually are to the explanation of contemporary change’ (Couldry 2006: 12, emphasis added), and ignore the possibility that ‘sometimes, perhaps more often than … we suspect, media are less consequential in the social world than other forces’. What Couldry has in mind here are broader social and economic forces, including shifts in income, changing patterns of employment or ownership, and so on. But his point remains true even within the field of media and communications. There is a tendency to assume that (mass) mediated communications are the most consequential forms of communication, and then to focus on them. Yet the fact of being ‘media’ or ‘mediated’ may often be less important than the fact of taking narrative form, or of being a work of science fiction. Of course, the communicative aspects of economic life may ultimately be less important than its other parts too – the extent to which communication constitutes economic life is clearly an empirical question – but ‘communication’ offers a much broader starting point than ‘media’ (particularly when ‘media’ is really code for mass media texts), and, for scholars interested in these questions, it makes sense to start with them before assessing the extent to which mediation matters.
In practice, focusing on ‘economic communication’ or ‘communication in economic life’ means drawing multiple traditions of work into the same orbit. Work on the way that, for example, financial crises or industrial disputes are represented in ‘the media’ (whether that is news and current affairs, or Hollywood films) must sit alongside work considering how ordinary people discuss debt and savings on internet discussion boards, or how they use savings apps on their phones, but also how their views of capitalism might be formed through reading particular kinds of novels or playing particular kinds of computer games. These are all forms of economic communication, and one is not more ‘authentically’ economic because it deals with inflation or central bank lending. Within such a framing, mediation would be posed as both a question and a spectrum. It has to be a question, rather than something we assume, because not all forms of economic communication are mediated, and certainly not through ‘mass’ media. As we shall see in chapter 6, the ordinary face-to-face discussions people have about the economy are vital for understanding how people make their own process of provisioning subjectively meaningful, and one of the advantages of attending to them is that they often
