media. On the other hand, mediation is also a spectrum because as we see in chapters 5 and 6, the ‘mediated’ versions of these conversations (for example as they take place on internet discussion forums) may share a good deal of the substance of their face-to-face counterparts. Where they differ is that mediated discourse extends the availability of these discussions in time and space, and offers a wider range of interlocutors (and perhaps of viewpoints) than are typically available in everyday life. Studying them alongside each other thus allows us to draw certain conclusions about how much difference mediation makes.
The approach to mediation in the chapters that follow draws on two traditions. The first is the expanded sense of media as including materials, technologies and systems. In this view, communicative forms such as novels, paintings and graffiti might be considered as mediators, because they play a role in shaping how we think about things (they ‘get in between’ us and some more direct view of a topic or event). But they are also mediated in the sense that their communication occurs via materials that place certain limits on them. In fact, all kinds of phenomena can perform a ‘mediating’ function: trains, radio signals and cloud storage can link people together, and have the potential to enable (but also place limits on) actions that are communicative (Innis 1950; Peters 2015). German sociologists Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann both include ‘money’ and ‘power’ in their definitions of communications media, and Luhmann even includes ‘scientific knowledge, art, love, [and] morals’ (Fuchs 2011: 90). These are beyond my scope here, but I do take this view of media as materials and systems seriously, particularly in chapter 2, where I look at the symbolic dimensions of money and payments media, and in chapter 3, where I explore the significance of ‘delinguistified’ and ambient forms of promotion.
The second tradition I draw upon is work in European media studies about ‘mediation’ or ‘mediatization’. This work explores the way that mediated communication creates ‘new forms of action and interaction in the social world, new kinds of social relationship and new ways of relating to others and to oneself’ (Thompson 1995: 4), and, as an unavoidable part of this, new ways of exercising power. This approach is developed by scholars who argue that the traditional focus of media and communications research – ‘mass’ communication, separated into the study of production, texts and reception – risks ignoring the significance of a more overarching set of historical developments in which media and processes of mediation have entered into many more aspects of daily life (see, e.g., Livingstone 2009; Couldry and Hepp 2013). In a post-internet age – but discernible before then – it has become much harder to speak about the media, as though that referred to a fixed set of forms and genres. Instead, we must begin by acknowledging the mediation, or potential mediation, of many elements of our experience, from taking out a loan or buying a book to going on holiday or seeking advice. From here, we can ask what difference this makes to social interaction and organization, to the distribution of resources, and so on. As various authors have noted, the concept of mediatization is therefore less a grand theoretical framework than a historical claim, a ‘sensitizing concept’ (Couldry and Hepp 2013) alerting us to what we must now consider when we explore the relationship between media and the social. The concepts of mediation and mediatization are valuable to the study of economic communication because they take seriously the fact that mediation, and mediated messages, can now be found in all kinds of places beyond what we think of as ‘the’ media, without determining in advance which are likely to be most consequential.
What does all this mean for the study of economic communication and the construction of economic life? I take economic communication to refer to a large, but still circumscribed, set of actions, interactions, encounters and forms of expression, which may be mediated or unmediated (or involve a complex interplay between the two), and which have to do, very broadly, with ways of understanding and providing for our material wants and needs. As I have suggested, a major theme of the rest of the book concerns the role played by both communication, broadly understood, as well as specific media technologies in defining the content, scope and limits of ‘the economic’, both as an object out there in the world (as, for example, in the case of the construction of the economy on television news) and as a lived set of experiences of provisioning.
Value plurality in economic life
A final concept underpinning the rest of the book is that of value plurality. If we take seriously the expanded view of economic communication outlined above – that is, if we are willing to include novels, films, social media accounts or online forum discussions as instances of economic communication – then we will likely find that economic life is marked by a much wider range of ideas, values and beliefs than if we focused solely on the way that ‘the economy’, understood in conventional terms as the macro economy and particular industrial sectors, is represented on television and in the press. We may live in societies dominated by capitalist logics and forms of accumulation, or that depend on consumer spending for growth, but to believe in value plurality is to believe that our material circumstances do not necessarily exhaust our ways of thinking about the world. In much of what follows, therefore, I keep ‘value plurality’ as an open question: to what extent do particular modes of economic communication (e.g., promoting, informing, narrating), media (e.g., books, films) or genres (e.g., news, advice, self-help) imply or invoke particular sets of values, or particular ways of framing and constructing economic life?
In foregrounding this question, I am drawing on a tradition of thought, spread across various social science disciplines, that sees economic life as governed by multiple logics, rather than a single capitalist logic. Within this tradition, we might start by considering Nick Couldry’s (2006) work on the ‘myth of the mediated centre’, mentioned above. In challenging the idea that media are our privileged points of access to social reality or shared social values, Couldry notes that while there may be a bureaucratic or organizational centre to social life, there may not necessarily be any ‘centre’ of social values at all. Rhetorical claims about ‘the nation’, or ‘society’, are often rhetorical only, and the coherence or otherwise of social values is something to investigate empirically, rather than to assume. Indeed, if we look closely, he suggests, we might see ‘disorder or a lesser degree of order: disputes over value, contests over legitimacy, [and] alternative explanations of social change’ (2006: 16). In making this argument, Couldry is drawing in part on earlier challenges to the idea of a ‘dominant ideology’ (e.g., Abercrombie et al. 1981). In this critique, the claim that an ideological ‘glue’ or superstructure is necessary to hold capitalist societies together in the face of their internal contradictions is wrong, simply because it overlooks the sheer range of other things that might make societies cohere. People may not accept the versions of social reality offered by a dominant class, or found in mainstream media output, but are often too busy with work and making ends meet to ‘resist’ in any way that critics would recognize. In any case, ideological control, or even consent, may not be necessary for the status quo to survive; it may indeed be the diversity of views and plurality of belief systems that keeps the organizational centre relatively stable.
The idea that economic life may be governed by multiple logics can also be traced in Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) notion of competing orders of worth. In their work they find ‘critical tensions … at the heart of what constitutes the economy’ (2006: 9), based on conflicting ‘orders of generality’ – that is, different systems for evaluating what matters, and different principles of order. Thus, forms of economic action based on personal ties and attachments are not simply archaic in the context of modern organizations, but rather indicate a distinct way of evaluating and bringing order to a situation, tied to a substantive philosophy (in this case one of loyalty). Thus, one cannot say that a particular way of organizing economic action is ‘inappropriate’, because the six ‘orders of worth’ that Boltanski and Thévenot initially outlined all represent possible moral principles for guiding action. A given actor in a given
