Part One

Introduction to Part One

Culture, Institutions and Cultural Policy Studies

Cultural interests and attributes… can only be described and assessed

relative to delimited norms and forms of calculation; that is, those made

available by the actual array of historical institutions in which such

interests and attributes are specified and formed. Clearly such an argument

entails setting limits to the concept of culture and cultural development.

(Hunter 1988b: 106)

Ian Hunter’s call for cultural studies to be less concerned with abstract

dialectical struggles and to orient itself more towards the history and politics of

cultural institutions, and the everyday practices of those who administer them,

provides an important starting-point for understanding the emergence of cultural

policy studies in Australia. At the core of the cultural policy studies debate, which

was a dominant one in Australian cultural studies in the first half of the 1990s,

were two issues. The first was a call for cultural studies to be less concerned with

textual and interpretative criticism, and to be more concerned with the distinctive

institutional arrangements through which cultural practices are administered.

Second, there was a view that, by linking cultural studies to social-democratic

politics and citizenship discourses, there existed a greater possibility of enabling

intellectual work to contribute to more effective forms of political practice. In

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particular, it was envisaged that such a ‘reformist’ cultural studies practice could

inform the practices of relevant decision-making agents in particular institutional

and policy fields. In explicit contrast to the neo-Marxist lineage of cultural

studies, this would involve an ongoing engagement on the part of critical and

cultural intellectuals with regulatory and policy agencies, or what Tony Bennett

described as ‘talking to the ISAs’ (Bennett 1992c: 32). 1

In light of cultural studies’ historical associations with the radical and anti-

statist politics of the New Left (Hall 1992), it is not surprising that such

arguments were believed by critics to involve an evacuation of cultural studies’

critical vocation in the name of political pragmatism. At the same time, however,

theorists such as McRobbie (1996), McGuigan (1996), Lewis (1997) and

Ouellette and Lewis (2000) have considered the possible political gains for

cultural studies in developing a more policy-oriented approach to media and

cultural analysis. Moreover, there has been a growing body o work, particularly in

Britain, that has sought to apply a ‘cultural industries’ or ‘creative industries’

model for understanding creative practice in capitalist economies (Mulgan and

Worpole, 1986; Garnham 1987; Lewis 1990; Pratt 1998; Leadbetter 1999; Landry

2000).

Cultural policy studies as it developed in Australia the 1990s was strongly

oriented toward what may be termed the ‘modern’ institutions of government, or

those which emerged at the historical interface between state formation and the
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development of political and cultural technologies of national citizenship, such as

museums and educational institutions. Importantly, these have been areas of

cultural activity that, until quite recently, have either been exclusively the

preserve of the state or subject to strong regulatory tutelage by state agencies. As

a result, the gap between the institutions and their related policy frameworks is

typically not that great; policy is formulated by the relevant agencies, and

implemented by the cultural institutions that they are responsible for. This has led

some critics, such as Miller (1994, 1996) and Craik (1995), to argue that

Australian cultural policy studies worked with a theoretically underdeveloped

understanding of policy, leading to an unduly benign image of government, and

an uncritical acceptance of the ‘bureaucratic imaginary’.

Consideration of broadcast media policy changes the focus of cultural

policy considerably. In countries like Australia, with a predominantly privately-

owned media sector, strategies to link the use of media technologies to principles

of cultural citizenship has always occurred in the face of considerable resistance

from powerful corporate interests to such governmental practices. While a

‘citizenship’ discourse can be traced in media reform campaigns in Australia, it

has existed in competition with prevailing notions of the media audience as

consumers, and the importance of private media institutions being protected from

undue government interference in their everyday operations. Policy is therefore

unable to function as a ‘master discourse’ to institutional practice. Instead, policy-

makers have to aim to guide the conduct of commercial broadcasters towards

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preferred governmental ends. They do so in a political environment where that

commercial broadcasters are not simply the subjects of government policy, but are

also politically powerful entities able to exert considerable influence over

governments to influence policy outcomes towards their preferred ends.

Broadcast media is also seen as having the potential to corrode national

citizenship, as its capacity to be simultaneously distributed across space has been

associated with an uncoupling of the ‘fit’ between polity and culture within a

national space. Chris Barker (1997) has observed that, as a ‘globalised’ cultural

technology, television presented a profound challenge to the integrative structures

associated with the development of national cultures through the institutions and

practices of nation-states. The dominance of the United States in global

audiovisual trade is seen as presenting further dangers to national citizenship,

particularly the threat that media globalisation will promote U.S. cultural

hegemony, cultural imperialism, and undermine distinctive local and national

cultures. Debates about broadcast media policy in Australia have thus always been

concerned with the question of what Philip Schlesinger (1991a: 162) terms

‘communicative boundary maintenance’, in a culture that is highly open to

cultural imports from other English-speaking countries such as the United States

and Britain. Media globalisation is also increasingly having an impact upon

national policy, not only in terms of investment and product, but through the ways

in which international trade agreements, such as the General Agreement on Trade

in Services (GATS), are promoting an ‘internationalisation of media governance’.

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Institutions and Discourse

Any institution implies the existence of statements such as a constitution, a

charter, contracts, registrations and enrolments. Conversely, statements

refer back to an institutional milieu which is necessary for the formation

both of the objects which arise in such examples of the statement and of

the subject who speaks from this position (Deleuze 1988: 9).

One of the central tenets of cultural studies has been that ‘reality’ or ‘the

social’ is culturally constructed and, as a result, social meaning is invariably open

to political and cultural contestation. John Hartley has described a central task of

cultural studies as having been to ‘convince activists and adversaries alike that

discourses organise practices, that the real is constructed (partly through media),

and that, therefore, reality is materially affected by media discourses’ (Hartley

1991: 11). Independently of cultural studies, the work of Michel Foucault was

developing a materialist theory of discourse, through establishing the rules of

formation of a discourse and the conditions of existence of discursive formations.

McHoul and Grace argue that the key implication of this work was that:

If discourses don’t merely represent ‘the real’, and if in fact they are part

of its production, then which discourse is ‘best’ can’t be decided by

comparing it with any real object. The ‘real’ object simply isn’t available
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for comparison outside its discursive construction. (McHoul and Grace

1993: 35)

Recognition of the materiality of discourse presents a theoretical challenge

of establishing the relationship between discourse and that which constitutes non-

discursive relations, such as institutional, social and technical relations (Foucault

1991). One approach, that has been characteristic of political economists such as

Golding and Murdock (1991), Mosco (1995) and Garnham (1997), argues that the

nature of texts and discourses is largely determined by the material realities of

media and cultural production and distribution under capitalism. By contrast,

Stuart Hall has argued that while ‘material conditions are the necessary but not

sufficient condition of all historical practice … we need to think material

conditions in their determinate discursive form, not as a fixed absolute’ (Hall

1996: 147). Bennett has observed a contradiction in Hall’s argument, in that it

‘puts discourse on both sides of the equation’, meaning that since ‘“material

conditions” … are discursive in form, [they] cannot fulfil the role assigned to

them of setting limits to discourse. (Bennett 1992a: 256). Recognising a similar

contradiction in neo-Marxist cultural theory, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

proposed a ‘post-Marxist’ alternative, that rejected the distinction between

discursive and non-discursive practices, instead insisting upon ‘the material

character of every discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107).

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All three of these theoretical positions have their origins in Marxist social

theory. As a result, whatever their differences, they share a similar tendency to

conceive of institutions as elements within broader structures. A reluctance to

differentiate the institutional forms of culture has been a recurrent legacy of

structuralist Marxism, where state and para-state institutions were assessed on the

extent to which they promoted ideological hegemony or were instruments of state

repression as part of the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The approach

to institutions in Marxist social theory has been premised upon the assumption

that the practices of institutions can in some sense be ‘read off’ a broader analysis

of structural and social relations. As a result, the need to study institutions as

distinctive analytical entities is subsumed within the task of interpreting

capitalism as a social totality.

If such a perspective is found to be an untenable basis from which to

understand both economic agents and the national systems in which they operate,

as is argued in Chapter One of this thesis, then institutions emerge as an object of

critical analysis in new and interesting ways. It becomes essential, for example, to

analyse national legal and policy forms as significant in their own right, rather

than as ‘reflecting’ other ‘global’ structural determinants, since they constitute

aspects of the conditions of existence of institutions and therefore influence their

decision-making practices. Another implication is that corporations should be

conceived of, not as unified entities with a singular goal, but rather as institutional

sites where a diverse range of calculations and practices are undertaken, and
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whose boundaries are not fixed, but rather intersect with the calculations and

practices of other forms of social agency, including regulatory agencies, trade

unions and community organisations (Thompson 1982). In the ‘mixed economy’

of Australian broadcast television, this points to the need to consider how the

conduct of private media corporations that control broadcast stations and

networks is shaped by the legal, regulatory and policy environment within which

they operate, rather than assuming that their overall conduct is structurally ‘given’

by the private nature of their ownership in a predominantly capitalist economy.

Citizenship Discourse and the ‘Deep Structure’ of Australian

Broadcasting

The concept of citizenship does not by any means imply a politics of the

status quo - a sophomoric version of civics. (Cunningham, 1992: 11)

If the problematic of underlying structures is rejected, then it becomes

possible to think of discourses and institutions co-existing at a similar ‘mid-range’

epistemological level. It becomes very fruitful to think of discourses and

institutions as not only co-existing but interlocking, in a manner akin to two ropes

in a ship’s knot. Both discourse analysis and institutional analysis face the

challenge of how to explain stability over time and structural change, as well as

how to deal with differences and continuities between nation-states and over

historical time. Michel Foucault’s approach to the study of discourse sought to

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establish ‘the positivity of discourses, their conditions of existence, the systems

which regulate their emergence, functioning and transformation’ (Foucault 1991b:

69). In an analogous manner, Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration traces

the ways in which institutions and institutional configurations become embedded

over time in particular places, and are in turn constitutive of social and political

fields, forms of identity and allegiance, and modes of discourse and ways of

thinking about issues. Foucault’s approach to discourse and power, and Giddens’

approach to institutions, together provide a means by which the intersection of

discourses and institutions can be understood as enabling a ‘deep structure’, that

is durable over time, to emerge within identifiable fields of social regulation and

cultural practice.

It will be argued in Chapter One of this thesis that such a ‘deep structure’

has existed in the field of commercial broadcasting as it has developed in the 20 th

century, although its institutional forms and political permutations vary

significantly across national broadcasting systems. The idea that broadcasting

involves an essentially commercial relation between broadcasters and their

audiences, subject to the neutral oversight of a regulatory authority, has always

been qualified in practice by the expectations that the users of such powerful

technologies of public communication are subject to obligations to serve the

‘public interest’. As a consequence, commercial broadcasting licensees are seen as

having ‘public trust’ obligations to the community, in order to justify having such

exclusive access to the airwaves as a system of mass media distribution. In

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Australia, the relationship between such concerns and the resultant institutional

and policy settlement came to solidify around three key elements:

1. The strong capacity of the commercial broadcasters to influence the

policy and regulatory environment;

2. A perceived trade-off between requirements on the broadcasters to

meet policy objectives such as adequate levels of local program

content in exchange for exclusive access to the airwaves, and the

ability to earn monopoly profits through restrictions on competition;

3. A counter-discourse that has demanded greater public participation and

stronger regulatory influence over commercial broadcasters, as a

condition for their access to such profitable and influential means of

mass communication.

Broadcast media policy, as with all forms of public policy, has both a

normative and a technical dimension. In this thesis, the normative dimension of

broadcast media policy is understood through its intersection with citizenship

discourse. Citizenship discourse has become increasingly important in media

studies in recent years, and this thesis will explore how the concept of citizenship

has been used by media activists and policy-makers to manage the ‘policy divide’

between broadcast media as a commercial industry and a cultural resource. This

involves developing an understanding of the relationship between media and

citizenship that does not reduce the relationship to either freedom from
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government controls or the necessity of non-commercial broadcasting, but allows

for a detailed understanding of how legislative and regulatory mechanisms have

been used in Australia to try and make commercial television broadcasters more

responsive to the discourses and principles of citizenship.

Citizenship is understood in this thesis as operating at two interconnected

levels - the political and the national - with the cultural dimension of citizenship

permeating both. Campaigns to extend the principles of political citizenship into

broadcast media policy have drawn upon two principal elements. The first has

been the way in which the ‘public trust’ attached to private ownership of access

right to the broadcasting spectrum renders broadcast licences a form of both

public and private property, or what Tom Streeter (1996) has termed ‘soft

property’. Given the contingent nature of such private property rights, state

agencies have a potentially strong capacity to determine the legal and institutional

arrangements and conditions attached to such property rights, such as a

requirement on broadcasters to be responsive to ‘public interest’ discourses.

Second, it points to ambiguities within citizenship discourse itself, or, more

precisely, the extent to which the practices and political rationalities of modern

forms of government can be seen as generating a ‘participation gap’, arising from

the distance between actions taken on behalf of citizens by government agencies,

and the actual involvement of citizens in decision-making processes that affect

their lives. This perceived ‘participation gap’ has not only animated campaigns for

opening upon broadcast media policy to greater public scrutiny; it has been a
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central element of political campaigns for ‘democratising democracy’ (Giddens

1998: 72) that first gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, and which continue

to be an important element of radical reformist politics.

Citizenship rights have been historically attached to the ‘imagined

communities’ of nation-states. In Australian broadcasting, the central

manifestation of principles associated with national culture and national

citizenship is the requirement that commercial television broadcasters program a

required quota of Australian content, also including sub-quotas for drama,

children’s programs and, more recently, documentaries. The Australian content

quota has been strongly supported by the production industry, media unions,

academic critics, and public interest and activist groups. Regulatory authorities

have also seen the Australian content quota as a central means by which

commercial television broadcasters fulfil their public interest obligations to the

Australian community. It has thus been a central component of the social contract

between broadcasters, regulators and the public.

Policy Structures and Policy Activism in Australian Broadcast

Media

The alternative is fundamentally concerned with process, with recipes

rather than blueprints, with cooking rather than engineering. In a sense,

everything in the policy world is really just process ... We cannot afford,
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therefore, to view policy as just a study of decisions or programs ... Policy

is the continuing work done by groups of policy actors who use available

public institutions to articulate and express the things they value

(Considine 1994: 3-4).

The ‘turn to policy’ in cultural studies was seen, both by its supporters

and critics, as seeking to bring the perceived ‘hard edge’ of the social sciences,

with their use of quantitative methodologies and more ready access to government

agencies, to media and cultural studies. Yet the above quote from Mark Considine

indicates that, within the field of policy studies, there has been a concern to

modify its self-image as an applied, problem solving area with a strong

orientation towards its government clients. Other theorists in this field, such as

John Forester, have drawn upon critical theory to argue that policy is best

analysed as a ‘mid-level range of institutions that links the lived world of actors to

the broader structures of society’ (Forester 1993: 12).

One issue that is central to these discussions is the relationship between

different debate cultures, and the positions that social actors occupy within them

(O’Regan 1996). The communicative positions that are occupied by bureaucrats,

academics, activists and industry representatives with the policy culture of

Australian broadcasting are in many instances quite ritualised. The alliance

between the production industry, the media unions, academics and policy activists

around supporting Australian content regulations, and the ritualised forms of

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opposition displayed by the commercial broadcast networks to this position, is

one example of this that is considered in this thesis. Debate cultures become most

interesting, however, when those speaking from within one communicative

position are required to translate their arguments and key concepts into forms that

make sense to those from another debate culture. This thesis considers two

instances where such ‘translation’ was required. The first, discussed in Chapter

Five, concerned attempts made by Australian media and cultural studies

academics to translate their critical accounts of ‘Australianness’ into discourses

that made sense to those responsible for administering areas of media and cultural

policy where these debates were relevant, such as Australian content regulations.

The second, discussed in chapter Six, concerned the ways in which the fields of

media and communications policy were rendered interpretable to economic

discourse, as these policy areas were linked to the principles of microeconomic

reform and competition policy.

The approach to understanding policy developed in Chapter Three outlines

the four key elements of a policy system:

• political economy, or the institutional forms and structural relations

through which resources are produced and distributed;

• policy institutions, including both the formal governmental and

regulatory authorities responsible for the administration of laws, but

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also the rules and procedures through which the conduct of

institutional agents is structured within this policy system;

• policy cultures, or the shared sets of values, assumptions, categories,

customs, conventions and discourses that allow competing interests

within a policy system to maintain ongoing and productive relations;

• policy communities, or the relations of alignment, dependency or

antagonism that emerge within a policy system over time, leading

either to a sustained value consensus, or to conflict, contestation and

policy change.

Discourse analysis has proved to be highly productive for policy analysis

in general, and media policy analysis in particular, as it can be observed that

statements enter into an order of discourse which already has its own rules,

hierarchies and conditions of existence. The concept of policy discourse is

particularly important to an understanding of policy cultures and policy

communities. It is through the emergence of a dominant policy discourse that

hierarchies of meaning and significance can be attached to the diverse statements

of competing interests in the policy field, so that statements are regulated in terms

of their capacity to influence policy outcomes.

It is in relation to such dominant policy discourses that the role of

academic and professional expertise becomes highly significant in a political

sense. Drawing upon the new relationships between knowledge and power that
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are associated with the rise of specific intellectuals, or intellectuals working

within given decision-making fields (Foucault 1980), a number of possibilities in

the deployment of expertise in the field of broadcast media policy in Australia can

be observed. The traditional utilisation of politically neutral expertise to assist in

‘rendering social relations governable’ (Johnson 1993: 151), has raised issues

about the ethics of policy studies, including cultural policy studies (Forester,

1993; Miller, 1994). Another approach, that becomes increasingly important in

Australia in the 1980s, is the linking up of this expertise to wider personal and

institutional networks of media policy reformers, or what Anna Yeatman (1998)

has described as activism in the policy process. Such activism involves building

linkages and coalitions between policy ‘insiders’, such as progressive bureaucrats

and government ministers, and policy ‘outsiders’, such as activists, academics,

unions and community groups, in order to develop tactical advantage in shaping

and shifting the policy process.

This thesis establishes that the central elements of a policy system in

Australian broadcasting emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, which continue to

dominate for the remainder of the century, in spite of significant challenges from

quite disparate sources in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The political economy of

Australian television, and the policy structure, essentially reproduces that

established in Australian radio in the 1930s (Johnson 1988; Potts 1989; Counihan

1992). The structure is based upon a dual system of commercial and national

public service broadcasters, with the number of commercial broadcasters in a

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licence area being determined by the regulatory authority, and licensed

commercial broadcasters being required to meet ‘public interest’ obligations as

determined by the regulatory authority. Under such regulatory arrangements,

where market structures and market outcomes are highly regulated and

competition takes place in a circumscribed fashion, the scope for policy activism

on the part of regulatory agencies is, in principle, quite high, as they can

determine the scope and limits of private property rights. In practice, however,

such regulatory agencies have tended to interpret their mandates conservatively,

and to be more protective than confrontational towards the industries they

regulate.

This regulatory conservatism is an example of what Robert Horwitz

(1989) has termed ‘soft legalism’, where regulatory agencies possess the formal

apparatuses and capacities to enforce decisions, but tend in their everyday conduct

toward practices that ensure mutually satisfactory outcomes between contending

institutional agents. The perennial danger of such informal and consensual modes

of regulation is that of regulatory capture, where the interest of the regulators in a

‘quiet life’, and those of the regulated industries in policy continuity and no new

challenges to decision-making autonomy, mesh around structures that have

preserved the status quo, and actively excluded dissenting voices or potentially

competing interests. The comparative stability of institutional, policy and

regulatory structures in Australian broadcast television from the 1950s to the

1990s, and the high profits it has guaranteed to broadcast networks, has allowed
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the demand to be reluctantly conceded that part of this surplus be redistributed for

‘pro-social’ objectives, such as the development of Australian national culture and

national citizenship through mandatory Australian content requirements. Other

demands of media policy reformers, such as the use of citizenship discourses to

demand greater openness on the part of the commercial broadcasters on the basis

of the ‘public trust’ through which they have access to broadcasting spectrum,

have met greater resistance from the broadcasting industry, and a more variable

response from regulatory agencies.

1
The ISAs are Ideological State Apparatuses, a term first used by French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser (1977) to
describe those institutions seen as reproducing ideological hegemony in capitalist societies.