KEY CONCEPTS IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES Second Edition STUDIES IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION General Editor: John Fiske Introduction to Communication Studies John Fiske Understanding News John Hartley Case Studies and Projects in Communication Neil McKeown An Introduction to Language and Society Martin Montgomery Understanding Radio Andrew Crisell Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience Iain Chambers On Video Roy Armes Film as Social Practice Graeme Turner Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth John Tulloch Understanding Television Edited by Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel A Primer for Daily Life Susan Willis Communications and the ‘Third World’ Geoffrey Reeves Advertising as Communication Gillian Dyer The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and its Audience Justin Lewis Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Henry Jenkins KEY CONCEPTS IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES Second Edition Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery and John Fiske London and New York Second edition first published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1994 Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery and John Fiske All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-13637-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18268-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06173-3 (Print Edition) CONTENTS General editor’s preface vii Preface to the Second Edition ix Introduction xi CONCEPTS 1 References 334 Index 357 GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE This series of books on different aspects of communication is designed to meet the needs of the growing number of students coming to study this subject for the first time. The authors are experienced teachers or lecturers who are committed to bridging the gap between the huge body of research available to the more advanced student, and what new students actually need to get them started on their studies. Probably the most characteristic feature of communication is its diversity: it ranges from the mass media and popular culture, through language to individual and social behaviour. But it identifies links and a coherence within this diversity. The series will reflect the structure of its subject. Some books will be general, basic works that seek to establish theories and methods of study applicable to a wide range of material; others will apply these theories and methods to the study of one particular topic. But even these topic-centred books will relate to each other, as well as to the more general ones. One particular topic, such as advertising or news or language, can only be understood as an example of communication when it is related to, and differentiated from, all the other topics that go to make up this diverse subject. The series, then, has two main aims, both closely connected. The first is to introduce readers to the most important results of contemporary research into communication together with the theories that seek to explain it. The second is to equip them with appropriate methods of study and investigation which they will vii be able to apply directly to their everyday experience of communication. If readers can write better essays, produce better projects and pass more exams as a result of reading these books I shall be very satisfied; but if they gain a new insight into how communication shapes and informs our social life, how it articulates and creates our experience of industrial society, then I shall be delighted. Communication is too often taken for granted when it should be taken to pieces. John Fiske viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION In this edition we have added one new author and 60 new entries. The book is 90 pages longer, the references are expanded from 13 to 21 pages, and we’ve added ‘cultural studies’ to the ‘communication studies’ of the original title. Meanwhile, 14 of the original entries have been deleted altogether, and a few others entirely rewritten. Minor editorial changes have been throughout as necessary. Now we are five, we have decided to identify who wrote what by ‘signing’ each entry with the initials of its author. We think this will assist readers by making clear that the concepts are written from differing disciplinary and personal perspectives. Such differences are an inevitable consequence of the increasing diversity of cultural and communication studies, not to mention our own geographical dispersal across three continents (to Australia, England, Scotland, the USA and Wales), since the first edition was published. In the ten years since then, communication and cultural studies have changed and developed as fields of intellectual inquiry, and they have also become much more institutionalized in universities around the world, both in undergraduate programmes and as recognized research areas. We hope that Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies will continue to prove useful and stimulating for those who want to know more. INTRODUCTION Fort Knox is reputed to be full of ingots of gold. These ingots are almost uniform blocks, virtually indistinguishable from one another. Although they seem to be intrinsically valuable they are in fact useless in themselves. Their value lies in their potential – what you can get for them in exchange, or what you can make them into by the application of your own resources and skills. So it is with this book. The entries are cast in a uniform shape but they are in fact fairly useless in themselves. It won’t pay you to leave them just as you find them – their value too lies in their potential, in what you do with them. What this amounts to is the difference between treating concepts as ingots of information with a given content and a known value on the one hand, and, on the other hand, treating them in terms of their possible meanings. Concepts don’t ‘contain’ little nuggets of meaning, however widespread their currency. And their value or meaning need not depend at all on their given or ‘obvious’ contents – as everyone knows, links can be forged by rhyme as well as reason, and sense can be made by metaphor (transferring meanings across different words) much more readily than it can by stores of information. In communication and cultural studies it is as important to be alert to potential meanings (even when they are at cross-purposes) as it is to search for exact information. This is because the object of study is the social world that we ourselves inhabit – we are not dealing with an ‘exact science’. One of the basic tenets of this book (taken from structuralism) is that without difference there is xi no meaning. That is, signs (like words in general and the following concepts in particular) can be understood only by reference to others in the same system. ‘Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not’ (Saussure 1974, p. 117). So it is with these concepts. Each of them is significant only to the extent that it relates to others, both within and beyond this book. They have no intrinsic but only established and relational meanings, and most of them have more than one. If you use the book simply to supply yourself with ready-made and self-contained bits of information you may well be able to use them in essays, but by themselves they won’t mean very much. In order to make full use of them you need to be alive to their relations and their potential for multiple and sometimes changing and contradictory meanings. Often this can be revealing in unexpected ways. You will fred that some entries don’t seem to agree with others, and in the unstated differences between them there may be quite important issues at stake. As a result, we hope you will find that the entries as a whole add up to more than the sum of their parts: they mean more than they say. But what they mean depends in the end on what you make of them. The ‘key’ in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies is designed to open things up so that you can take them away and work on them. As relatively new areas of study, communication and cultural studies have been characterized by fast-moving and innovative research work; by the attempt to say new things in new ways. At the same time, they have borrowed widely from a variety of established academic disciplines and discourses. As a result, there is often an uneasy period of disorientation for the newcomer to communication and cultural studies; a distinct lack of communication between researcher and newcomer. All spheres of intellectual work are of course characterized by their specialist terms and concerns, but in many cases these have become familiar over the years, or else the subject area is served by introductory books and courses designed to make them familiar.