[ecrea] Call for Papers - ECREA Communication Law and Policy Section

2013 Workshop of the ECREA’s Communication Law and Policy Section

Communication & Media Policy in Europe:
Assessing the Past, Setting Agendas for the Future
Call for Papers

The Communication Law and Policy section of ECREA invites abstracts for 
its 2013 workshop on Communication & Media Policy in Europe: Assessing 
the Past, Setting Agendas for the Future. The workshop will take place 
at MediaCityUK, Salford, Greater Manchester, UK, on October 25-26, 2013. 
It is hosted and organized by the University of Salford.

This workshop has two inter-related objectives. The first is to 
undertake an exploration of a range of the main conceptual and practical 
issues which have framed the academic analysis of communication and 
media policies in Europe over the course of at least the last decade. 
Second, the workshop will draw on this experience to explore key issues 
that can set the agenda for the short to medium term in communication 
and media policy in Europe. The workshop thus invites proposals for 
papers in a wide range of areas which, in their different ways, have in 
common the goal of addressing this dual purpose. Overall, the workshop 
aims to draw together policy lessons from the past and, in so doing, 
frame an agenda for the future. Papers may have as their focus empirical 
cases or conceptual and theoretical contributions, or both. 
Contributions may take a number of diverse foci individually or in some 
combination. These might range across the role and significance of 
policy actors, institutions, structures, instruments and processes in 
communication and media policy.

Below is a set of themes around which contributions might be centred, 
though ideas for papers which do not sit across one or more of these 
areas, but which address the core objectives of the conference, are also 
welcomed.

1) The Continued Role of Regulation

Issues of regulatory governance have sat at the heart of policies for 
the communications and media sector for decades and are now as strongly 
evident as ever. The regulatory governance of communications aims to 
evolve to keep pace with developments in technologies, services and 
markets, but often faces many challenges in so doing. Issues of 
regulation touch a broad range of areas concerned with the functioning 
of the communications sector: market making and monitoring; competitive 
relations between market protagonists; the nature and extent of public 
subsidies given to providers of communications media infrastructures and 
services; issues of equality of access and treatment; data protection 
and privacy. In particular, new developments in media – not least new 
social media and social networking activity which this has spawned – 
call forth particular challenges in terms of regulatory agendas. There 
is increasing evidence in the media sector of the emergence in new 
contexts of self- and co-regulation. Alongside this, the much studied 
convergence of media continues to raise major questions around the 
effective design of convergent regulation often drawing on the 
experience of different regulatory traditions and trajectories. What are 
the key current regulatory governance challenges in Europe and how have 
they become manifest? What regulatory solutions have been put forward 
nationally and internationally and what role have key actors such as 
governments, regulatory authorities, market actors and agents from civil 
society quarters played in the evolution of regulation? To what extent 
have regulatory solutions proved novel? To what extent have they 
displayed efficacy? What lessons can be learned from the experience and 
are these more widely applicable across the communications sector and 
beyond?

2) New Networks and Services Infrastructures

The development of infrastructures for electronic network communication 
media has been a core policy issue ever since the inception of 
telephonic and mass media communications. Today and looking to the 
future, policy debates at the national and European levels are 
addressing the current and future requirements of communications 
infrastructures. Whilst the creation of high speed, capacious networks 
is generally agreed to be a policy imperative, there is a debate on how 
precisely such networks might be delivered. This unresolved matter has 
tended to focus on actors, patterns of development, and timescales. What 
are the current key new network roll-out policy issues at national and 
European levels? What shape are the debates currently taking and which 
are the key policy actors? What kind of policy agendas for the delivery 
of new and upgraded communications should be developed into the future 
and what is the likelihood of them being realised?

3) Media Convergence

Technological and market convergence, until now much discussed in 
theoretical and speculative terms, is beginning to register a major 
impact on the media sectors. The Internet is eroding the boundaries 
between the press, broadcasting and new, on-demand media services. 
Broadcasters are offering press-like services and on-demand services. 
Newspapers are offering audiovisual content. New entrants from the 
telecoms are offering broadcast services. Faced with fragmenting 
audiences and readerships, media companies are trying to embrace 
convergence, and sustain their profitability, by re-using content across 
different media platforms. The re-articulation of traditional Public 
Service Broadcasting as Public Service Media has now arguably been 
well-established. The rise of social media has created a set of new 
online communications environments where the associated commercial and 
governance protocols are still very much in their infancy and thus 
contested. Issues of data protection, privacy, and advertising are 
salient among these. What are the key regulatory and policy challenges 
that are developing in the converging communications? What kind of 
policy responses have been out forward in key areas such market 
regulation, the continuation or otherwise of public subsidy, the 
prescription of base line public services, data protection and privacy? 
To what extent have these policies proven successful and how do they 
need to be developed further? This theme of the conference calls for 
papers which cover a range of policy issues salient to convergence and 
which call forth new policy thinking, such as subsidies for media 
content, ownership regulation, copyright regulation, spectrum 
allocation, ‘net neutrality’, and the regulation of social media.

4) The Role of the EU and the National Level

The European Union has emerged as a key institution in the development 
of communication and policy within the last 20 years. EU policies have 
spanned a raft of often controversial policy areas. Research on EU 
communications and media policy has highlighted the interplay between a 
range of often competing interests comprising variously: EU 
institutional actors in the European Commission and the European 
Parliament, national level policy makers and politicians and regulatory 
interests, civil society interests, and nationally based and 
multinational business interests in the media and communications 
industries. Papers are called for highlighting policy case areas which 
address one or more of the following issues: How significant an actor 
has the EU been in developing communications policy? What has the 
interplay between national and EU level been and what have been the 
consequences of this? What are the current key issues that the EU faces 
in communications policy and what policy measures are being taken? What 
are the chances of the EU being successful in achieving its policy goals 
in the key areas of communications policy with which it is currently 
concerning itself? In what ways might/should EU policies for the 
communications sector be developed and what are the likely policy 
constraints on this occurring? How might these be overcome?

5) Perspectives from Outside Europe

A key feature of research on communications policy in Europe has been 
the development of comparative analysis with non-European cases. This 
might take the form of cross-country, or inter-regional comparison. 
Comparative communications media public policy analysis has proven 
fruitful in understanding Europe in a number of ways. It allows the 
degree to which there are characteristically European approaches to 
matters of communications policy to be determined. Second, it can 
illuminate how European nations or, by contrast, the representative 
political bodies such as the European Union or the Council of Europe, 
operate in international/global policy environments, including 
institutional contexts. Finally, this kind of analysis allows us to 
understand better how Europe, be it in specific national contexts, or 
representative bodies such the EU, is viewed from outside. This can 
allow an enriched understanding of the significance of European 
perspectives on, and actions taken in, communications media policy to be 
established. Papers are invited in the full range of communications, 
media and cultural fields which address one or more of these broad criteria.

6) New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

Communications and media policy is a dynamic field constantly in search 
of refined and new ways of determining causal relationships, 
characterising complex phenomena and providing enriched and new 
conceptual and theoretical models to deliver better understandings of 
fast evolving communications environments. Theoretical and conceptual 
analyses focus on the position, role and dynamic interplay between key 
actors, interests and institutions of communications policy. Often 
theoretical analyses of recent and current communications policy matters 
lead to conceptual problematisation and, thence, new explanations which 
bring the state of the art forward. This theme calls for papers which 
articulate such developments in topic areas right across the field of 
policy studies in communications and media. Have new/enriched 
theoretical and conceptual understandings emerged to explain recent and 
current phenomena? How are these constituted? To what extent, and how, 
are they incremental or path-breaking in nature? What has their key 
contribution been and to what extent are they robust and flexible enough 
to help us understand other areas of communications policy now and into 
the future?

7) Commercialisation and Ownership

As has been well-established in the literature and beyond, recent 
decades have witnessed a structural shift in the communications sector 
and its sub-parts in the direction of commercialisation. The expansion 
of traditional broadcast media along commercial lines and the 
marketisation of telecommunications has occurred alongside the 
development of a new Internet based sector of communications 
underpinned, primarily, though not exclusively, by market values and 
practices. The consequent shape of the European communications sector 
highlights the significance of a raft of commercial issues pertinent to 
the current and likely future functioning of the sector, on which papers 
are invited. For example, well established issues of media ownership and 
concentration are still strongly relevant to our understanding of the 
evolving media landscape and are sharpened by developments such as 
online cross-media platforms. What are the current issues and 
controversies in media ownership and concentration and to what extent 
are these manifest at the national and European levels? Are there new 
explanatory models being developed to help us understand better key 
commercial changes across the European media sector? What new regulatory 
challenges exist from such developments and to what extent are we 
witnessing the emergence of appropriate solutions nationally and at the 
EU level?





Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted in Word document 
format directly to the conference organizer, Seamus Simpson 
((s.simpson /at/ salford.ac.uk)) by May 15, 2013. Your abstract should address 
one of the topics mentioned above and have a separate cover sheet 
providing your name(s), institutional affiliation(s) and e-mail 
address(es). You will be notified of acceptance by June 30, 2013. Full 
papers are due no later than October 1, 2013.

It is the intention of the organiser to put together an edited volume of 
the conference contributions.

The Registration fee for the workshop is £25.

Details on booking accommodation will follow on acceptance of your proposal.



Organizer

Seamus Simpson,
Professor of Media Policy,
School of Media, Music and Performance,
University of Salford,
MediaCityUK,
Salford Quays,
Salford.
Manchester M50 2HE

Email: (s.simpson /at/ salford.ac.uk)







Seamus Simpson

Professor of Media Policy| Vice Chair, International Communication 
Association, Communication, Law and Policy Division|

School of Arts and Media,

Floor 2, Desk 30, MediaCityUK, University of Salford, Salford M50 2HE

t: +44 (0) 1612956206

(s.simpson /at/ salford.ac.uk) | www.salford.ac.uk

MASTER_Salford logo.jpg

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