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[Commlist] Call for ICA 2025 panelists: Corporate Power Beyond Media Ownership Concentration
Sun Sep 15 22:03:00 GMT 2024
"*/Call for ICA 2025 panelists: Corporate Power Beyond Media Ownership
Concentration/*
I’m co-organizing a panel for ICA 2025 with Hendrik Theine and Sydney
Forde that aims to trace forms of media (including but not limited to
traditional media and telecom, platforms, AI companies, etc.) corporate
power beyond ownership concentration. Please see the below call for details:
Systemic political economic and technological transformations of our
communication systems (Cohen, 2019) have reinvigorated scholarly
attention to issues of media property and ownership (e.g., Birkinbine &
Gómez, 2020; Fuchs, 2024; Just et al., 2024; Srnicek, 2018; Theine &
Sevignani, 2024; Van Der Vlist et al., 2024). For instance, research
initiatives like the _Global Media and Internet Concentration Project
<https://gmicp.org/>_ (GMICP) aim to rigorously document dynamically
changing media markets, innovate methodologically, obtain often
difficult-to-access market data, and inform policy. By linking ownership
concentration to political, economic, and institutional power, such
inquiries engage foundational questions about the role of media and
communication in democratic societies, including the persistent and
historical tensions between democratic governance and powerful private
capital (e.g., Baker, 2007). This call embraces these scholarly efforts
and plans to build on them by inviting scholars to chart new directions
for thinking about corporate media power as a political economic
phenomenon beyond ownership concentration.
Our rationale is twofold. First, much of the scholarly attention
coincides with international policy efforts to reform and more
aggressively enforce competition laws to disperse concentrated corporate
power over media and communication systems. These initiatives represent
a crucial corrective to underenforcement and have yielded high profile
legal decisions (e.g., United States v. Google LLC (2020); India’s CCI
fine on Google for anti-competitive payment app practices) and new laws
(e.g., EU’s DMA). However, scholarly and policy attention to market
ownership concentration typically elicits calls for more competition
(e.g., break-ups, interoperability), which may restructure markets but
not upend the commercial, corporate business models that constitute many
media systems purporting to fulfill, but in fact undermining their
democratic functions (Birkinbine & Gómez, 2020; Phillips & Mazzoli,
2022; Pickard, 2020). Second, focusing on concentration often singles
out dominant market players over smaller (though often still quite
large) corporations that deploy various strategies to maintain and grow
their market positions and engage in anti-democratic practices (e.g., X,
Palantir). Likewise, analyses into ownership concentration can miss
interdependencies between market players, especially as modern media and
tech companies extend vertically and horizontally, and sometimes
leverage power from adjacent or downstream markets in those where they
lack dominance (Birkinbine & Gómez, 2020). Modern “media” corporations
deploy a range of strategies to accumulate and maintain power. For
instance, companies like ByteDance strategically restructure themselves,
engaging in regulatory arbitrage to take advantage of lax regulations in
various geographic markets (Li, 2024). In the AI context, corporations
pursue strategies like dual class voting shares, where minority holders
retain shares with larger voting power than majority owners; investing
massive venture capital to establish an AI startup pipeline that feeds
into their AI products and services; and establishing dominance over
cloud and data infrastructure to establish control in other sectors
(Rikap, 2024).
This panel seeks to expand our critique of both new and historical
corporate strategies of power accumulation and to deepen our
understanding of contemporary media and tech corporations, including by
attending to ownership structures that blur familiar categories and to
interdependencies between corporate actors (e.g., Sevignani & Theine,
2024). Panel contributions might examine the following topics:
*
Novel or retooled corporate strategies to maintain advantages in any
sector where powerful media organizations operate (e.g., search,
streaming, news, digital shopping), including the use of legal,
political, and economic tactics and tools
*
Efforts to influence policy to maintain media power or prevent
efforts to discipline it (e.g., regulatory arbitrage,
self-restructuring, lobbying)
*
Exercise of corporate control over media and tech labor to maintain
market dominance or to prevent labor mobility and/or stake in
corporate governance
*
Strategies to establish control of data production and collection,
processing and analytics, ownership, and transfer deployed to create
chokepoints and dependencies in datafied media markets
*
Policy, theory-based, activist, and other approaches that tackle the
complexities of corporate political economic power beyond break-ups
(e.g., restructuring business models, nationalization, etc.)
*
Contemporary and historical case studies of media and tech companies
leveraging significant power over other market players without
necessarily having a dominant market position (or leveraging a
dominant position in an adjacent, but separate market)
This is not an exhaustive list. We are interested in both empirical case
studies as well as conceptual pieces; we impose no methodological,
epistemological, or geographic restrictions; we are open to and welcome
a range of theoretical approaches; and we will prioritize submissions
that tackle novel and understudied cases.
If you are interested, please fill
out<https://forms.gle/M52syEzPY3kuV1kRA>_this submission form
<https://forms.gle/M52syEzPY3kuV1kRA>_ and include a brief (200 words
max) description of your paper, including your theoretical /
methodological approach, and how it contributes to the panel themes.
Submissions will be accepted until October 7, 2024.
Organizers
*
Pawel Popiel ((pawel.popiel /at/ wsu.edu)) - Assistant Professor, Edward R.
Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University
*
Hendrik Theine ((hendrik.theine /at/ wu.ac.at)) - Assistant Professor, WU
Vienna University of Economics and Business
*
Sydney Forde ((slf5652 /at/ psu.edu)) - Doctoral Candidate, Donald P.
Bellisario College of Communications, Penn State University
References
Baker, C. E. (2007). /Media concentration and democracy: Why ownership
matters/. Cambridge University Press.
Birkinbine, B. J., & Gómez, R. (2020). New Methods for Mapping Media
Concentration: Network analysis of joint ventures among firms. /Media,
Culture & Society/, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720902907
Cohen, J. E. (2019). /Between Truth and Power: The legal constructions
of informational capitalism/. Oxford University Press.
Fuchs, C. (2024). Critical Theory Foundations of Digital Capitalism: A
Critical Political Economy Perspective. /tripleC: Communication,
Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable
Information Society/, /22/(1), 148–196.
https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v22i1.1454
Just, N., Birrer, A., & He, D. (2024). Media power and ownership
concentration. In M. Puppis, R. Mansell, & H. Van Den Bulck (Eds.),
/Handbook of Media and Communication Governance/ (pp. 458–471). Edward
Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800887206.00046
Li, L. (2024). The specter of global ByteDance: Platforms, regulatory
arbitrage, and politics. /Information, Communication & Society/, 1–17.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2352634
Phillips, A., & Mazzoli, E. M. (2022). Minimizing Data- Driven Targeting
and Providing a Public Search Alternative. In M. Moore & D. Tambini
(Eds.), /Regulating Big Tech: Policy responses to digital
dominance/ (pp. 110–126). Oxford University Press.
Pickard, V. (2020). Restructuring Democratic Infrastructures: A Policy
Approach to the Journalism Crisis. /Digital Journalism/, /8/(6),
704–719. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1733433
Rikap, C. (2024, May 15). /Dynamics of Corporate Governance Beyond
Ownership in AI/. Common Wealth.
https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/dynamics-of-corporate-governance-beyond-ownership-in-ai
Sevignani, S., & Theine, H. (2024). Media property: Mapping the field
and future trajectories in the digital age. /European Journal of
Communication/, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231241268159
Srnicek, N. (2018). Platform Monopolies and the Political Economy of AI.
In J. McDonnell (Ed.), /Economics for the many/. Verso.
Theine, H., & Sevignani, S. (2024). Introduction to the special issue:
Media transformation and the challenge of property. /European Journal of
Communication/, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231241274347
Van Der Vlist, F., Helmond, A., & Ferrari, F. (2024). Big AI: Cloud
infrastructure dependence and the industrialisation of artificial
intelligence. /Big Data & Society/, /11/(1), 1–16.
https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630
<https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630>"
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