Cultural studies, production and moral economy

Cultural studies approaches have provided a welcome reinvigoration of research on media and cultural production. But, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that they also suffer from important limitations. To provide a basis for the assessment in this article, the first section revisits the 1990s moment of ‘political economy versus cultural studies’ with the benefit of hindsight, distinguishing what I call the theoretical and populist modes of cultural studies. I then outline three ‘schools’ of cultural studies approaches to production and economy: cultural economy, production studies, and creative industries analysis. My argument is that, in both its theoretical and populist modes, these cultural studies approaches to production and industry in the realm of culture suffer from a lack of attention to fundamental normative issues regarding the relationship between culture, media and economy. In the final two sections, which discuss the turn to cultural labour and the concept of moral economy, I offer suggestions for how key normative issues might be addressed in a more explicit way, potentially offering a more rigorous ethical grounding for important questions regarding the realm of cultural production. I briefly apply this to the problematic relationship between cultural goods and well-being in modern societies.