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Chapter One
Cultural Institutions, Cultural Policy and the
Historical Foundations of Australian Broadcast
Media Policy
This chapter begins by discussing the cultural policy debate in Australian
cultural studies. This debate raised a series of issues that are critical to media and
cultural studies as well as to policy studies, including the relationship of academic
criticism to political agency, the significance of Marxist and social-democratic
approaches to state power, and the need for a comparative and historical
perspective on policy that recognises the prevalence of policy failure. Examining
media from a policy-oriented perspective also allows greater consideration of the
role of institutions in the development of cultural forms and practices. It is
proposed in this chapter that an institutional approach to cultural analysis can
overcome some of the problems in media studies and media policy studies that
have arisen out of elitist, structuralist Marxist and cultural studies methodologies.
In the latter part of the chapter, an institutional framework is deployed to
develop an understanding of the structure of broadcasting and broadcast media
policy, and the bases for political agency arising from the relationship between
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public interest discourses and the structure of broadcast property. It is proposed
that a policy settlement emerged in Australian broadcasting in the 1950s and
1960s, where a formal commitment to cultural citizenship and community
participation was in practice negated by regulatory capture, indifference towards
cultural policy goals, and political dominance of broadcasting policy. At the same
time, however, this period saw the emergence of a linkage between cultural
nationalism and participation discourses that is at the cornerstone of the
campaigns for media policy reform that gained momentum in the 1970s.
Three elements are identified as central to the Australian broadcast policy
settlement: strong political and broadcaster influence over the conduct of
regulatory agencies; the expectation that the high profits of broadcast networks
legitimate demands for pro-social content regulations, such as those around
Australian drama production and childrens programming; and demands that local
content regulations are important to ensuring that Australian commercial
television fulfils national cultural development objectives. The relationship
between public participation and the rights of media consumers as citizens, in
contrast to broadcaster expectations of a hands-off relationship with
governments and regulatory agencies, was an area of contested political terrain
throughout the period from the 1970s to the 1990s.
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culture, and towards the institutional arrangements governing its administration
(eg. Hunter 1988a, Hunter et. al. 1991; Hunter 1994, Bennett 1995; Meredyth
1997; Meredyth 1998). Second, it would move cultural policy from being an
optional add-on to cultural studies, to being central to the definition and
constitution of culture (Bennett 1992d: 397). Third, it would require critical and
theoretical work in cultural studies to be informed by a more concrete sense of
the actual organisation of the political, institutional and policy fields it must
negotiate in order to be translated into programs capable of being implemented by
agencies and organisations with the capacity to do so (Bennett 1989: 11).
A related argument was developed by Stuart Cunningham (1992a), who
argued that cultural policy studies provided the possibility for research that
incorporated insights from the social sciences, such as politics and policy studies,
into how cultural policy is made, as well as expanding the scope for cultural
intellectuals to engage with such processes. Cunningham argued for cultural
studies to become more policy-oriented, and to develop a more subtle and
context-sensitive grasp of the strategic nature of policy discourse in negotiating
piecemeal, ongoing reform in democratic capitalist societies (Cunningham
1992b: 535). Cunningham maintained that this turn from radical oppositional
politics to a reformist and social-democratic approach to political change would
not only strengthen the critical element of intellectual practice, by giving it a
greater capacity to engage with institutional decision-making processes around
current issues, but would provide the potential for a more dynamic engagement on
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intellectual practice could be articulated to. Both seemed to favour the idea that
the critical intellectual should operate within what Terry Eagleton (1984) termed a
counter-public sphere, or in a relationship of mutuality with oppositional social
movements. Such a counter-public sphere would enable a shift [of] the role of
critic from isolated intellectual to political functionary, as well as provide a
readership [that is] institutionalised rather than amorphous, able to receive and
interpret such work in a collective context and to ponder its consequences for
political action (Eagleton 1984: 112).
Three problems can be identified with such a strategy. The first is a
pragmatic one: the 1990s were marked in Australia, as in many other countries
since the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism in 1989-
90, by the virtual disappearance of what Peter Beilharz (1994) termed a left
public sphere of political, social and cultural organisations, that had historically
sustained such a form of critical intellectual practice. Second, and more
significantly, this approach overstated the possibilities of linking a diverse range
of political, cultural and intellectual practices into a broad movement capable of
constituting a public sphere in opposition to the bureaucratic organisations of the
state. One of the problems with broad conceptions of counter-hegemonic politics
has been that they frequently fail to link advocacy of cultural reforms on behalf of
particular social groups to political practices that can change the conduct of
identifiable institutional agents. As a result, there is a recurrent danger that such
cultural politics is otherwise largely rhetorical, with no substantive impact in the
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political domain. Effective political practice necessitates recognition of its own
institutional and discursive conditions of existence, most notably its relationship
to decision-making institutional agents with capacities to represent interests or
organise outcomes. It is not sufficient to conflate an enunciative practice in an
academic context with effective political practice in a decision-making
institutional context.
Third, the opposition between state institutions and counter-public spheres
that underpinned such a counter-hegemonic role for criticism under-estimateed
the porosity of boundaries between state organisations and those of civil society.
Bennett noted that this opposition neglects the extent to which:
Public spheres ... are brought into being not merely outside of and in
opposition to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state but also within
those apparatuses or in varying degrees of quasi-autonomous relations to
state bureaucracies (Bennett 1992a: 235-236).
The significance of actions by state institutions to the formation of sites for
diverse and critical cultural activities is cogently developed in Gay Hawkins
(1993) history of community arts in Australia. Hawkins account provides ample
evidence to indicate that community arts, rhetorically constructed by some as the
most avowedly oppositional and anti-statist of forms of cultural practice (e.g.
Kelly 1984) is, at least in the Australian context, a creation of government policy,
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an official invention (Hawkins 1993: xviii). The emergence of community arts in
Australia had far less to do with demands from below for autonomous forms of
community self-expression, than with application of social democratic discourses
of access, equity, participation and community involvement to Federal arts
funding regimes since the Whitlam Labor government of the early 1970s. Rather
than marking a retreat into pragmatism, the engagement with cultural policy by
community arts activists provided a clearer basis for the articulation of intellectual
practice to sites of contestation in cultural politics, with the outcomes of such a
reformist commitment being unable to be determined in advance.
Tom ORegan (1992c) argued that advocacy of cultural policy studies in
Australia involved a shift in intellectual practice from an orientation towards the
non-organised subjects of policy actions, towards those agencies and institutions
involved with the development and implementation of policy, and to becoming
policy participants. He claimed that such an approach both unduly narrowed the
scope of policy-oriented research, and promoted a pragmatic politics, that
prevented critique of current cultural arrangements from extending beyond a
horizon of the thinkable (ORegan 1992c: 420). In doing so, ORegan argued
that a concern with cultural policy can serve a number of purposes, and different
subjects and/or agents of policy, including: state administration purposes;
reformism within the governmental system; oppositional purposes; and
diagnostic purposes, in which policy emerges as a politics of discourse in a
descriptive enterprise. ORegan defined an orientation towards the subjects of
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institutional power as a bottom-up approach, which he described as being
characteristic of cultural studies, whereas an orientation towards the agents of
institutional power is defined as a top-down approach to policy, which he saw as
central to the cultural policy studies turn. The outcome, for ORegan, was an
associated narrowing of the scope of what constitutes relevant intellectual work
to that which can be made governmentally or corporately actionable, can be
publicly endorsed, and can be institutionally sanctioned and found useful by
government, tribunal, policy-makers and interest-group lobbyists directly
involved in forming policies (ORegan 1992: 414).
ORegans critique of cultural policy studies was a wide-ranging and
cogent one, but could be seen to possess two related limitations. The first,
addressed above, is the claim that much of cultural studies and cultural criticism
can be interpreted as policy analysis. This claim that enunciative practice is
synonymous with effective political engagement effectively dilutes policy studies
of any specificity and distinctiveness. The second flaw is the dichotomising of
top-down and bottom-up orientations toward institutional power,
commissioned and independent academic research, and political positions that are
for or against the reproduction of existing relations of social and cultural power. It
is not self-evident that an involvement with bureaucratic institutions entails
complicity with top-down policy programs, particularly if one accepts the
existence of porosity between state agencies and the institutions of civil society,
and that state agencies can be established which aim to represent the interests of
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disorganised or disempowered individuals and groups. The use of binary
oppositions between top-down and bottom-up orientations to power has
difficulty in dealing with the politics associated with the governmentalisation of
culture, and the extent to which the management of cultural resources in ways
intended to reform ways of life remains very much part of the active politics and
policy of culture in contemporary societies (Bennett 1998: 104).
A different line of criticism of cultural policy studies as it has developed in
Australia was taken by Miller (1994, 1996) and Craik (1995), who argued that
theorists had overestimated the coherence and rationality of the policy formation
process, assuming an easy translation between the policy statements of
government agencies and their effective implementation as policy. This emphasis
upon the role of government in the shaping of culture was also seen as leading to
neglect of the role played by the corporate sector as shapers of culture, and the
extent to which it has been the private sector, rather than the state institutions, that
have driven the development of cultural technologies such as broadcast media.
There is also the concern that cultural policy theorists are too sanguine in their
evaluation of the ways in which reason of state or the bureaucratic imaginary
are directed towards the management of populations and the governance of
conduct, and are insufficiently concerned with the limits of governance and the
extent to which citizenship rights are legitimately directed in opposition to
governmental power.
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The genesis of many of these problems lay in the manner in which cultural
policy studies, as it has evolved in Australia, had developed largely as a reaction
to the perceived weaknesses of cultural studies, thus tending to neglect research
findings arising out of the social sciences or policy studies. Craik argues that
Foucault-derived or governmental approaches to cultural policy failed to
adequately engage with the dynamics of policy formation and its relationship to
the political process. It was claimed that such approaches to cultural policy
studies worked, typically in an implicit rather than an explicit sense, with a
rational-comprehensive model of policy formation which assumes that the
pronouncements of governments equals their policies and practices, thereby
glossing over the labyrinthine minefield of competing agents and agencies,
contradictory agendas, political expediency, and bureaucratic intransigence found
in actual policy processes (Craik 1995: 205). Miller (1994) argued that, in the
enthusiasm to advocate cultural policy studies as an alternative approach to
cultural studies, there was confusion between advocacy for engagement with
policy processes concerned with media and culture, and critical analysis of the
impact of policy processes upon media and culture.
There have also been varying degrees of uptake of cultural policy as an
organising principle of arts and media policy across industrialised societies, which
is a point often neglected in more governmental approaches to cultural policy as
the practice of citizen formation in modernity. A commitment to cultural policy
has been more notably a characteristic of European states where there are strong
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social-democratic traditions, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and the
Scandinavian states. By contrast, the Anglo-Saxon states such as Australia,
Britain and the United States have been more reluctant to develop cultural
policies, as there is a strong historical suspicion of the role of governments in the
administration of culture, and a resulting emphasis upon keeping a distance
between governments and decisions concerning the allocation of cultural funds.
Craik (1996) and Vestheim (1996) have developed four ideal-type models of
cultural policy, which correspond to the dominant practices of state institutions in
particular nations and regions (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Models of Cultural Policy
Role of
State
Cultural
Agencies
Model
Country
Principal
Funding
Mechanisms
Dominant
Strategies
Modes of
Evaluation
Facilitator United States Tax
concessions
Market
manipulation
Commercial or
patron tastes
Patron Britain,
Australia
Grants by
quasi-
independentbodies
Arms length
principle
Professional or
peer-based
Architect France,Scandinavian
countries
Direct grantsfrom Ministry
of Culture
National andcommunity
cultural
development
National andcommunity
Engineer Former
USSR,
China, Cuba
Government
ownership of
culturalorganisations
State political
objectives
Political
Source: Craik 1996; Vestheim 1996.
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Institutions and Cultural Studies
The cultural policy debate brought a renewed focus upon institutional analysis in
cultural studies. The concept of institutional power that was developed, as being
positive and productive, owed a great deal to the work of Michel Foucault.
Foucault consistently linked power, knowledge and discourse, as part of his
concern with elaborating a political economy of truth that moved beyond
questions of truth and ideology, to grounded historical accounts of the discursive
and institutional formations of power/knowledge. Foucault proposed that power
should not be understood in terms of sovereign or juridical rights, or as the
exclusive property of any single group or class over others, to be possessed or
captured. Rather, Foucault believed that power operated among individuals and
institutions through a net-like structure of relations of production, circulation
and redistribution, which are strategic, flexible and productive in their
combination and application of institutional and discursive forces (Foucault 1980,
1990). What emerged from Foucaults work was a particular way of theorising
the relationship between power and government, with power being associated
with the ability to structure the conduct of free subjects:
The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct
and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a
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confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other
than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad
meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. Government did not refer
only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it
designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might
be directed [and] modes of action, more or less concerned and
calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of
other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field
of action of others (Foucault 1982: 221 - emphases added).
In referring to the role of institutions as positive, three aspects of this
positivity need to be distinguished. First, there is the extent to which institutional
practices are constitutive of a social field. This concept is derived from Foucaults
work on power, particularly his analysis of the emergence of sexuality as a
problematic of government in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe (Foucault
1990). It has been used by Jacques Donzelot in his account of the diverse
ensemble of institutions, discourses and practices that emerged in eighteenth and
nineteenth century Europe around the management of families, as a crucial link
between promoting the economic wealth of the society and the health and well-
being of individuals and the population as a whole (Donzelot 1979).
Second, recognition of the interrelationship between institutions and the
formation of individual identities enables consideration of how institutions confer
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identities, or how they provide the cognitive and discursive conditions for the
making up of an individual persona, or self. Mary Douglas (1986) has
explored the relationship between institutions and individual identities by drawing
an analogy between the development of institutions and the development of ideas,
noting that the preservation and reproduction of both depends upon their ability to
provide a set of analogies with which to explore the world and with which to
justify the naturalness and reasonableness of the instituted rules, and it can keep
its identifiable continuing form (Douglas 1986: 112). Rather than seeing
institutions as the result of shared agreement between autonomous individuals,
Douglas proposed that institutions confer identities, providing a classificatory
system that formed the basis for shared discourse. This is consistent with Scotts
(1995) observation that the new institutionalism in politics, economics and
sociology is characterised by its stress upon the cognitive dimension of
institutions, and how they frame situations and define identities, as well as by a
social constructivist approach to knowledge, whereby meaning is generated out of
a repertoire of available discourses and situated social identities. Such a shared
public memory would not, however, provide a sufficient basis for the continuation
of institutions or of ideas; what is also needed is the ability to intervene to
support individual strategies to create a collective goal (Douglas 1986: 73).
Finally, if institutions are a necessary condition for meaningful reflection,
decision-making and action, it follows that effective social and political agency
largely arises in and through institutional forms. The notion of an institution
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includes, but need not be restricted to, legally - sanctioned formal bodies such as
corporations, state agencies, trade unions, political parties, etc. At the same time,
institutions do not necessarily need to be formal legal entities. Raymond
Williams account of cultural formations draws attention to the significance of
alternative or oppositional cultural producers developing forms of group
organisation, such as formal membership, collective public manifestations (eg.
manifestos), or informal networks of conscious association or group
identification, alongside creative practices which place them in an alternative or
oppositional relationship to formal or established cultural institutions (Williams
1981: Ch. 3). In a different vein, John Ruggie approached multilateralism as an
institution in two senses: as both a set of shared ideas and conventions that
independent national governments could agree to, in order to establish generalised
principles of conduct; and as a set of formal international organisations that are
palpable entities with headquarters and letterheads, voting procedures, and
generous pension plans (Ruggie 1993: 13).
The need to conceive of institutions as both a set of organising rules and
principles of conduct, and as formal legal - political entities capable of exercising
effective agency within and outside of their organising domain, is reinforced by
the literature on collective action and the limits of individualism. Friedland and
Robertson (1990) argue that the failure of mainstream economic theories to
adequately account for power is most apparent in the exclusion of so-called rent-
seeking behaviour from the operations of efficient markets, since the
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of policy formation and implementation are treated essentially as what is required
to secure larger strategies of elite co-option of the decision-making process.
The media mates approach also simply assumes two points that need to
be proven. First, it assumes that the power of governments to act independently is
relatively weak vis--vis corporate power. In the literature on state theory,
Nordlinger (1981), Skocpol (1985) and Block (1987) have drawn attention to the
problems that arise from assuming that public policies are largely determined by
the balance of forces and priorities of powerful groups outside of the state
institutions. Skocpol has argued that the formation, let alone the political
capacities, of interest groups and classes depends in significant measure on the
structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to
influence (Skocpol 1985: 27). Second, it is assumed that the distribution of
decision-making power within complex media organisations is based upon a
relatively straightforward top-down model, where decisions come from a unified
organisational leadership and are duly ratified and implemented at lower levels.
Political economists (Herman 1981; Murdock 1982) and economic sociologists
(Scott 1979, 1986; Tomlinson 1982) have pointed to the limitations of assuming
that corporate behaviour can be characterised by a top-down model. They
instead argue that corporate strategies have to be seen as the result of particular
and contingent forms of decision and action, with the forms of calculation,
decision-making and action undertaken by corporations as economic and social
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agents being highly variable across nations, on the basis of a diverse and
historically - based range of legal, economic, political, social and cultural factors.
Political economy approaches to media studies have drawn attention to the
significance of structural determinants upon the behaviour of agents, seeing this
as central to the dynamics of media policy. In the process of defining and
defending the political economy approach to media, Mosco points to the value of
theorising the social totality ... [and] conceptions of power that derive from the
fundamental rules governing structures in society (Mosco 1995: 258). Similarly,
Murdock (1982) argued that it was most useful to understand corporate control as
being primarily driven by the structural constraints upon decision-making arising
from the operations of capitalism as a mode of production, since the basis of
power for large media corporations is not personal but structural, driven by the
impersonal forces associated with capitalist competition. Murdock drew upon
Marxist approaches to corporate strategy and behaviour, which argued that the
study of capitalism should not crystallize on the question of whether the units
of decisions are isolated corporations or interest groups because, whatever
form prevails, it is still the rationality of the system, its logic of accumulation,
which dominates these forms (De Vroey 1975: 9).
Marxist analyses work from a structural analysis of capitalism as a mode
of production with definable and determinate features, providing a sufficient basis
for understanding the practices of institutions and other social agents. Since
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corporations as economic agents can be understood as personifications of the
social relation of capital, it is the structural characteristics of capitalism as a social
totality that dictate their conduct. In his own writing, Marx stressed the extent to
which the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely
personifications of economic relations (Marx 1976: 179), and maintained that
the individual has an effect only as part of a social power, as an atom in a mass
(Marx 1981: 295), since the process of competition produces a set of mechanisms
whereby the many capitals force the inherent determinants of capital upon one
another and upon themselves (Marx 1973: 651).
The claim that the practices of institutions can in some sense be read off
from an abstract mode of analysis of the capitalist mode of production has been
subject to a withering critique by Cutler et. al. (1977, 1978). These authors have
pointed to the limitations of an approach that assumes an abstract analysis of
capitalism as a social totality can provide the foundations for understanding the
actions of individual institutional agents. This is argued by Cutler et. al. on the
basis of structuralist Marxisms inability to deal with:
the significance of corporations operating within national economies,
with their own distinctive laws, regulations and policies, and the fact
that these national conditions shape corporate behaviour;
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This analysis points to significant limitations to those approaches that
explain policy formation through theories of the state based upon underlying
structural analyses of society. Vincent Mosco (1988, 1989) has argued that
changes in US telecommunications policy can largely be explained as a
consequence of a shift in approaches to governance from a
managerialist/expertise-based to a pluralist/market-based approach, that can in
turn only be explained from the standpoint of a class-based approach (Mosco
1988: 119). What is apparent from Moscos account is that he defines the state as
a unified social agent with a singular set of interests, and an ability to make
decisions and act upon them. At the same time, however, the states interests are
not its own; instead, its forms of control over decision-making and policy agendas
are expressions of dynamic processes and power relations in the entire social
system, and a vehicle for maintaining class power without directly appearing to
do so (Mosco 1988: 117, 118). The problem with this structuralist-Marxist
approach is, as Les Johnston has observed, it leaves us with the uncomfortable
inference that the study of state institutions is something of an irrelevance
(Johnston 1986: 69). Politics located at the level of particular institutional sites
and policy domains, such as telecommunications, become secondary to a second,
more fundamental, set of political relations, formed at the society - wide level of
antagonistic class relations, which are then reflected back onto the level of
telecommunications policy. Significantly, Mosco provides no account of how the
capitalist class as a whole can form interests in the outcomes of
telecommunications policy, nor does he establish how these interests are in
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opposition to the interests of what he describes as non-dominant groups, or how
interests are translated into actual policies towards the telecommunications
sector.
The work of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1981, 1984) is important to
developing an approach to institutions that can balance the dichotomy between
agency and structure that has dogged critical social theory. Giddens approach
aims to account for the longevity and the constitutive roles of particular
institutional configurations in the formation of social identities, discourses, and
practical consciousness, while at the same time avoiding the tendency of
structuralist analysis to presume that agents simply occupy places and functions
within overarching structures for which institutions provide the conduit. For
Giddens, institutions provide the deeply-layered structures of a time and a place
that continuously organise the behaviour of social agents (Giddens 1979: 64-65).
Institutions are both the medium for and the outcome of practices that constitute a
social system, and exist as forms that both mediate and transcend the duality of
agency and structure. They do not just work behind the back of the social actors
who produce and reproduce them, but work through the active engagement of
social actors who possess knowledge of their operations and choose to interact
with them: such knowledge is not incidental to the operation of society, but is
necessarily involved in it (Giddens 1979: 71).
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Giddens concept ofstructuration (Giddens 1984) has been developed as a
means of developing an institutional typology that allows for differing
configurations of agency and structure across historical time. The concept of
structure refers, in the first instance, to the structuring properties allowing the
binding of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible
for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and
space and which lend them systemic form (Giddens 1984: 17). These
embedded structural principles, such as the ones that constitute the distinctively
capitalist form of class society, are those most deeply implicated in the
reproduction of societies, and which are found across a large number of
comparable societies. Structures, however, have a duality, whereby they are both
relatively enduring over time and across societies, and subject to conditions of
reproduction, mediation and transformation. The reproduction of structures, for
Giddens, has to be seen as being grounded in the behaviour of knowledgeable
agents, and as enabling as well as constraining of the conduct of social agents
(Giddens 1984: 25). The concept ofstructuration, then, links structures, as
relatively invariant institutional forms, and systems, which constitute the domains
within particular periods of time and social spaces where relations between actors
and collectivities are organised and reproduced as regular social practices,
frequently through the mediation of state agencies.1
A focus upon the duality of structures also points to a need to uncouple the
concept of agency from its association with individuals. Barry Hindess (1986,
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collectivity with interests that broadcasters had an obligation to serve. Anthony
Smith has described the concept of the public interest as containing sub-textually
a sense of the existence of a natural conflict between individual and public goods,
between the natural strivings of people for their own betterment and the social
benefit which might ensue from a partial or temporary denial of self - gain (Smith
1989: 11). Smith has observed that there have been three major attempts to
guarantee the public interest in broadcasting. The first has been monopolisation
of the airwaves by state-funded broadcasters, which occurred in the majority of
European, Asian, African and Latin American countries, and closely tied
broadcasting to principles of political and national citizenship. Second, there was
statutory regulation by a government agency of private broadcaster conduct,
which the United States is the most prominent example of, and which has to deal
with what Smith describes as a permanent tension ... between what might be
labeled constitutional and public interest positions, or between commercial
freedoms guaranteed by law and social responsibilities sought through regulation
(Smith 1989: 20). Finally, there are those countries such as Australia and Canada,
which adopted a dual broadcasting system, with regulated commercial
broadcasters coexisting with a state-funded national broadcaster.
Accounts of the history of public trust discourse in US broadcasting policy
typically tell of its betrayal in the warp and weft of actual regulatory practice.
Robert McChesney has argued that the passing of the Communications Act of
1934 saw the defeat of a significant oppositional movement to commercial
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Royal Commission on Television in Australia described such a tension in the
following terms:
If the public puts up with inferior television, it will only have itself to
blame if it fails to take advantage of the means provided for the expression
of its dissatisfaction. What is needed is a vocal public which will offer
constructive criticism and refuse to be satisfied with inferior programmes
... An active policy of constructive public criticism is essential in Australia
if television is to reach the standard desired ( Parliament of the
Commonwealth of Australia, 1954: 37).
Institutional Stability and Institutional Change: Periodisation and
Policy Settlements
In his discussion of media institutions in modernity, John Thompson observesd
that a degree of stability is given in the existence of institutions, since institutions
are constituted by determinate sets of rules, resources and relations which have
some degree of durability in time and some extension in space (Thompson 1995:
12-13). At the same time, it has been argued in this chapter that, while an
adequate theoretical framework for understanding institutional dynamics is
required in media and cultural studies, this should not become a structural edifice
that obscures an understanding of changes over time in institutional structures,
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and important differences between national policy systems. The concept of
periodisation has been used in a number of studies as a way of establishing the
principles underpinning institutional stability as well as institutional change, and
elements of specificity and difference between national societies, within an over-
arching interpretative framework. The Regulationist approach, developed by
Michel Aglietta (1987, 1998) and Alain Lipietz (1987), among others, provides
one example of such a framework. Michel Aglietta has argued that stability in
capitalist economies is premised upon the ability to effectively align the dynamics
of capital accumulation at a particular historical time to a mode of regulation
within a particular society, defined as a set of mediations which ensure that the
distortions created by the accumulation of capital are kept within limits which are
compatible with social cohesion within each nation (Aglietta 1998: 44).
Aglietta (1987) argued that a stable regime of accumulation in the period
from 1945 to 1970 was based around a more interventionist and regulatory role
for government, overlaid by a historic compromisebetween capital and organised
labour that has been termed Fordism, after the industrial production and labour
management techniques pioneered by car manufacturer Henry Ford (cf. de Vroey
1984; Lipietz 1987; Murray 1989). Thjs developed in the context of a global
capitalist economic Golden Age or Long Boom (Armstrong et. al. 1984;
Bowles et. al. 1984; Marglin and Schor 1990). Under the Fordist historic
compromise, organised labour secured a degree job security and wages growth, in
exchange for conceding to management the right to reorganise the labour process
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to achieve productivity growth through intensification of labour. This in turn
enabled the development of a high-wage economy based upon a regime of
accumulation of mass production, mass consumption, a strong consumer goods
sector, and relatively egalitarian incomes growth within regulated national
economies. The mode of regulation, or system of institutional relations, social
norms and ways of living which underpinned this regime, constituted structures
that provided limited recognition of the rights of organised labour, rewarded
company loyalty through internal promotions, and promoted the development of
semi-autonomous nuclear family structures which acquired consumer goods in
the new suburban housing estates.
Francis Castles (1985, 1988) and Stephen Bell (1997, 1998) have
developed the concept ofpolicy settlements or historic compromises as a basis for
understanding and interpreting long-term institutional stability. Castles observes
that historic compromises emerge in situations where competing or antagonistic
interests develop a broadly agreed conception of mutual gain that is less about
achieving consensus and more upon establishing the terms and conditions under
which contending groups and classes have something to gain by establishing a
limited agreement as to the parameters in which their conflicts will be pursued
(Castles 1988: 71). A condition of successful historic compromises is the
existence of a power above the conflict that is sufficiently trusted by all parties to
act as guarantor of their agreement, which is most likely to be a state agency, in a
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national context where the state is both strong and seen to be capable of action
autonomous of the interests of any particular collective actor (Castles 1988: 77).
Bell defined a policy settlement as a political coalition and political
compact that underpins a given model of economic development, which in turn is
broadly defined as the mix of state intervention and market forces that structures
political economy in any given era (Bell 1998: 157). Bell proposed that the
pattern of Australian economic development from the early twentieth century to
the 1970s could be explained through the intersection of two policy settlements.
First, there is the model of domestic defence, that used a mix of tariff protection,
wage-fixation systems and immigration controls to forge an alliance between
powerful economic interests (both capital and labour), political leaders, state elites
and electoral coalitions around the promotion of the manufacturing sector.
Second, there is the Fordism model of state regulation, welfarism and regulation
of international financial flows that developed in many capitalist economies in the
post-World War II period (Bell 1997).
Both the Regulationist framework and the concept of policy settlements
provide important insights into the development of the institutional framework for
Australian television broadcasting. Williams (1974), Attallah (1991), Spigel
(1992) and Hartley (1999) have established the central place of broadcast
television in the intersection between a Fordist regime of accumulation and the
social and cultural institutions that underpinned a modern mode of life in the
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In considering how national broadcasting systems differed in their
development in the context of Fordism and the Long Boom in advanced
capitalist economies, a threshold question is the extent to which the public are
considered to have a right and capacity to intervene in the conduct of broadcast
media as citizens, in a capacity that is additional to their status as consumers of
broadcast media content. If the public are recognised as having the capacity to
influence the conduct of broadcasters as well as to consume or not consume its
content, this introduces an additional dimension to the broadcaster-regulator-
public relationship, where the regulator has obligations to the public as citizens to
provide opportunities to participate in the conduct of broadcast media policy in
addition to its regulatory responsibilities toward the broadcasters. A further
question is the extent to which, given that interests are characteristically
represented in the policy domain by institutional agencies with their own rules of
formation, strategies and modes of political calculation, the organisations that
claim to represent either the public interest or particular interests (eg. children,
religious organisations, pensioners) should be provided with the right and
capacity to participate in processes of broadcast media policy formation.
The Policy Settlement for Australian Broadcast Television
Early Australian broadcasting policy was premised upon identification of a moral
dimension as well as a purely commercial element to the operations of
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commercial broadcast licensees, on the basis that it dealt with a public
collectivity beyond the market place (Hawke 1993: 14). The first major public
inquiry into broadcasting in Australia, the Gibson Committee on Wireless
Broadcasting, argued that there is no reason why the public should be asked to
accept anything less than the highest possible ethical standards that can be
attained by those who hold commercial broadcasting licences (Australian
Parliament 1942: 60). This public trust discourse formed the basis for state
interventions in programming, such as the requirement that broadcasters are
required under their licence conditions to provide an adequate and
comprehensive service, with the precise forms of evaluation to be determined
through the policy process.
In practice, the policy settlement for Australian broadcast television was
characterised, in the first instance, by strong and politically powerful broadcast
licensees, and weak and compliant regulatory agencies. As a result, demands for
commercial broadcasters to meet affirmative programming obligations, and for
greater public involvement in the broadcast policy process, were ongoing areas of
political struggle up to the 1970s. Another element of the policy settlement was
the highly profitable ownership structure that emerged out of laws governing
networking and barriers to entry, and the question of whether the monopoly
profits that subsequently accrued to broadcasters should be directed towards
programming of high social or cultural value, such as Australian drama
production and childrens programming. Early Australian commercial television
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was also characterised by high levels of imported programming, particularly from
the United StatesThis in turn created demands for policy intervention to secure
levels of local content, particularly in the area of drama, that would enable the
medium to develop as a site for national cultural development and provide
employment opportunities for creative people and the development of a strong
local audiovisual industry.
The 1953-54Report of the Royal Commission on Television (Parliament of
the Commonwealth of Australia 1954) provides revealing insights into the politics
of broadcasting policy in the pre-history of Australian television. The Royal
Commission, which was established by the Menzies Liberal-Country Party
government to advise on the establishment of television in Australia, is often
considered a failure, since primary structural questions such as whether TV
should be introduced, or whether there should be a public service monopoly or a
dual commercial/public service system, had been decided in advance by the
government (Hazlehurst 1982/3; Curthoys 1986; Moran 1993). Nonetheless, its
findings on the relationship of policy to television program content are worth
considering in relation to the emergent policy settlement and its limitations in
terms of realising cultural citizenship goals.
The Royal Commissions approach to the relationship between television,
its audiences and program content was based upon an implicit cultural
evolutionism, arguing that audience use of the medium would improve over time
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as they become habituated to it (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia
1954: 34). The Report advocated use of the compulsive period of TV viewing as
one that gives an opportunity to widen the interests of the viewer, so that more
culturally appropriate forms of programming will be available over the
subsequent period, where the viewer becomes more selective in their viewing
habits (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1954: 34, 37). As a policy
document read on its own terms, the Royal Commissions vision of Australian
televisions development can be seen as one of establishing broadcast television
as a new domain of cultural policy, whereby regulatory agencies would manage
the interrelated development of an informed viewing audience, a civic-minded
broadcasting sector, and governmental institutions willing to guide the process
toward preferred outcomes. This would be analogous to the processes described
by Bennett where forms of culture became enmeshed with modern forms of
government through the emergence of new fields of social management in which
culture is figured forth as both the object and instrument of government (Bennett
1992: 26). Similarly, the Royal Commissions vision of greater public
participation in the broadcasting sphere as being the key to better television
parallels Millers account of cultural policy as a technology of governance, or as
a means of managing the public by having it manage itself (Miller 1992: 12).
What is striking about the subsequent development of Australian
commercial television was how little it was informed by this reformist trajectory.
Dr J.R. Darling, a member of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board who had
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responsibility for the drafting of program standards for commercial television, has
referred to the considerable hope that existed at the time about how television
could be a powerful influence for good in the country and that through the box a
true democracy could be born (Darling 1978: 211-212). The reasons why
commercial television did not develop in the ways foreseen by these public
administrators were partly structural and partly institutional. At a structural level,
the rejection of arguments for public monopoly had also involved a substantive
rejection of the idea of broadcasting as primarily an instrument of cultural reform,
citizenship education and nation-building. The result was that attempts to institute
these priorities upon television would continue to work against the grain of the
logic of commercial ratings and mass audiences. The institutional problem lay
with the failure of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB),
established in 1949 by the Chifley Labor government, to act as an effective
conduit for public participation, an effective regulator of program standards or
even an initiator of research which could enable informed public debate about
television and its impact. What developed in the early years of Australian
television was a closed policy framework, where the ABCB was unwilling to use
powers to revoke a licence or suspend a licensee, in spite of its powers under
Section 109 of the Broadcasting and Television Act 1953. Instead, the ABCB
relied upon what has been described as a mix of gentlemans agreement and
friendly gestures, in a context where the Board and licensees were a very happy
family in those days,2 and where the Board was fearful of Ministerial rejection of
Board recommendations which contravened the governments objectives. 3
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The ABCB as a regulatory agency exhibited elements of what Robert
Horwitz has termed regulatory capture. Horwitz defines a captured agency as one
that systematically favours the private interests of regulated parties and
systematically ignores the public interest (Horwitz 1989: 29). Regulatory failure
or regulatory capture arises from over-identification on the part of the regulatory
agency with the industry which it regulates, and its bases include: (1) recruitment
procedures which tend to draw those already associated with the industry into
being its regulators; (2) the need for good working relations with the regulated
industry, as well as with Ministers and Parliamentarians with a particular interest
in the industry; and (3) a structural relationship of weakness on the part of the
regulatory agency vis-a-vis the industry which it regulates. Mark Armstrong found
that program standards as administered by the ABCB were a quagmire on the
outskirts of which various opposing forces in the community became bogged: the
elusive drafting and legal status of the standards prevented them from actually
coming into direct conflict (Armstrong 1981: 135). The Vincent Report, released
in 1963, was harshly critical of the ABCB, arguing that it should have long since
abandoned its policy of sweet reasonableness and taken much firmer action
with the commercial stations (Parliament of Australia 1963: 6). These findings
are consistent with Horwitzs sketch of the captured regulatory agency, that not
only fails to adequately police the conduct of the industry which it has been
empowered with the responsibility to regulate, but whose legislative basis and
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regulatory practice act as a positive barrier to community demands for reform in
the conduct of industry participants.
The Vincent Report (Parliament of Australia 1963), which came out of a
Senate Inquiry into how to encourage Australian film and television production,
marks an important transitional document in Australian media policy. While the
Report itself had little immediate impact on the media policies of the Menzies
Liberal-Country Party government, and its criticisms of the ABCB had no
significant impact upon its conduct, it nonetheless acted as a catalyst for media
reform in Australia that was to have a more significant impact in the 1970s.
Bertrand and Collins (1981) and Dermody and Jacka (1987) observed that the
Vincent Report was critical in bringing together an alliance of production industry
representatives, social reformers and cultural nationalists, across the film and
television sectors, that would be the principal drivers of media policy reform for
the next 20 years. It promoted the development of a range of organisations and
alliances, such as the Australian National Television Council, formed in 1965, the
Australian Mass Communications Council, which emerged in 1969, and the TV:
Make It Australian campaign, as models of coalition politics in the media field,
that complemented the ongoing policy activism of unions such as the Actors and
Announcers Equity of Australia (later Actors Equity). These media reform
coalitions would link greater openness in media policy processes to campaigns for
improvement of the medium generally, and programming content of commercial
television broadcasters in particular. They also drew attention to the closed nature
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of the policy and regulatory process, and the absence of a tradition of activism
from within the policy process, such as that which emerged in the United States in
the 1960s under Newton Minows activist chairmanship of the Federal
Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963 (Barnouw 1982: 299-300;
Krasnow and Longley 1978).
The Vincent Report was particularly interested in the dominance of
programming imported from the United States, observing that, in 1962, 97 per
cent of television drama was imported (Parliament of Australia 1963). It aligned
the lack of local TV production to the absence of enforceable local content quotas
and in turn linked this to the lack of a developed Australian film industry. In doing
so, it linked campaigns for a local content quota for Australian TV drama to
support for the development of an Australian film industry (Dermody and Jacka
1987: 50-54). It also linked campaigns for local content quotas to the wider
cultural nationalist movement developing in Australia in the 1960s, which united
liberals (eg. Phillips 1988) and Marxists (eg. Turner 1987) around the argument
for a distinctive national culture as a condition for social advancement, and which
saw the lack of a local film production industry as preventing the cultivation of a
distinctive national imaginary. Central to the extension of this discourse to
television was the pivotal role of television drama, described by Mungo
MacCallum as being as much a part of the communitys culture as its sport it
reflects us to ourselves, helps us to know ourselves and passes on the information
to the rest of the world (MacCallum 1968: 67). Demands for a strengthening of
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local content requirements for Australian commercial television, particularly in
drama, were to represent a significant appendix to the cultural nationalist
moment in Australian film policy, where the demands of industry-oriented lobby
groups such as the Australian Film Council and the Film and Television
Committee of the Australian Council for the Arts would receive a sympathetic
hearing from Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton (1968-69) and the Labor Prime
Minister Gough Whitlam (1972-75).
Conclusion
This chapter has proposed that a deep structure can be observed in
Australian commercial broadcasting, providing the basis for relatively durable
discursive, institutional and policy frameworks, yet also promoting significant
forms of political contestation, particularly around the simultaneously public and
private nature of commercial broadcast licences. The Australian commercial
broadcast media system takes its particular forms out of a combination of a dual
system of commercial and national public broadcasting, and because its
characteristic policy settlement has been one where relatively powerful
commercial broadcasters have dealt with relatively weak regulatory agencies, and
where the scope to extend citizenship discourses around the public trust aspects
of access to broadcast spectrum has been characteristically circumscribed. The
development of institutional bases for reformist policy activism would, however,
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link demands for enhanced public participation in decision-making processes
concerning broadcast television with demands for stronger content regulations,
particularly in the areas of Australian content and childrens programming.
The policy settlement in Australian broadcast television was one where a
fomal expression of support for the capacity of broadcast television to develop
cultural citizenship and community participation coexisted with a political context
where regulatory capture was prevalent. The likelihood of regulatory agenices
utilising their capacity as gatekeepers of access to spectrum to exercise control
over the conduct of commercial broadcasters was minimal during the period of
ABCB responsibility. This was partly because of close links between the Menzies
and other Liberal-Country Party governments and major media proprietors, but it
was also because both the self-organisation of prospective critics and the
developmernt of policy discourses that would enable a wider scope for the
organisation of the public as citizens would only gradually develop in the course
of the 1970s and 1980s, although their institutional origins can be traced to the
aftermath of the Vincent Report in the mid-1960s.
It was a policy settlement where the demand for local content on
commercial television remained an ongoing concern, linking local film and
television producers, media policy activists, and cultural nationalists, around the
demand that governments and regulatory agencies will set and enforce rules that
require the commercial broadcasters to commission and broadcast local programs,
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particularly in the strategically significant genre of drama. A progressive position
towards Australian media policy that would be influential in the 1970s and 1980s
thus emerged in the 1960s, based around demands for an enhanced political
participation and the development of a distinctive national audiovisual culture as
central elements to the insertion of citizenship principles into Australian
commercial broadcast television.
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1 Giddens (1984: 185-193) illustrates this with the example of labour markets in capitalist societies. The labour
market and the wage-labour contract is a structural feature of capitlaist class-based socieites. At the same time, the
functioning of labour markets and the legal realtions of employment vary consdierably across capitalist societies, and havesignificantly changed over time, on the basis of factors such as the relative strength of trade unions ot employer
oprganisations, the priorities of different political parties and governments, and laws and policies towards labour and
employment in different countries. For Giddens, it is through the axis of structuration that an abstract analysis of the nature
of wage-labour in capitalist socieities can be linked to the highly variable institutional frameworks that govern labour
markets and employment relations in different capitalist societies.2 The quotes are taken from A. Jose, Director of Programme Services at the ABCB, 1949-1971, and J. OKelly,
Secretary of the ABCB 1949-1962, in interviews with Mark Armstrong, 1976, held in the Australian Film and Television
School Library.3 Myles Wright, Board chairman from 1966 to 1976, admits that the Boards plans were very substantially
influenced by political considerations (quoted in Armstrong 1980: 132). The best known manifestation of this was the
Brisbane and Adelaide affair of 1958. With television about to commence in Brisbane and Adelaide in 1958, the ABCB
recommended to the Minister that only one commercial licence should be issued in these two markets, due to their small
size in relation to Sydney and Melbourne. It also argued against granting licences to the proposed applicants, arguing that
they were too close to the dominant commercial interests in Sydney and Melbourne.
The Minister rejected the findings, and asked for a second report recommending applicants for the grant of two
licences in each city, which the Board provided. On the Brisbane-Adelaide affair, see Harrison (1986: 30-31); Davidson(1968); and Armstrong (1980: 142).