cultural studies

Chapter 26 discusses Stuart Hall’s cultural studies approach. Similar to Deetz’s critical approach to organization, Hall has developed a critical perspective to examine media.

Hall argues that cultural studies is valid if it deconstructs media research that fails to address ideology. Like all critical theorists, Hall is suspicious of research that ignores power relationships. Hall believes that mainstream mass communication research in the U.S. supports the myth of democratic pluralism. In his view of cultural studies, Hall places his emphasis on resistance. He argues that media hegemony results in the production of consent. In hegemonic encoding the dominant accepted discourse rules out alternative ideas.

In his discussion of cultural critics whose work is related to that of Stuart Hall’s, Griffin observes that the Frankfurt School theorists were the first to examine the failure of Marx's prediction that capitalist economies would decline. Another cultural critic, Roland Barthes, argues that mythic signs, such as the yellow ribbon, reinforce a culture's dominant values. Michel Foucault, a cultural critic Griffin discusses, provided the impetus for a "discursive turn" in cultural studies. Foucault's research on mental illness found that the definition of insanity changed a great deal over time. Kellner, another cultural critic, argues that during the first Gulf War, the major television networks effectively portrayed war as theater. From Hall's perspective, in framing opposition to the 1991 Gulf War as not an option, the media engaged in ideological discourses of constraint.

Hall argues that the primary function of discourse is to make meaning. From Hall's cultural studies perspective, an ideological fight is a struggle to capture language. According to Hall, the powerless may resist the dominant ideology using their own decoding options: operating inside the dominant code, applying a negotiable code, and substituting an oppositional code. So like Deetz, Hall holds out the possibility that people who are oppressed will not necessarily participate in their own oppression (hegemony) and instead will find ways to fight back.

This is a somewhat complex chapter, so read it through several times, take notes, and review it again before taking the quiz.

~ Professor Cyborg