1. Communication, Institutions and Power
Spring, 2017
Gary Fields

2. Today’s Program (4/7) Review Concepts from Tuesday
Expand our model of Communication by focusing on:
1) Institutions
2) Power
3) Mobility

3. ‘Communication’ Oxford English Dictionary
1) The imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, information.
2) The action of circulation from one place to another.
3) Interchange of merchandise for buying and selling
4) A channel of connection between points

4. What is Communication?
Connection: enabling information and materials to circulate from one point to another.
Movement: Movement of materials or meaning from one point to another.
Exchange: Transfer of materials, meanings, men/women from one point to another.
Infrastructure: A system of access enabling materials meanings, and people to move from one point to another.

5. Communication involves…
Mobility…
…Across Distance
Taking Time

6. What is Communication?
Communication encompasses the circuits emerging from the movement and circulation of goods, messages, and people.
Armand Matelart (1996, p. xiv)

7. Means of Conveyance
Infrastructure (The body, telephone wires, wireless towers, shipping lines).
Institutions

8. What is an Institution?

9. What is an Institution?
…Systems of established rules that structure our interactions. Language, money, law, table manners, weights and measures, contracts, the state, the school, and the business firm are all institutions.
Geoffrey Hodgson (2006, p. 1)

10. If institutions are most fundamentally systems of “rules that structure our interactions,” what are the primary attributes of institutions?

11. If institutions are most fundamentally systems of “rules that structure our interactions,” what are the primary attributes of institutions?
Regulation
Control

12. How do Institutions play a role in the conveyance of merchandise, messages and people?

13. Shenzhen – Mango Jeans

14. Guangdong – Workshop of the World

15. Shenzhen – Mango Jeans

16. What Changes When Communication Changes?
Economic Life
Technology
Politics / Institutions
Work
Consumption
Boundaries
Property
Truth
Conflict / Power

17. What is a Communication Revolution?

20. Adam Smith (1776)
“The division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not the effect of any human wisdom but instead derives from the propensity in human nature to truck, barter, and otherwise exchange one thing for another.”
Book 1, Chapter 2

22. The Border

23. Shenzhen – Foxconn Electronics

24. ‘Hegemony’ and Theorizing Order
Society consists of a political order which rules through law and force, and a civil society which rules through consent. For Gramsci, such consent was the basis of ‘culture’ in which a dominant ideology or world view prevailed. Gramsci use the term cultural hegemony to describe dominant ideologies to which we give our tacit consent. Breaking this cultural hegemony was the key to social change.

25. Order, Consent and Social Movements Key Questions
How do people come to understand their consent to order as somehow intolerable? How do people come to act collectively to change what they believe to be intolerable?

26. “History must be mobilized if we are to understand the present.”

27. What is Communication?
16th century origins from Latin “communicare” meaning to “share.”
When we “share” something, we are engaged in an act of “exchange.”
When we exchange, we are essentially “trading.”
From the Oxford English Dictionary, trade and communication are inextricably linked.