Communication and Economic Life. Liz Moor

of key concepts, and the widespread sense that neither governments nor media organizations are especially willing to explain them, means that only those with existing knowledge are able to take something useful – or even comprehensible – from economic news coverage. This has unfortunate implications for democratic participation, since it makes it much harder to evaluate politicians’ claims about the country’s economic situation, or their proposals for future action. And faced with large volumes of hard-to-parse information, it may be more tempting to rely on ‘gut instinct’ – something that can easily be manipulated by politicians (see, e.g., Andrejevic 2013; Davies 2018a).

Both criticisms have merit, and both turn on the claim that, one way or another, media are not just reporting on reality but shaping it – either through a heavy-handed or partial framing of issues, or by neglecting the educational or explanatory dimensions of their role. But I want to suggest a third way in which media shape reality, which is through their definition of ‘the economy’ itself. The claim of this book is that there is in fact a lot more to economic life and economic communication than the contents of the business, financial and economics sections of newspapers or television news, and that while the language of economics and the media reporting of economic issues are vitally important areas of research and study, they should not be seen as coextensive with the economic lives of most people. Many people find it hard to see their own lives reflected in either the official language of economics or the way economic matters are reported on television, but this is partly because the definitions of ‘the economy’ in these places are so limited. What is more, these limitations are often replicated in academic studies of economic communication. When this happens, social science disciplines make it harder rather than easier for people to understand the connections between ‘the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history’ (Mills 1959: 4).

In what follows, I attempt to challenge these narrow definitions of the economic, and expand our horizon away from news and current affairs. Instead, I propose a framework for thinking about economic communication that foregrounds the broader category of communicative practices rather than ‘media’, and that understands economic life not only in terms of the macro economy and GDP, but more sociologically as a set of processes of providing for material wants and needs, which may be subjectively meaningful for those engaged in them (Weber 1978). To do this, I first highlight how economic action itself is communicative, and then explore how our economic lives are constructed communicatively in a variety of modes that move through, but also exceed, mass media. The modalities that I focus on in Part II of the book – promotion, information, narrative and discussion – remind us not only that ‘the economy’ looks different in different communicative practices, but also that the values governing economic life are not so uniform as they sometimes seem. A communicative practice like ‘informing’, discussed in chapter 4, may have two quite different sets of meanings: one that is relatively open, and has to do with disseminating facts and ideas; another that is more secretive and involves passing information to those in power. Discussions online often challenge the accounts of economic life offered by banks or even schools, and the economic narratives found in films and novels, discussed in chapter 5, often reflect quite different value systems from those found in television news or newspapers’ financial pages. This plurality of values matters, because it is part of what makes economic change thinkable.

      In the remainder of this introduction I outline the frameworks and theoretical ideas that underpin the chapters that follow, and the account of communication and economic life that the book offers: first, I explore the idea that ‘the economy’ is a historical construction, rather than natural category, and the consequences of this for social science researchers; next, I outline the rationale for starting from a conception of ‘communication’ or ‘communicative practices’ rather than ‘media’; finally, I explain why it is appropriate to assume value plurality in economic life.

The economy and ‘economic life’

      In arguing that media researchers would benefit from a new way of thinking about communication and economic life, I am suggesting, first of all, that they need a way of framing ‘the economy’ that does not depend solely on the definitions used by governments, or the range of topics designated as ‘economic’ by television news. The first step, therefore, is to recognize all the ways in which the economy, as an object of study, is already constructed, even before its appearance in media. Michael Emmison (1983) has shown that modern uses of the term ‘economy’ did not appear until the 1930s, alongside Keynes’s conception of the macro economy and his proposal of a wider role for government in managing it. More recently, Timothy Mitchell has shown that the modern Western concept of ‘the economy’ – in the sense of ‘the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region’ (1998: 84) – emerged with the shift from colonial government to a post-colonial world order, and partly as an outgrowth of the experience of colonial rule (Mitchell 2002: 83–4). Here, ‘the economy’ appears at the intersection of various new forms of discourse, techniques of measurement and forms of classification, including maps that link territories to ownership, and statistics that capture information about populations and their assets.

Perhaps the most influential definition of ‘the economy’ and economic activity is gross domestic product (GDP). In recent years it, too, has become an object of some scrutiny. This is because the way it is calculated leaves out various activities that might legitimately be seen as ‘economic’ while overstating the significance of others. These decisions have important consequences, because they reinforce a sense of what is productive and therefore valuable and, by implication, what is not. Diane Coyle’s (2014) study of the history of GDP shows that one important omission is household production. Work based in the home, including caring work and cleaning work, is not included in GDP measures because it is unpaid, despite the fact that it is clearly both productive and valuable (indeed its value can readily be estimated through reference to its paid equivalent). Its omission means that much work – often women’s work – is in effect considered unproductive. Similarly, many digital goods and services (including Google, Wikipedia, Twitter) that contribute to economic welfare are not included in GDP because they are zero-priced, intangible and often hard to measure. Yet they are surely productive and valuable. This is a problem for economists, as Coyle notes, because it makes the gap between economic welfare – i.e., general living standards, prosperity and wellbeing – and the definition of economic output unhelpfully wide.² But there is also a salutary lesson here for researchers in other fields who take formal definitions of ‘the economy’ at face value, thereby consigning certain aspects of productive experience to some other domain of study altogether.

The consequences of relying on narrow definitions of ‘the economy’ for media and other social science research can also be illustrated by another example from Coyle’s work, to do with the role of finance. The value of the financial sector to the national economy has been overestimated by between one fifth and one half, according to Coyle, in large part because of a controversial change to the calculation of GDP that allowed financial risk-taking to be counted as an ‘output’ rather than an intermediate service, which would not normally be included. Where previous accounting techniques showed financial services making either a negative, or only barely positive, contribution to GDP, the methodological change ‘turned finance from a conceptually unproductive into a productive sector’ (2014: 103, 104). This had significant political effects. As Coyle shows, the view that finance is a strategically important sector of the economy developed alongside those statistical changes, but a belief in finance’s strategic importance made it more likely that regulatory reform would be shaped around it in beneficial and supportive ways. The problem for media research is that the classifications and definitions of ‘the economy’ used by government agencies tend to get repeated in news and current affairs,³ and then, by extension, by media researchers themselves. The pages of media and communications journals show fairly clearly how much more importance the discipline attaches to finance than, for