Several of the most important and influential political economists of communication working today explore a rich mix of topics and issues that link work, policy studies, and research and theory about the public sphere to the heritage of political economy. Familiar but still exceedingly important topics in critical political economy studies are well represented here: market structures and media concentration, regulation and policy, technological impacts on particular media sectors, information poverty, and media access. The book also features new topics for political economy study, including...

What roles can and should governments play in communication policymaking? How are communication policies related to welfare politics? With the rapid globalization of commerce and culture and the increasing recognition of information as an economic resource, the grounds for defending the welfare state have shifted. Communication policy is now more widely understood as social policy. Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy examines issues of communication technology, neoliberal economic policies, public service media, media access, social movements and political communication, the...

A number of authors, including several contributors to this collection, argue that on the eve of the 21st century, civil society is beginning to disintegrate everywhere. In this volume, fifteen scholars from ten different countries address that argument by problematizing the relation between the older concept, civil society, and the newer one, information society, and offering perspectives on future directions.

Placing struggles for communication rights within the broader context of human rights struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this broad-based collection offers a rich range of illustrations of national, regional and global struggles to define communication rights as essential to human needs and happiness.