This book attempts to provide an understanding of current thought and enquiry in the study of popular culture and communication media. The popular sentiments and impulses underlying neo-Gramscian cultural studies and its postmodernist variants are explored and criticized sympathetically. An uncritical and exclusively consumptionist trend of analysis is identified and shown to be an unsatisfactory means of accounting for the complex material conditions and mediations that shape ordinary people's pleasures and opportunities for personal and political expression.

Jim McGuigan discusses cultural policy as a manifestation of cultural politics in the widest sense. Illustrating his case with examples from recent cultural policy initiatives in Britain, the United States and Australia, he looks at:
* The rise of market reasoning in arts administration
* Urban regeneration and the arts
* Heritage tourism
* Race, identity and cultural citizenship
* Censorship and moral regulation
* The role of computer-mediated communication in democratic discourse

This study addresses cultural policy from a critical and multi-dimensional perspective. It is informed by some of the most advanced ideas in contemporary social theory, drawing particularly upon the work of Pierre Bourdiew, Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. The book challenges the commonly accepted instrumentalist agenda for cultural policy studies and proposes an alternative view of cultural policy as a matter for the widest possible critical and cultural debate. Illustrating his case with examples from recent cultural policy initiatives in Britain, the United States and Australia,...