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Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 25
Cultural Studies
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• Theorist Stuart Hall questioned the role of the media and their frequently sensational, false,
and misleading images.
o Unlike other communication theorists, however, Hall focused on the role of the
media and their ability to shape public opinions of marginalized populations.
• Hall was very much concerned with how “cultural forces” influenced the culture at large
(Horowitz, 2012).
• Cultural Studies is a theoretical perspective that focuses on how culture is influenced by
powerful, dominant groups.
o Cultural Studies does not refer to a single doctrine of human behavior.
o Stuart Hall (1992) persuasively argues that “Cultural Studies has multiple discourses
discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it
has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. . . . I want to insist on
that!”
o Cultural Studies has its background and its beginnings in Britain.
o Hall (1981, 1989) contends that the media are powerful tools of the elite.
o The media keep the powerful people in control while the less powerful absorb what
is presented to them.
o Cultural Studies is a tradition rooted in the writings of German philosopher Karl
Marx.
II. The Marxist Legacy: Power to the People
• Philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) is generally credited with identifying how the
powerful (the elite) exploit the powerless (the working class).
o He believed that being powerless could lead to alienation, or the psychological
condition whereby people begin to feel that they have little control over their future.
▪ For Marx, alienation is most destructive under capitalism.
▪ When people lose control over their own means of production (as happens in
capitalism) and must sell their time to some employer, they become alienated.
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• Marx believed that the class system—a monolithic system that pervades all society—must
be unearthed by the collective working class, or proletariat.
o He felt that laborers were often subjected to poor working and living conditions
because the elite were unwilling to yield their control.
o Laborers across society are constantly relegated to secondary status.
o The elite, or ruling, class’s interests become socially ingrained, and therefore people
become enslaved in society.
o One of Marx’s principal concerns was ensuring that some revolutionary action of the
proletariat be undertaken to break the chains of slavery and ultimately to subvert
alienation under a capitalistic society.
• Marxist thinkers who believed the working class was oppressed because of corporate-
owned media have been called the Frankfurt School theorists.
o These thinkers and writers believed that the media’s messages were constructed and
delivered with one goal in mind: capitalism.
▪ Everyday life for Marx was centered on work and the family. Writers in
Cultural Studies have also studied recreational activities, hobbies, and sporting
events in seeking to understand how individuals function in society.
o Cultural Studies moves beyond a strict, limited interpretation of society toward a
broader conception of culture.
III. Assumptions of Cultural Studies
• Cultural Studies is essentially concerned with how elite groups such as the media exercise
their power over subordinate groups.
• The theory is rooted in a few fundamental claims about culture and power:
o Culture pervades and invades all facets of human behavior.
o People are part of a hierarchical structure of power.
• The various norms, ideas, values, and forms of understanding in a society that help people
interpret their reality are part of a culture’s ideology.
Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
o According to Hall (1981), ideology refers to “those images, concepts, and premises
which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand,
and ‘make sense’ of some aspect of social existence” (p. 31).
o Hall believes that ideologies include the languages, the concepts, and the categories
that different social groups collect in order to make sense of their environments.
• Graham Murdock (1989) emphasizes the pervasiveness of culture by noting that “All
groups are constantly engaged in creating and remaking meaning systems and embodying
these meanings in expressive forms, social practices, and institutions” (p. 436).
o Murdock notes, being part of a diverse cultural community often results in struggles
over meaning, interpretation, identity, and control.
▪ These struggles, or culture wars, suggest that there are frequently deep
divisions in the perception of the significance of a cultural issue or event.
• Dreama Moon (2008) notes that culture includes a number of diverse activities of a
population.
o Culture cannot be separated from meaning in society.
• Meaning in one’s culture is profoundly shaped by the media.
• The media could simply be considered the technological carrier of culture.
fears, and, in turn, invite us to inhabit them” (pp. xiii–xiv).
• A second assumption of cultural theory pertains to people as an important part of a
powerful social hierarchy.
o Power operates at all levels in society.
o Hall is interested in the power held by social groups or the power between groups
(Goggin, 2016).
o Power is something that subordinate groups desire but cannot achieve.
o Often there is a struggle for power, and the victor is usually the person at the top of
the social hierarchy.
• It appears that the ultimate source of power in one’s society is the media.
IV. Hegemony: The Influence on the Masses
• The concept of hegemony is an important feature of Cultural Studies, and much of the
theory rests on an understanding of this term.
o Hegemony can be generally defined as the influence, power, or dominance of one
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Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
▪ He openly questioned why the masses never revolted against the privileged
class.
• Gramsci’s notion of hegemony was based on Marx’s idea of false consciousness, a state in
which individuals are unaware of the domination in their lives.
o Consent is a principal component of hegemony.
▪ Consent is given by populations if they are given enough “stuff” (e.g.,
freedoms, material goods, etc.).
• What happens in hegemonic societies is that people become susceptible to a subtle
imbalance in power.
meanings change from one culture or era to another.
o This translates into what Hall calls a theatre of struggle, which means that various
ideologies in society compete and are in temporary states of conflict.
V. Counter-Hegemony: The Masses Start to Influence the Dominant Forces
• Counter-hegemony occurs when, at times, people use hegemonic behaviors to challenge
the domination in their lives.
• Counter-hegemony becomes a critical part of Cultural Studies thinking because it suggests
that audiences are not necessarily willing and compliant.
o In counter-hegemony, researchers try to raise the volume on voices that have been
voiceless.
• Over the years, television has been a major vehicle for counter-hegemonic messages.
o The Simpsons, the longest-running comedy on television, contains satiric counter-
hegemonic messages aimed at showing that individuals who are dominated use the
same symbolic resources to challenge that domination.
VI. Audience Decoding
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Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
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• No hegemonic or counter-hegemonic message can exist without an audience’s ability to
receive the message and compare it with meanings already stored in their minds (O’
Donnell, 2017). This is called decoding.
• When individuals receive messages from others, they decode them according to their
perceptions, thoughts, and past experiences.
• Decoding is central to Cultural Studies.
• Hall (1980a) elaborates on how decoding works in the media.
o He recognizes that an audience decodes a message from three vantage points, or
positions: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional.
• Hall claims that individuals operate within a code that dominates and exercises more power
than other codes. He terms this the dominant position.
o The professional code of television broadcasters will always operate within the
hegemony of the dominant code.
o The selection of words, the presentation of pictures, and the choice of spokespeople
in infomercials are all part of the staging in the professional code.
o Audiences are prone to either misunderstanding a message or selectively perceiving
only certain parts of a message.
VII. Integration, Critique, and Closing
• Cultural Studies has attracted the attention of critical theorists in particular because it is
founded on the principles of criticism.
o Its Marxist influence has also drawn scholars from philosophy, economics, and social
psychology, and its emphasis on underrepresented groups in society has enticed
writers in sociology and women’s studies to take notice (Steiner, 2017).
A. Logical Consistency
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
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• Despite some glowing endorsements, the logical consistency of the theory has been
challenged.
o Mike Budd, Robert Entman, and Clay Steinman (1990) suggest that some cultural
and critical theorists overestimate the ability of oppressed and marginalized
populations to escape their culture.
▪ Particularly those communities that lack the skills, insights, and networks,
escaping is very difficult.
B. Utility
• Cultural Studies “makes up a vehicle that can alter our self–image” (Carey, 1989, p. 94).
o It’s possible to translate some of the theory into daily life, making it useful to
some extent.
o Its utility can also be found in its dedication to studying the cultural struggles of
the underprivileged.
o By concentrating on these marginalized social groups, a number of subfields have
emerged, namely, ethnic studies and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender studies
(Surber, 1998).
C. Heurism
• Many of the principles and features of Cultural Studies have been investigated.
o Ideology has been examined (Lewis & Morgan, 2001; Soar, 2000), and the
concept of hegemony has been applied to episodes of television shows, including
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Dow, 1990), Saturday Night Live (Davis, 2012),
and Sex and the City (Brasfield, 2007).
• Research by Janice Radway (1984, 1986) focused on romance novels and the women
who read them.
o She discovered that many women read these books silently to protest male
domination in society.
Classroom Activities
1. Advertising Culture
Objective: To explore how advertising may represent the interests of the dominant group
and also how it can be decoded from Hall’s three positions
Materials: Magazine advertisements and video recordings of commercials
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Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Directions:
a. Show students the magazine advertisements and recorded commercials.
b. Have students analyze the advertisements using the three decoding positions.
c. Lead a class discussion based on these questions.
• Who or what is the source of this message? That is, who stands to gain by you
accepting the message (or lose by you rejecting the message)?
• How might someone operating from a dominant-hegemonic position interpret
this message?
• How might someone operating from a negotiated position interpret this
message?
• How might someone operating from an oppositional position interpret this
message?
2. Whose Culture Is It?
Objective: To encourage students to begin to integrate the principles of Cultural Studies
into their daily lives
Materials: None
Directions:
a. Before class, have students analyze their roles as consumers of information and
products. For one day, have them record or make a note of every time they purchase
a product or take in new information from the media and interpersonal interactions.
Have them identify the product and/or information and ask themselves, “Whose
culture is it?” They should answer this question in a few sentences.
b. During class, have students discuss their journal entries and their reactions to the
assignment.
3. Cultural Studies in the News
Objective: To have students use Cultural Studies to analyze a real event
Materials: News articles (provided or brought to class by students) about the December
2005 discovery that the U.S. military had been paying Iraqi newspaper editors to run pro-
U.S. stories about the war
Directions:
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Chapter 25: Cultural Studies
a. Have students read one or more of the news stories.
b. Divide the students into groups.
c. Have groups analyze this phenomenon from the perspective of Cultural Studies,
considering the following questions:
• What would Cultural Studies have to say about this phenomenon? Does it
support or negate the theory?
• What concepts from the theory might explain this phenomenon?
• From which position is it likely that Iraqi newspaper readers decoded this
media content? Why do you think so?