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STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 5
American successes in shifting the discourse of policy, which ultimately
shapes its outcome. We cannot but point to the writings of Kathy Ferguson,
who, referring to the similar case of the sterilized (‘neutral’) field of
public administration studies, argues that bureaucratic discourse ‘rebuffs
the project of social criticism and political change’ (1984: 82). We also
assert that a separation of politics from policy (Bobrow et al. 1977), apart
from being an artificial, ideologically loaded position that falsely claims
neutrality, is neither possible nor desirable nor purposeful for the project
of critical analysis of and reflection upon the contexts that determine
the availability of communication channels and conditions for personal
and cultural, social and political expression. Feminists across a variety of
disciplines have historically focused on the politics of practice, whether
writing about the realm of elite politics and political decision-making or
‘personal’ politics. Policy, in its form of governmental or other state-like
authority-derived assertions, and lack thereof, has never been considered
irrelevant to or unwanted from political analysis in the writings of Staudt
(1998), which address development and international policy-making, or
by feminists in the field of ICTs, technology and media (Cockburn 1998;
Cockburn and Ormrod 1993; Crow and Longford 2004; Huws 2003;
Wajcman 2005).
In the era of globalization, or more precisely of market and finance integration,
the actors involved in decision-making are located not only at
the national level but also at the supranational, regional and local, transnational
(institutional bases spanning more than one nation) and translocal
(institutional bases spanning more than one city across nations) levels.
This means that influential policy actors are based not only in national
governments but also in supranational bodies, regional and local administrations
as well as transnational and translocal networks and corporations.
Concentrated in the terrain of ‘elite’ politics these institutions can be formally
organized or loosely affiliated to the state, through such things as
subcontracted organizations or think tanks. Policy actors participate in
policy-making processes that often take place in informal settings that
are difficult to document and map. Alongside the official, documented
and institutionalized realm of policy-making, we recognize that there is
also the ground of politics occupied by publics that engage in more informal
ways with the social outcomes of policy shifts whether as audiences,
consumers, citizens or merely by exclusion. The politics of everyday life,
cultural expression and intentional as well as informal dissent is for this
study a structuring component of the field of global communications
policy. Although these publics are not the central object of analysis in
this book, the underlying assumption of our work is that critique and social
change is inseparable from practice and agency. Our approach to the