Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

10 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
The dynamics of international trade and the dialectics of market and
state cannot be excluded from the study of communications policy. In
the following chapters we make sense of globalization by following the
evolving relationship between the mode of accumulation and the mode of
regulation, ‘the ensemble of rules, norms, conventions, patterns of conduct,
social networks, organizational forms and institutions which can
stabilize an accumulation regime’ (Jessop 1997: 291). The role of the
nation-state has been transformed. But it is not necessarily diminished
in the face of globalization. Gordon argues that state policies have actually
become ‘increasingly decisive on the institutional fronts, not more
futile’ (1994: 301). Mistral before him, also from the French Régulation
School, argues that the forms of international régulation do not suppress
national differences in the form of internal policy and regulation but
reduce divergences (Robles 1994).
So, is globalization a state of affairs, a fixed process of international
entropy, a highly specific and catholic-experienced condition? Does it
mean the end of history and therefore of the political? Our discussion on
the role of the state and the international trade and policy regimes shows
that, if anything, this is a period when different levels of globalization
exist simultaneously according to conditions and context, whereby different
faces of capitalism are experienced across the world. The relations
between capital and labour and their relation to culture and state are
experienced through the filters and conditions of class, but also gender,
race, nationality and religious difference. These mediating factors matter
in the ‘configuration of political struggle’ and to the social regime of
accumulation (Albelda and Tilly 1994: 228).
Beyond establishing the importance of historical specificity lies for us
the larger conceptual goal of examining the symbolic as well as material
dimension of state power in shaping public policy. While there is a range
of perspectives on the cultural analyses of the state, it is helpful to consider
the work of French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu expands
on Max Weber’s famous formula that the state ‘successfully claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a
definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population’
(1999: 56). For our purposes, in addition to the role and character of
the state as a ‘regulator’ and part of a ‘steering’ action for international
trade transactions, we draw from Bourdieu’s understanding of the state
as a ‘bank of symbolic capital’ (1999: 66) and access to capital étatique
(state capital) as a ‘(meta)authority to validate or invalidate other forms
of authority, that is, to have the last word in a territory, to have the last
judgment’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 6).