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How do groups become hegemonic?*

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In this chapter we examine:

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• How groups and meanings become hegemonic • The flexible and responsive hegemonies that took shape in the networked era by using

digital communication technologies and channels to make and manage audiences, publics and markets

• The work of managing hegemonies using communicative sites, communication pro­ fessionals and meanings

• The dynamics of resistance and change that characterize any hegemony.

What institutions are used to maintain hegemony?

What role do professional communicators play in making and maintaining hegemony?

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MEDIA AND SOCIETY

WHAT DOES THE MEDIA MAKE?

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One of the peculiar things about humans, which makes us unique as a species, is our ability to store information about reality outside our living bodies. In the long history of media making – from etching on rocks, to creating machines that can reproduce written text, to an internet that can store, transfer and process data on a planetary scale – the twentieth century is a crucial period. In the early twentieth century we began building institutions that produce and manage culture on an industrial scale. The media and cultural industries shape the imaginations, worlds, feelings, politics and practices of enormous populations. For this reason, controlling the institutions, professionals and technologies that are used to make and circulate meaning is crucial to the exercise of power. This turns out to be a complicated process because meanings are social, they are not fixed. As we have argued in previous chapters, communicators can ‘encode’ any meaning they like into a text, but the people who ‘decode’ that text can do so in a variety of ways (Hall 1980). Managing the relationship between meaning and power doesn’t just mean seizing control of the process of making and distributing meaning, it involves developing techniques for controlling the whole social process of communication. The task for those with power, or seeking power, is the continuous work of creating and maintaining a cultural atmosphere, within which a common-sense set of meanings is established and managed over time. However, this is never guaranteed. Human history is characterized by struggles over how we should organize our relationships with one another. In this chapter, we aim to develop an account of how those with power, or those seeking power, shape our world.

If you are a professional communicator and you go to work in a media and cultural institution each day, what do you make?

One way of answering this question is to argue that professional communicators make shared ways of life. For much of the twentieth century we might think of the culture industry as producing a narrative about what it means to live a ‘good life’. Moreover, the culture industry produces a group of people – a mass, a population, a society – who enter into, desire and practise this ‘good life’. By ‘good life’ we mean that set of ideas and images that we intuitively use as a schema for what we want out of life or what we think would make us happy. It might be a combination of things, like a house in the suburbs, a new car, fashionable clothes, going out to restaurants and bars with friends and falling in love. You might try to write down a list of what you imagine your life might look like in a decade’s time, if all goes to plan. Where do you think you learned to desire a life like that? We’re not saying here that these dreams of a ‘good life’ are inauthentic, but rather that they are socially constructed, learned and reproduced.

In the mass society, a crucial power dynamic forms around the narrative of the ‘good life’ that the culture industry produces. If the culture industry creates collective identities

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around shared ideas of a desirable life, then elites need to create a corresponding political and economic system that can deliver on those promises. If you make a house in the suburbs, a new car and a range of household gadgets desirable, and millions of people want them, then those things need to be attainable for the majority of the population. Conflict emerges in societies that cannot deliver what they promise, or can only deliver what they promise to an elite minority. The media and cultural industries play an important role, then, in reflecting back to us the ways of life we already want and are already living. Media don’t so much tell us what to do as much as they reflect our own lives back to us. They demonstrate to us how we are already part of a larger collective. In the twentieth century, the culture industry became locked together with the larger industrial system, playing the crucial role of making desirable what is already accessible and available.

The TV drama Mad Men is set in an advertising agency in New York in the 1960s. The first episode of the first season contains a famous scene of a fictional pitch for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The tobacco executives are concerned because they can no longer advertise cigarettes as a health product. At the end of the pitch the advertising creative Don Draper says, Tf you can’t make those health claims neither can your competitors. This is the greatest opportunity since the invention of cereal. You have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?’. The Lucky Strike executive explains that they grow tobacco, cut it and toast it. Don writes ‘it’s toasted’ on the board and says ‘Everyone else’s tobacco is poisonous, Lucky Strike’s is toasted’, and then tells the executives ‘Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car, it’s freedom from fear, it’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing it’s OK. You are OK’.

The scene illustrates several important aspects of the work of professional communicators in the culture industry. Professional communicators are experts in using symbolic power to help other elite groups maintain, or acquire, political and economic power. In the case of tobacco, professional communicators used the power to make and distribute meaning to shift public perceptions of tobacco from being a ‘health’ product to a ‘cool’ lifestyle product. Meaning making affects how goods circulate and are consumed. In the case of tobacco, from the middle of the twentieth century, smoking was ‘cool’. The fictional ad creative makes an emphatic point about the ‘affirmational’ nature of mass culture – reflecting back to people their own lives and pastimes. It was only when many governments outlawed tobacco advertising and branding that this set of meanings around tobacco could be dismantled. Professional communicators work for other powerful groups in society. They are astute observers of culture and identity, and understand the complicated nature of making and circulating meaning. They understand that you can’t tell people what to think; you need to construct a lifestyle with which people identify. To do this, they generate stories about the good life and convey them to us in advertisements, films, television, music and popular culture.

MEDIA AND SOCIETY

MEANING AND POWER

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The ability to exercise power – to have your interests prevail over others – is interrelated with the capacity to control the creation and circulation of meaning. A range of institutions in society are effectively ‘licensed’ to make, circulate and manage meaning. These include schools, universities, parliaments, courts and the media. Being powerful is the outcome of struggle, of learning techniques and acquiring material and symbolic resources that enable you to realize your will. One of the sites of this struggle is the production of meaning. Whose ideas and visions for society are taken to be ‘good’ or ‘common sense’? This question is always in the process of being worked out through a struggle between different groups of players. On the one hand, we have groups who broadly agree with the current status quo, and likely want to restrict, narrow and close flows of meaning – to prevent them changing too much. They don’t want to let groups different from them, with different meanings, into the institutions that make meaning. On the other hand, we have groups who don’t agree with the current status quo, and likely want to open up and disrupt flows of meaning – they want meanings to change. Being able to stop meanings from changing, or make meanings change, depends on being able to access and control the institutions where the industrial production of meaning takes place. Rather than view groups as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it is productive, first, to see both those who are striving for closure and those resisting as the necessary and inevitable outcomes of humans organizing their relationships with one another and seeking to build a world together. Take the contests in recent years over the legitimacy of statues in public places like parks and city squares as an example. Some groups want the statues removed, even forcefully tearing them down, because the statues represent people and values that they do not agree with. Others groups view this as a rewriting of history. The place of statues that commemorate imperial, colonial or confederacy figures and their ideas is a struggle over how meanings should be arranged, and which meanings should be given prominence in public space and culture. If we take up this ‘creating closure’ of the meaning-making process versus ‘resisting closure’ of the meaning-making process approach to analysing communication, we can ask five questions that guide a systematic way of unravelling media and cultural production:

1. Where is communication is taking place? This is a question about the institutional settings where meaning making is controlled.

2. Who is culturally, economically and politically dominant? This is a question about who is able to control meaning making.

3. How did they become dominant and stay dominant? This is a question about the tech­ niques for exercising power.

POWER AND MEDIA PRODUCTION

5.

BECOMING HEGEMONIC

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In the previous chapters we have described hegemony as the process of establishing a ‘way of life’ – a culture, a set of ideas, practices and values – as being common sense and taken for granted. Hegemonic ideas are consensual and agreed upon, and in the mass society professional communicators do the work of building hegemony. Gwyn Williams explains that:

To become hegemonic, or powerful, a group of people need to be simultaneously successful in three spheres:

By ‘hegemony’ Gramsci seems to mean a sociopolitical situation, in his ter­ minology a ‘moment’, in which the philosophy and practice of a society fuse or are in equilibrium; an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, moral­ ity, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation. An element of direction and control, not necessarily conscious, is implied. (Williams 1960: 587)

The more legitimacy powerful groups have, the less coercion they need to employ. However, even the most legitimate social systems rely on some coercive underpinning, even if it is only the threat that sanctioned violence can be used if individuals break the law. Each of these three hegemonic functions relies on the organization of meaning making. Becoming powerful relies on learning to mobilize and organize the art of coercion and the art of communication and negotiation. Becoming socially and politically dominant requires the ability to manage meaning making and the building of consensus. This means that powerful

4. How do they manage the creation and circulation of meaning within society? This is a question about how they use meaning to exercise power. Who is resisting these dominant meanings? This is a question about who dominant groups are in competition with.

1. Building and maintaining a working set of political alliances. 2. Generating consent and legitimacy among the public for their ideas. 3. Building coercive capacity to underpin their ideas and generate authority through

police, courts, prisons and possibly a military.

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groups must build a meaning-making ‘machinery’ that includes professional communicators, such as public relations professionals, media and communication advisors, researchers, community organizers, social media managers and so on. Acquiring and maintaining power in mediatized societies depends to a large degree on the capacity to manage meaning making.

How do groups become hegemonic? Industrial and post-industrial societies are highly complex entities, involving the interactions of millions of individuals and multiple interest groups. Taking the lead and becoming hegemonic in such complex entities requires constructing alliances that draw together players from a range of social sectors – such as business, legal, media, health, security, education, labour and so on – and cultural groupings. Becoming a powerful group that has control over a mass industrialized society is hard and continuous work.

A political elite, whose job it becomes to coordinate the various interests of the wider alliance of economic and cultural stakeholders, has to be constructed and then held together through a process of negotiation. This negotiating task has become professionalized and institutionalized within a range of sites, including parliaments, boards, bureaus and multinational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Politics is an intensely communicative occupation. Building and maintaining hegemony requires the capacity to alternate between consensus and conflict-driven communication. In part, alliance construction involves producing and circulating successful internally directed meanings; that is, meanings that hold alliances together and keep them focused on a shared vision. The creation of a successful hegemony depends on effective leadership and communication skills. Once formed, hegemonies constantly change because the leading group must continually adjust and make new compromises to survive. This makes hegemonies highly contextual organisms tied to a particular location and moment. The actual composition of a hegemonic alliance is seldom the same for very long, because the membership and patterns of influence are ever mutating. But, in addition to small ongoing shifts through which hegemonic groups continually renew themselves, huge cataclysmic hegemonic shifts also occur. At those moments the hegemonic ‘rules of the game’ – the common-sense ideas – are fundamentally altered. Such revolutionary changes usually transpire when dominant groups have failed to sufficiently renew their composition and their discourses, and so lose their ability to lead and organize a changed society. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 represents such a revolutionary hegemonic shift. More recent political events, such as Brexit in the United Kingdom and the Trump presidency in the United States, are also examples of the ‘common sense’ shifting, and of groups of elites having their ‘common-sense’ ideas dramatically challenged. At such moments, the common-sense meanings that organize a

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society are rendered transparent because they are no longer taken for granted. A collapsing hegemony loses the capacity to normalize its way of life and world-view, but likewise an emerging hegemony will not yet be in a position to normalize its preferred vision. It takes a new order some time to fully dislodge old meanings and practices and entrench, and close, its own preferred discourses and practices. The period in which one set of hegemonic ideas gives way to another feels chaotic and messy because the common-sense frameworks that make life seem orderly have become brittle and up for debate.

It is not enough to simply become hegemonic. Hegemonic groups have to work at staying dominant. This involves both creating and managing meanings that keep the ruling alliance together, and generating consent for the power of that alliance among other groups in society. For hegemonic groups, the more naturalized their meanings are, the better. A naturalized set of hegemonic meanings and practices effectively makes historically contingent and constructed power relationships appear natural. Although dominant groups strive for it, a fully naturalized hegemony is unlikely. Rather, hegemonies have to be continually remade as dominant groups struggle to maintain their leadership through a process of negotiation with other groups. Those in power have three goals:

Powerful groups necessarily intervene to try to influence the production, circulation and reception of meaning. By the early twentieth century, communication was a professionalized and institutionalized process. Elite groups needed to take over, or create, institutions that managed meaning making as part of the exercise of power. One important feature of the hegemonies of mass industrialized societies is that professional meaning makers themselves become a powerful group within the process of making and maintaining power because they developed the expertise to organize the industrial production of meaning. Other powerful groups, or aspiring powerful groups, need to find or create professional meaning makers who will help them to generate consensus for their ideas.

HEGEMONY AND THE ART OF MANAGING DISCOURSES

1. Produce meanings that advance and confirm their interests. 2. Create as much closure of meaning making as possible. Use the power already pos­

sessed by ruling groups to try to influence, or nudge, meaning-making processes in the direction of closures favouring perspectives and practices advantageous to themselves and their allies.

3. Regulate shifts in meaning so that they favour the interests of the already dominant.

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IManaging the meaning makers If meaning is produced by humans interacting with each other and those interactions are organized by power relationships, then we need to examine who gets to make meaning and where they make meaning. Many of the meanings we individually receive and make sense of on a daily basis are produced and circulated by professional meaning makers. They exercise influence in society because they become gatekeepers and regulators of meaning making. They control not just particular meanings, but also the institutions that control the overall process of making meaning. Institutions might be owned and controlled by powerful groups, and those institutions might provide the coordinates and structure for meaning making, but ultimately it is the professional meaning makers who are the creative heart of the machinery.

The industrialization of meaning making shifted the nature of intellectual work. Once intellectuals were elites whose work was largely confined to other elite audiences and cloistered from the general public. Rhetoricians, clergy, writers, philosophers, political thinkers and early scientists were confined to royal courts, elite universities or the homes and businesses of wealthy patrons. The emergence of a culture industry meant that meaning makers were drawn from all classes of society and produced meaning for a general public. They were a new class of workers who produced ‘ideas’ for the masses. Intellectual or knowledge work is increasingly concentrated within organizational sites where creative people are employed to generate the ideas and relationships that hold society together. They circulate these ideas to multiple elite, niche and mass public audiences.

Professional communicators are implicated in the exercise of power through the symbiotic relationships they form with other political and economic elites. The relationships between powerful groups and professional meaning makers are central to creating the ideas that organize the lives of large populations (Berger 1977). The Frankfurt School saw these relationships between the powerful and professional communicators as ones of‘patronage’. In their view, professional communicators needed to work for one or other branch of the culture industry. To keep their jobs, they need to produce content that serves the interests of the patrons that pay their wages. While intellectuals in the culture industry are free to think whatever they like, they are confined to producing meanings that serve the interests of the institution. This sometimes directly takes the shape of‘self-censorship’, but more routinely, it just means that they are oriented towards producing meanings for mass audiences.

These relationships of patronage make for complex professional ideologies and identities. Professional communicators often find themselves balancing out their own views, desires, creative impulses and political viewpoints with the demands and objectives of the institution they work for. Patronage subtly, but dramatically, narrows the range of discourses and practices available to professional communicators. If you live in a large city and want a job at a media corporation as a journalist, advertiser or writer, you will find that most of the jobs in most institutions are much the same when it comes to the level of freedom and creativity

POWER AND MED.A PRODUCTION

SHIFTING HEGEMONIES

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Hegemonies are never permanent fixtures. Dominance is always subject to being challenged. When hegemonies are very strong, alternative meanings and practices can at best cling to life in marginal spaces. But all hegemonies have life cycles, they grow old and weak, which is when those advocating alternatives are presented with opportunities for asserting their hegemonic dominance. Hegemonies are at their most fragile just after being born, before they have naturalized their discourses and practices and before they have consolidated their grip on the steering mechanisms of society, and then again when they grow old and weak. When dominant groups lose the capacity to set the intellectual agenda, negotiate new deals and alliances, and police all the ‘spaces’ in society, opposition groups sense the weakness because the old hegemony appears fragile and insecure. Furthermore, mature hegemonies sometimes lose the capacity to recognize, countenance and demobilize resistant ideas because their own world-view has become so naturalized to themselves. We see this in the progressive reaction to the resurgence of right-wing nativist and nationalist movements over the past decade. Alternative visions are empowered by

in the ideas you will produce. Very few cultural workers can truly go to work every day and do whatever they like. Even those who appear to have very creative jobs – like advertising creatives, fashion designers or film makers – work within coordinates set by their institutions, financiers or bosses. No advertising creative can produce campaigns that don’t achieve the instrumental needs of their clients, regardless of how creative the idea is. No fashion designer remains relevant and employed if their fashion range doesn’t attract attention and sell. No film maker survives if their films don’t acquire the audiences their financial backers seek.

Professional communicators learn the already-existing meanings and meaning-making practices of the institutions they work for. In some industries, these meanings and practices are learned ‘on the job’; in others, they are learned at training colleges and universities. In the mass societies of the twentieth century, mass university education became a key ‘credentializing’ pathway into the media industries. Sometimes this causes tensions, for example when the ‘ideas’ taught at university conflict with the dominant ideas of the media and cultural institutions in which graduates then go to work. This tension emerged when practitioners felt they were losing control of media training processes, such as when in-house journalism cadetships were replaced by university programmes. Practitioners became concerned that university programmes involved too much critique and theory and not enough practical skills. For some news organizations, on-the-job training and cadetships created the ideal conditions for cloning, ensuring that journalists were socialized into existing appropriate sets of meanings and practices.

•MED; A ANDSOGETY

A NEW HEGEMONIC ORDER

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The hegemonic order of the twentieth century was organized around mass production and consumption. Mass societies were characterized by public and private institutions like government departments and corporations that organized production in a hierarchical, top- down, command-and-control style. By the 1970s this system was showing signs of strain, it was becoming too big and complicated to steer. The managerial class that ran this system found themselves vulnerable to competing political and economic ideas. They were struggling to deliver the ‘good life’ and other groups were emerging that promised alternative visions. In managerial socialist countries, the emerging alternative was opening up to capitalist markets and private enterprise. In managerial capitalist countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, the alternative gathering legitimacy was the rearrangement of the welfare state, the retreat of the government from the economy and the liberalization of trade. The socialist societies reached a crisis before those in the capitalist societies. The Soviet decision to allow the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989 was deeply symbolic of the fate of the managerial elite. A new kind of hegemonic alliance was forming. In the West, the managerial class remade itself into an alliance of global networkers. This class began to create a system of international trade, to pursue deregulation and reformulation of the welfare state with an emphasis on criminal justice and so-called mutual obligation, and to

I the growing availability of communicative ‘spaces’ and ‘gaps’ as dominance slips away. The more that alternative visions are able to colonize communicative spaces, and thereby become empowered, the greater become the crises facing the existing hegemonic group. Holding a hegemony together, once the crises born of weakness begin, becomes a little like trying to plug an already leaking dam. Weak hegemonies ultimately crumble, and one of the formerly resistant groups, or an alliance of many them, learns to become the new hegemonic group. These processes of hegemonic weakening, death and birth have occurred again and again in history. The end of the British Empire and the Soviet collapse are among the most spectacular of recent hegemonic upheavals. Perhaps with Brexit in the United Kingdom we are witnessing the weakening of the European Union hegemony. We might also consider whether the rise of Trump in the United States represented a weakening of the globalist free market hegemony. Not surprisingly, hegemonic crumbling is usually associated with wars breaking out, as aspirant hegemonic groups try to grab space from a retreating hegemonic order. Maintaining hegemonic dominance involves more than maintaining and promoting one’s own meanings and practices. It also involves meeting constant challenges from rivals. The management of meaning involves constantly renewing meanings in order to remain dominant, and to keep the alliance of interests intact.

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create a new flexible mode of capitalism organized around information technologies. As the mass societies and their managerial elites gave way to the network society and their elites, we have witnessed several changes that impact on the processes of hegemony building.

Digital communication technologies From the 1970s, digital technologies were used to organize a global communication network. A new class of entrepreneurial networkers learned to exploit these to accumulate wealth. These entrepreneurs found ways to generate wealth from exploiting rapid information and data sharing. A new capitalist elite was bom from learning, in an ad hoc way, to exploit digital communication technologies. Some of these new entrepreneurs appear to have created long-term wealth-generation enterprises – such as News Corporation, Apple, Microsoft Facebook, Amazon and Google – whereas other contributions have only involved rejigging older discourses and practices rather than building new business empires. The 2007 Global Financial Crisis, for instance, exposed a complex web of speculative trading of ‘junk’ bonds, derivatives and financial products. Corporations were using a complex networked system of financial trading to invent and trade high-risk and potentially high-yield products, but with no or little underlying material value. This system was only possible in the ‘spaces’ opened up by the development of global capitalism and information technologies. But there have also been corporations that reinvented themselves by learning to exploit

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