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In arguing that media researchers would benefit from a new way of thinking about communication and economic life, I am suggesting, first of all, that they need a way of framing ‘the economy’ that does not depend solely on the definitions used by governments, or the range of topics designated as ‘economic’ by television news. The first step, therefore, is to recognize all the ways in which the economy, as an object of study, is already constructed, even before its appearance in media. Michael Emmison (1983) has shown that modern uses of the term ‘economy’ did not appear until the 1930s, alongside Keynes’s conception of the macro economy and his proposal of a wider role for government in managing it. More recently, Timothy Mitchell has shown that the modern Western concept of ‘the economy’ – in the sense of ‘the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region’ (1998: 84) – emerged with the shift from colonial government to a post-colonial world order, and partly as an outgrowth of the experience of colonial rule (Mitchell 2002: 83–4). Here, ‘the economy’ appears at the intersection of various new forms of discourse, techniques of measurement and forms of classification, including maps that link territories to ownership, and statistics that capture information about populations and their assets.

Perhaps the most influential definition of ‘the economy’ and economic activity is gross domestic product (GDP). In recent years it, too, has become an object of some scrutiny. This is because the way it is calculated leaves out various activities that might legitimately be seen as ‘economic’ while overstating the significance of others. These decisions have important consequences, because they reinforce a sense of what is productive and therefore valuable and, by implication, what is not. Diane Coyle’s (2014) study of the history of GDP shows that one important omission is household production. Work based in the home, including caring work and cleaning work, is not included in GDP measures because it is unpaid, despite the fact that it is clearly both productive and valuable (indeed its value can readily be estimated through reference to its paid equivalent). Its omission means that much work – often women’s work – is in effect considered unproductive. Similarly, many digital goods and services (including Google, Wikipedia, Twitter) that contribute to economic welfare are not included in GDP because they are zero-priced, intangible and often hard to measure. Yet they are surely productive and valuable. This is a problem for economists, as Coyle notes, because it makes the gap between economic welfare – i.e., general living standards, prosperity and wellbeing – and the definition of economic output unhelpfully wide.² But there is also a salutary lesson here for researchers in other fields who take formal definitions of ‘the economy’ at face value, thereby consigning certain aspects of productive experience to some other domain of study altogether.

The consequences of relying on narrow definitions of ‘the economy’ for media and other social science research can also be illustrated by another example from Coyle’s work, to do with the role of finance. The value of the financial sector to the national economy has been overestimated by between one fifth and one half, according to Coyle, in large part because of a controversial change to the calculation of GDP that allowed financial risk-taking to be counted as an ‘output’ rather than an intermediate service, which would not normally be included. Where previous accounting techniques showed financial services making either a negative, or only barely positive, contribution to GDP, the methodological change ‘turned finance from a conceptually unproductive into a productive sector’ (2014: 103, 104). This had significant political effects. As Coyle shows, the view that finance is a strategically important sector of the economy developed alongside those statistical changes, but a belief in finance’s strategic importance made it more likely that regulatory reform would be shaped around it in beneficial and supportive ways. The problem for media research is that the classifications and definitions of ‘the economy’ used by government agencies tend to get repeated in news and current affairs,³ and then, by extension, by media researchers themselves. The pages of media and communications journals show fairly clearly how much more importance the discipline attaches to finance than, for example, housework or care work.⁴ This does not mean that finance is unimportant – indeed there would be good reasons to study it even if it were seen as unproductive through the lens of GDP – but it does show how much ordinary economic action might be deemed irrelevant if we follow government or media definitions of economic life to the exclusion of all others.

How might media researchers avoid relying on definitions of the economy that either exclude important aspects of productive activity or simply replicate the choices of news editors? There are at least two ways to do so. The first would be to recognize that ‘the economy’ is the outcome of a process – often conflicted or contested – and then to shift more attention to that process, rather than its outcome. The process, following Çalişkan and Callon (2009, 2010), might be called ‘economization’. This refers to all the ways in which ‘activities, behaviours and spheres or fields are established as being economic’ (2009: 370). In the same way that social researchers see ‘the social’ as a constant production (Hall 1977; see also Couldry 2006: 17), so, too, is the economy ‘an achievement rather than a starting point or pre-existing reality’ (Çalişkan and Callon 2009: 370). One now well-established way of looking at processes of economization is to focus on the work of economists, and the field of economics, since these actors are often a powerful influence on how real-life economies and markets are made, as well as being key voices within government. I take up this idea in chapter 1, where I look at the way economists have historically downplayed the role of communication in economic life, or else skewed its definition towards ‘information’.

A second way to avoid ‘capture’ by governmental or media definitions of the economy is to more explicitly incorporate anthropological and sociological understandings of economic life into our definitions of the field of study. For both sociologists and anthropologists, what is of interest is not so much ‘the economy’ itself as some pre-given thing, but rather ‘economic action’ as a purposive activity. And economic action, in turn, is interesting because of its meaningfulness for those involved and its continuity with other forms of social action (Weber 1978). The first part of this argument concerns the scope of ‘the economic’. In Weber’s account of economy and society, actions were ‘economically oriented’ insofar as they were concerned with making provisions or satisfying a desire for utilities (Swedberg 2011). One way of doing this would be via exchange on the market. But households – which were the dominant economic form for much of history – could make provisions for themselves in all kinds of ways, including through home production, non-market exchange and various other forms of production and distribution. Similarly, anthropologists have historically found that economic actions are organized according to logics of reciprocity and redistribution as well as market exchange. This range of forms of provisioning can still be observed today, even in highly specialized market economies where non-market provisioning is assumed to be a minor part of economic activity (and where it is not counted in standard measures of ‘the economy’). And yet to focus on ‘provisioning’ or ‘satisfying the desire for utilities’ is to imagine a much broader terrain of study – and one that more closely captures everyday experiences of economic life – than either the macro economy or the economics of particular sectors.

The second point concerns the meaningfulness of economic action and its continuity with other forms of action. Weber’s economic sociology is again relevant because of his distinction between formal and substantive rationality. In economic action, something is substantively rational to the extent that ‘the provisioning of different groups of persons … is shaped by economically oriented social action under some criterion (past, present, or potential) of ultimate values, regardless of the nature of these ends’ (cited in Swedberg 2011: 68, emphasis added; see also Weber 1978: 28–30). This is contrasted with a ‘formal’ economic rationality – of the kind usually modelled by economists – concerned with quantitative calculation of means and ends. As Çalişkan and Callon (2009: 374) note, to adopt a formalist approach to the economy in a field like anthropology (or indeed media studies) is essentially to engage in ‘the continuation of economics by other disciplinary means’, because it replicates economists’ definitions of the terms and purpose of the field of study. A more properly sociological or anthropological approach is one that engages with ultimate values and emphasizes the fact that much of what we call ‘economic action’ is, at some fundamental level, continuous with other kinds of social action. This might mean looking beyond traditional topics (e.g., firms, hiring practices, price setting and market design) to things like student loans, therapy bills, art galleries and branding practices. But the emphasis on the meaningfulness of economic action has also led sociologists after Weber to be much more interested in where the desire for particular ‘utilities’ comes from, or how the various means chosen to meet and satisfy those needs and preferences come to be socially meaningful rather than simply efficient or functional. Perhaps the most well-known example of this approach comes from Viviana Zelizer (e.g., 1994, 2005), whose work has been concerned not only with the way people combine intimate relationships with economic ones, but also with the way that economic transactions can be used to organize and comment on social relationships. But this approach to the social meaningfulness of economic action can also be seen in Daniel Miller’s longstanding insistence (e.g., 1987, 1998, 2001) that the meaning of consumption and provisioning cannot be simply read off from the mode of production within which goods were produced.⁵

I will draw out the implications of these sociological and anthropological definitions of the economy for media researchers in more detail in the conclusion, where I outline some of the potential sites for a reconfigured approach to communication and economic life. In the rest of the book, I draw most explicitly on these insights in chapter 2, where I offer a preliminary account of the symbolic or communicative dimensions of relatively mundane aspects of economic activity (such as payment) and artefacts (such as monetary tokens and prices). Sociological accounts also influence the choice of examples in later chapters – the focus on, for example, debt discussion boards, small-scale investor clubs, online reviews and ratings or audience discussion shows are all ways of emphasizing forms of provisioning and the way these are communicated or mediated, rather than ‘the economy’ and how it appears in news and current affairs. Finally, I draw on these fields throughout the book in my use of the term ‘economic life’ rather than ‘the economy’ (see, e.g., Spillman 2011; Wherry 2012). To focus on economic life is to deliberately distance oneself from definitions of ‘the economy’ as only the macro economy, and to attempt instead to capture the breadth and diversity of economic activity, beyond capitalism, and even beyond markets (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Instead, it takes as its objects of study those processes of provisioning where both ‘economic’ and non-economic values collide, mingle and influence each other, and in which the meaning-making activities of ordinary people are as important as the calculating activities of more powerful institutional actors.