[Air-L] Call for ICA 2025 panelists: Corporate Power Beyond Media Ownership Concentration

Fri Sep 13 09:31:52 PDT 2024

Apologies for cross-posting.

I’m co-organizing a panel for ICA 2025 with Hendrik Theine and Sydney Forde that aims to trace forms of media (including but not limited to traditional media and telecom, platforms, AI companies, etc.) corporate power beyond ownership concentration. Please see the below call for details:

Systemic political economic and technological transformations of our communication systems (Cohen, 2019) have reinvigorated scholarly attention to issues of media property and ownership (e.g., Birkinbine & Gómez, 2020; Fuchs, 2024; Just et al., 2024; Srnicek, 2018; Theine & Sevignani, 2024; Van Der Vlist et al., 2024). For instance, research initiatives like the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project<https://gmicp.org/> (GMICP) aim to rigorously document dynamically changing media markets, innovate methodologically, obtain often difficult-to-access market data, and inform policy. By linking ownership concentration to political, economic, and institutional power, such inquiries engage foundational questions about the role of media and communication in democratic societies, including the persistent and historical tensions between democratic governance and powerful private capital (e.g., Baker, 2007). This call embraces these scholarly efforts and plans to build on them by inviting scholars to chart new directions for thinking about corporate media power as a political economic phenomenon beyond ownership concentration.
Our rationale is twofold. First, much of the scholarly attention coincides with international policy efforts to reform and more aggressively enforce competition laws to disperse concentrated corporate power over media and communication systems. These initiatives represent a crucial corrective to underenforcement and have yielded high profile legal decisions (e.g., United States v. Google LLC (2020); India’s CCI fine on Google for anti-competitive payment app practices) and new laws (e.g., EU’s DMA). However, scholarly and policy attention to market ownership concentration typically elicits calls for more competition (e.g., break-ups, interoperability), which may restructure markets but not upend the commercial, corporate business models that constitute many media systems purporting to fulfill, but in fact undermining their democratic functions (Birkinbine & Gómez, 2020; Phillips & Mazzoli, 2022; Pickard, 2020). Second, focusing on concentration often singles out dominant market players over smaller (though often still quite large) corporations that deploy various strategies to maintain and grow their market positions and engage in anti-democratic practices (e.g., X, Palantir). Likewise, analyses into ownership concentration can miss interdependencies between market players, especially as modern media and tech companies extend vertically and horizontally, and sometimes leverage power from adjacent or downstream markets in those where they lack dominance (Birkinbine & Gómez, 2020). Modern “media” corporations deploy a range of strategies to accumulate and maintain power. For instance, companies like ByteDance strategically restructure themselves, engaging in regulatory arbitrage to take advantage of lax regulations in various geographic markets (Li, 2024). In the AI context, corporations pursue strategies like dual class voting shares, where minority holders retain shares with larger voting power than majority owners; investing massive venture capital to establish an AI startup pipeline that feeds into their AI products and services; and establishing dominance over cloud and data infrastructure to establish control in other sectors (Rikap, 2024).
This panel seeks to expand our critique of both new and historical corporate strategies of power accumulation and to deepen our understanding of contemporary media and tech corporations, including by attending to ownership structures that blur familiar categories and to interdependencies between corporate actors (e.g., Sevignani & Theine, 2024). Panel contributions might examine the following topics:

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Novel or retooled corporate strategies to maintain advantages in any sector where powerful media organizations operate (e.g., search, streaming, news, digital shopping), including the use of legal, political, and economic tactics and tools
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Efforts to influence policy to maintain media power or prevent efforts to discipline it (e.g., regulatory arbitrage, self-restructuring, lobbying)
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Exercise of corporate control over media and tech labor to maintain market dominance or to prevent labor mobility and/or stake in corporate governance
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Strategies to establish control of data production and collection, processing and analytics, ownership, and transfer deployed to create chokepoints and dependencies in datafied media markets
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Policy, theory-based, activist, and other approaches that tackle the complexities of corporate political economic power beyond break-ups (e.g., restructuring business models, nationalization, etc.)
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Contemporary and historical case studies of media and tech companies leveraging significant power over other market players without necessarily having a dominant market position (or leveraging a dominant position in an adjacent, but separate market)

This is not an exhaustive list. We are interested in both empirical case studies as well as conceptual pieces; we impose no methodological, epistemological, or geographic restrictions; we are open to and welcome a range of theoretical approaches; and we will prioritize submissions that tackle novel and understudied cases.
If you are interested, please fill out <https://forms.gle/M52syEzPY3kuV1kRA> this submission form<https://forms.gle/M52syEzPY3kuV1kRA> and include a brief (200 words max) description of your paper, including your theoretical / methodological approach, and how it contributes to the panel themes. Submissions will be accepted until October 7, 2024.

Organizers

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Pawel Popiel (pawel.popiel at wsu.edu) - Assistant Professor, Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University
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Hendrik Theine (hendrik.theine at wu.ac.at) - Assistant Professor, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
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Sydney Forde (slf5652 at psu.edu) - Doctoral Candidate, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, Penn State University

References
Baker, C. E. (2007). Media concentration and democracy: Why ownership matters. Cambridge University Press.
Birkinbine, B. J., & Gómez, R. (2020). New Methods for Mapping Media Concentration: Network analysis of joint ventures among firms. Media, Culture & Society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720902907
Cohen, J. E. (2019). Between Truth and Power: The legal constructions of informational capitalism. Oxford University Press.
Fuchs, C. (2024). Critical Theory Foundations of Digital Capitalism: A Critical Political Economy Perspective. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 22(1), 148–196. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v22i1.1454
Just, N., Birrer, A., & He, D. (2024). Media power and ownership concentration. In M. Puppis, R. Mansell, & H. Van Den Bulck (Eds.), Handbook of Media and Communication Governance (pp. 458–471). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800887206.00046
Li, L. (2024). The specter of global ByteDance: Platforms, regulatory arbitrage, and politics. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2352634
Phillips, A., & Mazzoli, E. M. (2022). Minimizing Data- Driven Targeting and Providing a Public Search Alternative. In M. Moore & D. Tambini (Eds.), Regulating Big Tech: Policy responses to digital dominance (pp. 110–126). Oxford University Press.
Pickard, V. (2020). Restructuring Democratic Infrastructures: A Policy Approach to the Journalism Crisis. Digital Journalism, 8(6), 704–719. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1733433
Rikap, C. (2024, May 15). Dynamics of Corporate Governance Beyond Ownership in AI. Common Wealth. https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/dynamics-of-corporate-governance-beyond-ownership-in-ai
Sevignani, S., & Theine, H. (2024). Media property: Mapping the field and future trajectories in the digital age. European Journal of Communication, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231241268159
Srnicek, N. (2018). Platform Monopolies and the Political Economy of AI. In J. McDonnell (Ed.), Economics for the many. Verso.
Theine, H., & Sevignani, S. (2024). Introduction to the special issue: Media transformation and the challenge of property. European Journal of Communication, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231241274347
Van Der Vlist, F., Helmond, A., & Ferrari, F. (2024). Big AI: Cloud infrastructure dependence and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 11(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630

Pawel Popiel, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Journalism and Media Production
The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University
Affiliate, Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), UNC Chapel Hill
Affiliate, Media, Inequality and Change (MIC) Center, University of Pennsylvania
Website<https://pawelpopiel.com/> | Google Scholar<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CW3X1pcAAAAJ&hl=en> | Faculty Profile<https://murrow.wsu.edu/about-the-college/contact-connect/faculty-and-staff-directory/wsu-profile/pawel.popiel/>