The Return to Cultural Production

'Mass Media and Society' is a leading international textbook, written by distinguished academics from around the world. It provides an invaluable guided tour through three key areas: theories of media and society; studies of media organisation; and studies of media, culture and ideology. Critical overviews are combined with original case studies.

To keep pace with a rapidly changing field, the majority of essays in this third edition are new. These include overviews of media and society from the perspectives of class, gender and ethnicity which plug media studies into new developments in the social sciences. This new edition also includes essays focusing on the rise of globalisation. This last unlocks a major debate running through the book, as to whether globalisation is challenging or confirming unequal power relations, extending or undermining structures of media ownership and control, transforming social identities and civic cultures or leaving national images and cultures surprisingly undisturbed. In addition, this book has a number of now classic essays by leading scholars which have been fully updated and revised.