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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.

Communication, media and economic life

The book’s focus on communication and economic life is motivated not only by this expanded conception of ‘the economic’, but also by a particular approach to media and communication. Media and communications research is a broad field, with many different kinds of scholarship, but in Britain it has historically been concerned primarily with media texts, institutions and technologies rather than with the more obvious – and much larger – category of communication and communicative practice. This is no doubt partly due to its coexistence alongside a powerful cultural studies tradition, in which the idea of ‘communication as culture’ (e.g., Carey 1989) has been well developed, and in which there is correspondingly a wider sense of what counts as ‘media’ for communicative practice. However, to the extent that media and communications has an identifiable sub-field of economic communication, it has been overwhelmingly focused on the way that ‘the economy’ (understood in the limited ways outlined above) is represented in media texts or genres such as ‘the news’ and, less commonly, film and television. As such, it has tended to overlook a broader range of ways that economic activities, practices and beliefs are constituted communicatively.

      Why does a focus on (usually mass) media texts and institutions, rather than a wider array of communicative practices, matter? One reason is simply

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