Is ‘neoliberalism’ a concept that works for understanding media? As I left a workshop last Friday at University College London, on the subject of ‘postneoliberalism’, I asked myself this question. My initial, rather impulsive, answer at the beginning of the workshop was no. But I need to put that answer into context.

The workshop was focused on how debates on city development and urban politics might move beyond a near hegemonic (and often unthinking) framing lens of ‘neoliberalism’. I myself came to this workshop as a skeptic about neoliberalism as concept. That – to be clear – is not to say that I don’t think there are certain very damaging models of market thinking being applied to a wide variety of settings and sectors. A clear and present example, in which I’ve been involved recently, is the extremely worrying market model being proposed by the UK coalition government for higher education. And there are many others.

However, I was certainly a skeptic about the easy deployment of neoliberalism by far too many scholars to frame virtually any political policy or phenomena, more often than not without defining what is meant by the term. This is to say that I’ve felt for some time, following perhaps one AAG conference too many, that the term is misused and often abused. At its worst, it often rather unfortunately ends up being little more than a tag line for scholars to demonstrate their criticality. I think Clive Barnett is right to argue that critical scholars who use neoliberalism are often very good about stating what they are critical of, yet do quite poorly in providing a plausible case for what they are critical for, aside from occasional gestures to (usually implicit) utopian ideals. I also think writers like James Ferguson are right to note that neoliberally-conceived market arrangements are often creatively re-imagined by NGOs and activists to form the basis for pragmatic (imperfect yet effective) measures that make the lives of the poor and disposed demonstrably better. And this might just mean that Michel Callon is right: we really ought not leave the detailed analysis about how markets work (and might work) to the economists.

So, back to my impulsive ‘no’ for whether neoliberalism is an adequate concept that works for unerstanding media. Actually, it wasn’t a question I was asked directly: we were doing an introductory go-round, where were asked to identify ourselves and what we hoped to get out of the event. I more or less said something along the lines of neoliberalism not necessarily having the same central place in media studies that it does in human geography, and particularly in studies that connect media and urban politics. This is despite the fact, I added, the longstanding and intrinsic market or commercial basis of so much of the Western media industries. In saying this, I suppose my contrasting point of reference was the tendency for work using the concept of neoliberalism in urban studies to be focused on state actors and their policy programs. In as far as such examples seem to assume a one-way rolling out of state strategy, they seemed to offer little, and admit little, in relation to a more ‘circulatory’ idea like urban public culture.

As the day wore on, however, it did occur to me that this initial statement wasn’t quite accurate, at least not on the surface. First of all, not only have the media industries from their inception been based on the commercial exploitation of symbolic goods (as John Thompson noted in his The Media and Modernity), but it might also be plausibly argued that a major aspect in a typical suite of so-called neoliberal reform policies is the deregulation and commercialisation of communication markets. Second, if one were to be using neoliberalism in a different way, to denote forms of governmentality (i.e. the conduct of conduct), then there is certainly a story about how mediated knowledge and affects might encourage ways of thinking that could be described as neoliberal. Nick Couldry’s recent book Why Voice Matters makes the argument – though not necessarily in a governmentality vein – that major media amplify ‘neoliberal values’, and this is why people need effective ways to express their voice on those matters that affect their lives.

I’m starting to circle about, but I think after Friday’s workshop my answer still remains conditionally no. Conditional, anyway, if we are referring to a neoliberalism which is an objective process, driving or otherwise defining various media-related practices. Perhaps the most useful distinction coming out of the workshop was between neoliberalism as ontological concept versus neoliberalism as a (oppositional?) label. If we are talking about the latter, I suppose I am more comfortable. If we are talking about the former, and especially if we are talking about case studies which seem to offer little more than yet another predictable instance of neoliberalism in action, then I’m not so comfortable.