Introduction

In the context of the study of media production and industries and the making of media, I think of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, or media studies and media work, as unlike cultures that interact on many levels. While differing in many ways, and perhaps even disagreeing on their exchange itself, these groups can still ‘hammer out a local coordination despite vast global differences’. Peter Galison, a historian of science, has described such coordination between dissimilar groups as a ‘trading zone’ in his account of modern physics (Galison, 1997, p. 783).

We can think of media industries research as one such contact zone where exchange happens between different groups – academics, industry professionals, policymakers, journalists, and consumers. Doing research in this area requires crossing two boundaries simultaneously: the boundary in-between academic disciplines, on the one hand, and the boundary between academia and the world it observes, on the other. It requires engaging in intra-group contact between various disciplines as well as in inter-group encounters between media studies and media work.

Media industries research often goes along with an experience of tensions that result from such encounters. Proponents of the field describe its mission as a ‘transdisciplinary conversation about the converging global media landscape’ (Holt & Perren, 2009, p. 14). It is an integrative approach to studying cultural production bottom-up, focusing on the role of individual agents within larger media structures. This means importing participant observation, ethnography, shadowing, interviewing, and other social science methods into humanities-based research traditionally premised on analysing and interpreting texts (Caldwell, 1993). It also means engaging in a direct conversation with those involved in producing and distributing texts.

To study the media industries thus has become a way of critical social thinking, and has established a trading zone between the humanities and social sciences, and between media and communication studies.