Continental Order?: Integrating North America for Cybercapitalism
Continental Order?, edited by two leading scholars of the North American political-economy tradition, offers an important and timely continental perspective on the restructuring of the communication industries in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. At the heart of the book's themes is the (uneven) process of convergence - technological, organizational, and spatial - that has characterized the North American communications landscape in the post-NAFTA era. As Mosco and Schiller emphasize in their introduction, this has been neither a simple nor an automatic process. On the one hand, continental integration has been confronted with resistance rooted in long-standing principles of national control and public service. On the other, changes in the communication industries have themselves been subject to a larger process of capitalist reorganization, as production and consumption are increasingly organized around transnational networks of voice, data, and audiovisual communication. This has led to conflicts of an entirely different sort, as the often-contradictory interests of various capitals - national, regional, transnational - vie for advantage within nation-state structures and international organizations such as the World Trade Organization. The net result of these forces and tensions is that efforts to integrate the North American communication industries take place within a complex and contradictory terrain that belies any simple account (utopian or dystopian) of continental order - a point aptly conveyed by the question mark of the book's title. What is clear, contra NAFTA optimists, is that "uneven economic development - and cultural variation - are being reconstituted, rather than eradicated" (p. 4).
Within this general framework, the volume's contributors address a wide variety of themes. These range from such standards as television, film, print journalism, and telecommunications to new (or newly prominent) areas such as multimedia policy, professional sports, and the on-line education business. In this regard, Continental Order? updates and extends important earlier work on the North American cultural industries, most notably McAnany & Wilkinson's 1996 edited collection, Mass Media and Free Trade.
Although a detailed account of each of the 11 chapters would extend beyond the space available here, a couple of articles stand out as worthy of mention. Economist Richard B. Du Boff's chapter, placed immediately after the editors' introduction, offers a rich and detailed assessment of the ongoing continentalization of the North American economy. Drawing on a range of trade and investment trends and indicators, he demonstrates that CUSFTA and NAFTA are only the most recent and visible manifestations of a continental integration project whose fortunes have risen and fallen throughout the twentieth century. Also noteworthy is Richard Gruneau and David Whitson's chapter, "Upmarket Continentalism: Major League Sport, Promotional Culture, and Corporate Integration." Building on their important earlier work in this field (see, for example, Gruneau & Whitson, 1993), they examine the ongoing integration of professional sports into the larger North American entertainment economy, linking the historical development of major-league sport and other "world-class" entertainment events to successful strategies of cartelization, through which transnational hierarchies of consumption are created and maintained. In the 1980s and '90s, these strategies have intensified and expanded, as professional sports assume an increasingly central role in the continental - and global - strategies of the major media conglomerates. In challenging the traditionally place-based character of sport, these processes of consolidation and stratification have raised new dilemmas of local governance and identity, and called into question the viability of regionally distinct sports cultures.
More generally, the volume's greatest strength lies in its comparative focus. While most of the articles tend to emphasize one or the other of the key binational relationships around which NAFTA is structured (U.S.-Canada, U.S.-Mexico), the sum total of the collection is a surprisingly rich and wide-ranging picture of the rapidly evolving North American communications order. Particularly praiseworthy is the detailed analysis, developed across several chapters, of the position of the Mexican communication industries within the continental dynamic - a case relatively neglected by English-language communication scholars to date. Articles by Andrew Paxman and Alex Saragoza, Enrique Sanchez-Ruiz, and Gerald Sussman are noteworthy in this regard, offering detailed explorations of recent transformations in the Mexican television, audiovisual, and telecommunications industries, respectively. Mari Castañeda Paredes approaches the continental dynamic from a different angle, by examining the changing nature of Spanish-language marketing strategies within the U.S.
In general, Mosco & Schiller's volume suggests the potential usefulness of " middle-range " studies that locate their object of analysis between the more narrow geography of the nation-state and the overarching (and overwhelming) theme of globalization as a whole. Observers of the European and Latin American communication scenes have, of course, long applied this regionalist perspective. Its extension to North America is a source of hope for at least two reasons: first, the recognition of North America as a region among others may help to erode the peculiar parochial universalism that has sometimes afflicted writings on the U.S. and North American communications industries; and second, this sort of intraregional dialogue may help to lay the groundwork for new forms of interregional comparative work capable of revealing patterns and processes too often erased by more narrowly focused national studies and the more general narrative of globalization. Within this comparative regions perspective, North America may be understood as a fascinating and deeply significant political-economic and cultural experiment. As such, it poses unique challenges and opportunities for communication scholars of all theoretical and political stripes. It is gratifying to see this challenge being taken up so ably.
References
Gruneau, Richard, & Whitson, David. (1993). Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, identities, and cultural politics. Toronto: Garamond.
McAnany, E., & Wilkinson, K.T. (Eds.). (1996). Mass media and free trade: NAFTA and the cultural industries. Austin: University of Texas Press.