National Contextual Factors for the Development of Communication Studies in Australia and New Zealand

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is my QUT colleague (and current ANZCA president) Terry Flew, whose focus is on Australian and New Zealand communication research. ANZCA began in 1980 as the Australian Communication Association, and there have been a few overviews of the history of communication research in Australia and the region since; but what is interesting about this is that there is mainly a focus on a historical, temporal perspective, rather than including a spatial aspect as well: how do communications systems differ from one another across countries and regions, and more importantly, why?

Local histories, institutions, and state agency matter in this context, of course, and these bases of institutional differentiation need to be examined. There are a number of underlying influences here: when did a mass press emerge; is there a political parallelism or alignment between specific newspapers and political parties; how important is the question of professionalism in journalism; and what is the status of public service broadcasting? Terry points out five key variables in this context: the nature of the media system (e.g. the relative significance of public service broadcasters), the nature of political culture (the positioning and significance of left-of-centre parties), the dominant intellectual traditions (communication vs. political economy and cultural studies), the available funding sources, and the struture of the national higher education system.

Raymond Williams's concepts of segmentation and flow were based on his experience of being a British TV critic watching television in the US - he noticed a lack of segmentation between programmes and commercials -, and this is an example of how the experience of media can differ between even quite culturally affine nations. In Australia, public broadcasting is more central than in the US, but less so than in the UK; additionally, SBS has few parallels anywhere else in the world, and highlights the importance of multiculturalism. In New Zealand, PSBs were gradually sidelined; however, Maori TV is far more central than indigenous programming in Australia.

In Australia, the Labor Party has had an important role through the decades, but was never very left; in some aspects, indeed, it may have been a precursor to the positioning of Britain's New Labour. This also led to the emergence of the Greens here - but there is more pragmatism and less ideology on the Australian left, and so it has been difficult to develop a counter public sphere in opposition to other social and political movements; the politics of organised labour have a much greater presence, too.

Dominant intellectual positions in Australia meant that there developed no positivist tradition; critical media and communication studies led to cultural studies approaches that connected high theory with radical populism, and there is no great intelectual divide between communication and cultural studies journals, for example. At the same time, there is a strong tradition of pragmatic engagement with industry and government (theoretically informed), leading to a reformist approach which was critiqued by some neomarxist scholars elsewhere in the world as a sell-out (and this is repeated around the concept of the creative industries today).

The level and types of research funding available in Australia have greatly increased over the past 20 years, and a number of key research centres in media, communication, and cultural studies have been established in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s - with greater significance and diversity than in New Zealand, and with substantial cross-disciplinary and cross-university collaboration.

Finally, media and communication in the higher education system has long been a 'growth stock', first especially driven by some of the newer, technology universities, but now also supported by the older sandstone universities. There has been a rapid growth in higher degree students - though not without its tensions -, and the field has been pushed to the forefront of the humanities in Australia; this has not been mirrored in New Zealand.

Such national overviews can be replicated elsewhere, and the forces which influence development must be studied. There is no simple shift from national to global systems here; the impact of digital media technologies on scholarly publishing, the role of 'travelling theories', and the impact of new forms of academic audit culture which promote international publication certainly all push internationalisation, and this is overlaid also by international staff and student movements, but spatial - national and regional - differences continue to remain.

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