The Centre for Cultural Policy Studies warmly invites you to our second research seminar of the term.

On Tuesday 29th November at 5pm in G50 of Millburn House we will be welcoming Dr. Tom Mills, lecturer in Sociology at Aston University and author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), to give a paper entitled 'The Structural Transformation of the BBC.' Abstract below.

Refreshments will be provided. Please e-mail Paula Watkins on p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk to reserve your place.

Abstract

In September 2015, the BBC management responded to the Government's controversial Green Paper by proposing what the Director General Lord Hall referred to as a 'competition revolution' at the broadcaster. The proposals, which received little critical attention, were adopted in an even more radical reform in the Government's White Paper, and are set to further integrate the BBC into the capitalist market – accelerating a process of neoliberal reform which began in the 1980s.

This paper puts these proposals in context by outlining the process of organisational and cultural change which the BBC underwent in the wake of Thatcherism; both in terms of its journalistic practices and its broader bureaucratic structures. It is argued that existing accounts suffer from two related shortcomings. First, they tend to have too shallow an understanding of neoliberalism, which is usually seen as a programme for rolling back the state and expanding the market, or more concretely transferring state or publicly owned assets to the private sector. Second, they tend to see the struggles over public service broadcasting largely in terms of the conflictual relationships between BBC on the one hand and its commercial rivals and their political allies on the other. This has led to a failure to see the internal politics of the BBC as institutionalised manifestations of broader political struggles, and to recognise that the 'hollowing out' of public service broadcasting has been as much a result of internal reforms spearheaded by the BBC's own leadership

Tom Mills, Centre for Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture, Aston University