During recent years, the concept of mediatization has made a strong impact on media and communication studies, and its advocates have attempted to turn it into a refined and central theoretical framework for media research. The present article distinguishes two forms of mediatization theory: a strong form based on the assumption that a ‘media logic’ increasingly determines the actions of different social institutions and groups, and a weak form that questions such a logic, though the latter form emphasizes the key role of the media in social change and singles out mediatization as a central ‘meta-process’ today. Exponents of the weak form have convincingly criticized the notion of media logic. However, the weaker version of mediatization is itself problematic, as its advocates have failed to produce a clear explanatory framework around the concept. We argue that, although the analytical status of mediatization is unclear, fascination with the concept will, in all probability, continue in the years to come, due to the promises of heightened disciplinary coherence and status that this notion has conveyed for media and communication studies.

Instead of alternative economic ideas or institutional shifts, the post-financial crisis conjuncture has witnessed the persistence of neoliberal ideas and the strengthening of the institutions implementing them. Instructed by ideational institutionalism, this article analyzes the interplay between ideas and institutions by examining the public debate on economic policy in Finland during the euro crisis. We show how ideas formed by the dominant institutions of Finnish economic policy-making dominated the debate in the leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in the years 2009-2014. The media and the elites coalesced around a consensus built by the Ministry of Finance and EU institutions, which demanded austerity and structural reforms to the Finnish economy. Our findings support claims that established institutional forces prevent ideational shifts even during major crisis periods. The media takes part in this through its unwillingness to provide alternative viewpoints on consensual political issues, thus strengthening a post-democratic public sphere. the actual market-based causes of the crisis, and the economically and socially deleterious consequences of austerity, the 'dominant forms of economic regulation persist, apparently impervious to evidence, evaluation or the merits of alternatives' (Davies 2016, 121).Such inertia has defied the expectations of many political economists, among them institutionalists of different persuasions, who have emphasized that exogenous factors, such as economic crises of this magnitude, have historically been a major source of institutional change and the emergence of new policy paradigms (P. Hall 1993; Blyth 2001; Hay 2001).Crises tend to support new ideas that challenge conventional wisdoms, but such potentialities by necessity clash with established institutional settings and their ideological make-ups in specific national contexts (Schmidt 2008, 307;Baker and Underhill 2015). In the end, the success (or lack) of new ideas is dependent upon political conditions and the balance of power between divergent political and economic agents, interests and institutions.In this article, we will critically analyze how the public interplay between ideas and institutions has played out in Finland, a northern member of the EU and eurozone. It offers an interesting case since 'of all the European countries that turned austere, Finland was, apart from the UK, the only one that volunteered for it' (Blyth 2017, 7). One factor that accounts for this is that Finland's history of economic policy-making embodies, despite its reputation as a Scandinavian-style welfare state, persistent non-Keynesian features and a strong consensus-seeking orientation (Pekkarinen 1989; Pekkarinen and Heinonen 1998;Kantola and Kananen 2013). We will analyze how this tradition affected the responses of Finnish political and economic elites to the economic crisis. The article contributes to institutionalist research by examining how leading Finnish politicians and economic experts, together with the mainstream media...

This article critically discusses the intellectual and conceptual shifts that have occurred in information society theories (and also policies) in the previous four decades. We will examine the topic by focusing on the work of Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells, arguably two of the most important information society theorists. A key element in the academic shift from "post-industrial" (Bell) thinking to the discourse on "network society" (Castells) is that it has brought forward a different way of understanding the role of the state vis-a-vis the development of new information and communication technologies, as well as a new assessment of the role of the state in the economy and society at large. Against the Keynesian undertones of Bell's ideas, Castells' network society theory represents a neoliberally restructured version of "information society" that is associated with the rise of flexibility, individuality and a new culture of innovation. We argue that these changing discourses on the information society have served a definite hegemonic function for political elites, offering useful ideals and conceptions for forming politics and political compromises in different historical conjunctures. We conclude the article by looking at how the on-going global economic crisis and neoliberalism's weakening hegemonic potential and turn to austerity and authoritarian solutions challenges existing information society theories. The Origins of "Information Society"Discourses concerning "information society" have had a major influence on sociological thinking and also policy-making in the previous four decades. In this article we will analyse such discourses from a critical perspective, that is, by examining the ways in which the notion of "information society" has been formulated in different times, in response to changes in the political-ideological conjunctures of advanced capitalist countries. We will begin the article by looking at the emergence of "information society" as a key concept. This will be followed by a more detailed consideration and critique of the work of two important information society theorists, Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells. Their works have served hegemonic functions for political elites across the capitalist world, providing them with ideals and conceptions for forming politics and political compromises in recent decades. Yet, in the last part of the article we will discuss how the on-going global economic crisis and the concomitant weakening of neoliberalism has challenged the effectiveness "information society" as a tool for creating and maintaining global capitalist hegemony.The notion that "information" or "knowledge" somehow dominates societies has a real foundation in the needs of developing capitalism regarding the organisation of large-scale production and exploitation of labour, the efficient movement of raw materials and goods by transportation, and the collection of information regarding market successes and failures, all of which are dictated by the imperatives of capitalist ec...

This article develops a critique of academic globalization theory from the viewpoint of media and communications. First, it discusses the overall importance of media and communications for the core argument of globalization theory, namely that the contemporary period has witnessed a dramatic shift in the spatio-temporal constitution of society. This is followed by a reconstruction and critique of such a line of reasoning in the work of two notable globalization theorists, Manuel Castells and Arjun Appadurai. It is argued that their positions are founded on an overtly mediacentric and unhistorical treatment of globalization that lacks a critical materialist analysis of how the global media sphere has developed in the recent decades. It is further argued that such positions can be understood in the context of the rise of neoliberalism that overlaps with the development of globalization theory. Critical Sociology 38(2)and cultural analysis, to the point of establishing a new theoretical orthodoxy that we can define as globalization theory.Despite its hold on the academic imagination, globalization theory has received its share of criticism. Several commentators have pointed to the indeterminacy and ambiguity of 'globalization', characterizing it, for example, as a concept that creates 'an accumulation of confusion rather than an accumulation of knowledge' (Van der Bly, 2005: 890-91). In light of such suspicions, a remarkable feature of globalization discourse in academia has been its resilience. An important reason why the concept of globalization has gained such a firm foothold in academia is due to the fact that it is not only used to describe a host of changes in social and cultural life, but that it has also been developed into a theory or explanation of their causes and consequences. The attempt to ascribe huge causal importance for globalization has been discussed and criticized on a general theoretical level -especially by Rosenberg (2000Rosenberg ( , 2005 -but the specific ways in which globalization theorists have centred on changes in media, especially media and communications technologies, in such efforts has received less attention. Yet, arguments about media and communications are of crucial importance for the claim that because of globalization, society is currently undergoing transformations of epochal proportions.In this article, I will focus critically on the role played by media and communications in the works of sociological and cultural theorists of globalization. In the first section, I will elaborate on the core elements of globalization theory and specify the centrality of media and communications for them. Even though the strategy of concentrating on new means of communication has helped to make the concept of globalization analytically more precise, it is a highly problematic strategy in various ways. In the following two sections, I will bring forward difficulties in how two noted theorists of globalization (Manuel Castells and Arjun Appadurai) have approached media and communications in th...

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