continued: "Reconsidering cultural imperialism theory" by Livingston A. White
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Tables / References

The theory lacks precise definitions. The lack of conceptual precision or consensus has been a major obstacle to the development of a precise theory to inform research on cultural imperialism (Fejes, 1981; Lee, 1988). This is evident in the myriad definitions that have been offered by different critical theorists. In addition to Boyd-Barrett's and Schiller's definitions stated earlier, others such as Beltran have offered their own interpretation of cultural imperialism. For Beltran (1987), cultural imperialism is "a verifiable process of social influence by which a nation imposes on other countries its set of beliefs, values, knowledge and behavioral norms as well as its overall style of life" (p. 184). Said (1993) actually separates the term cultural imperialism in his book "Culture and Imperialism" and he offers a straightforward definition of imperialism and colonialism. For Said, imperialism means "the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory" (p. 9). Sui-Nam Lee (1988) analyzed various terms relating to cultural imperialism, criticizing the theory for not being specific. But he does not help in making it any more specific as he proposes the use of yet another term - "communication imperialism" - complicating the notion of cultural imperialism. Table one gives an overview of various definitions of cultural imperialism.

The theory does not acknowledge the active media audience member. Active audience theorists, such as Tamar Liebes and Ien Ang, have conducted research illustrating how domestic audiences respond to Western media in an attempt to prove that cultural imperialism does not exist. Liebes studied the impact of the popular TV program "Dallas" in Israel. According to Schiller (1989), the "New York Times" generously devoted half a page to a discussion of Liebes work asserting that it "relates to a larger debate about the so-called American cultural imperialism - the extent to which American programs, art, culture, and other values are exported and overwhelm those of foreign countries."

Applying the active-audience frame of analysis, the study included four groups of Israeli viewers: Israeli Arabs, Moroccan Jewish immigrants, kibbutz members, and new Russian immigrants. Liebes found that the message imparted by "Dallas" depended on the viewer's values and varied according to the experiences of the particular group to which the viewer belonged. The viewer, therefore, actively produces meaning while consuming the media product or program. Another academic, Ien Ang, has also supported this finding through studying the impact of "Dallas" to confront what she termed "a stubborn fixation on the threat of American cultural imperialism" (as cited in Schiller, 1989, p. 150).

The theory is not supported in all situations of information exchange between nations. Australian scholars, Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham (1996), have published a book that presents scholarly writings on the television industries of periphery nations such as India, Brazil, Mexico, the Middle East, Canada and Australia to prove that the cultural imperialism theory does not hold true in all situations. For example, the Mexican based, Televisa, which produces 78% of all its programming and the Brazilian Globo Network, which produces 80%, have managed to secure and dominate their domestic markets to a degree unmatched by any English-speaking market. These new patterns in global television have been explained by scholars such as Straubhaar (2000) who posits that 'cultural proximity', a concept describing the way "audiences will tend to prefer that programming which is closest or most proximate to their own culture: national programming if it can be supported by the local economy" (p. 4), is responsible for media industries dominating a market and not necessarily "cultural imperialism."

Responses to criticisms
Schiller responded to the criticism from active audience proponents in his 1989 work "Culture, Inc." In that book he argued, in reference to Liebes' dissertation, that

Assuredly, this was a finding most agreeable to the producers [of American media content] and one that sharply rebuffed the worriers who championed a new international information order. How heartening to the cultural message makers to learn that cultural imperialism does not exist! Each audience receives and makes its own message. Liebes concluded: "The idea of a simple 'American' message imposing itself in the same way on viewers all over the world is simply not valid."

But who would have made such a claim in the first place? The transfer of cultural values is a complex matter. It is not a one-shot hypodermic innoculation of individual plots and character representations. It involves the much more difficult to measure acceptance of deep-structured meanings that may not even be explicitly stated. Can the transfer, for example, of acquisitive or consumerist perspectives be simply quantified? (Schiller, 1989, p. 149).

In another article by Schiller (1991), he also responded further to active audience theorists, asking "How can one propose to extract one TV show, film, book, or even a group, from the now nearly seamless media-cultural environment and examine it (them) for specific effects?" (p. 24). He goes on further to question how can a researcher specify the individual source of an idea, value, perspective, or reaction. According to Schiller an individual's response, for example, to the television series "Dallas" may be the result of "half-forgotten images from a dozen peripheral encounters in the cultural supermarket" (p. 24).

An evaluation of the criticism and the theoretician's response
The intention of presenting some of the various definitions of cultural imperialism is to demonstrate the range of thinking about the theory. Some may argue that this diversity is good as scholars with similar interests in imperialism would have a tacit but nevertheless mutual understanding of the various terms. But to scholars and students studying the theory for the first time and interested in learning more about it, these various definitions of the theory may be interpreted as inconsistency and confusion among the theoreticians.

Potter (1996) offers a typology for definitions in his analysis of qualitative research methods. Definitions, he purports, can be direct, indirect, that is, contrasting type, component-type, procedural-type, product-type. Using a similar approach to analyzing the various cultural imperialism definitions, one recognizes that cultural imperialism theorists have offered differing kinds of definitions (see table one) that have resulted in a broadening of the concept into different interpretations rather than a limiting of its definition to a precise interpretation. These different interpretations of the theory can be attributed to the fact that the critical school of theory-building is based on an ontological assumption of the nature of reality that acknowledges the existence of multiple realities, as well as a naturalistic, qualitative approach that celebrates diversity and differences in interpretation.

But one cannot merely denigrate cultural imperialism because of a lack of definitive precision. One must recognize and accept cultural imperialism for what it is - a critical theory; and as Litttlejohn (1999) argues "critical theories consist of a loose confederation [italics added] of ideas held together by a common interest in the quality of communication and human life" (p. 15). Critical theories therefore operate at a macro-level, albeit less specific, rather than at the micro-level. Cultural imperialism focuses on broader, less explicit issues of culture, transnational media and political economy while active audience theory focuses on the individual audience members.

One will note that this is one of the basic premises of the argument that cultural imperialists have used in defending the theory. Schiller, in response to active audience proponents, has contended that these researchers are basically trying to apply cultural imperialism to the micro-level or individual audience members and the theory does not attempt to explain this. Instead, the theory is designed for application to macro-level situations such as the flow of information between countries.

Schiller has also criticized the methodology of active audience researchers. Clearly, cultural imperialism cannot be studied from a purely positivistic quantitative perspective. Implicit in his critique, cited earlier, is the notion that cultural imperialism is a long-term process and therefore cannot be analyzed with "one-shot" analyses. An examination of cultural imperialism requires longitudinal analyses with media audience cohorts. But the studies that have been designed to test the theory have employed both qualitative and quantitative methods with some studies using a triangulation of methods. This leads us to an analysis of the cultural imperialism literature.

An evaluation of the set of empirical studies designed to test the theory
Researchers, writing from a critical as well as a social scientific perspective, have done studies to test cultural imperialism. As Ware and Dupagne (1994) point out, "in the last decade [1985-1995], the number of qualitative and quantitative studies dealing with the impact of U.S. television on foreign audiences has increased dramatically" (p. 947). The impact of television on foreign audiences has been used as a test for the cultural imperialism thesis.

Size of literature. In determining the size of literature that pertains to cultural imperialism, keyword searches were conducted on an online library catalogue and an electronic index of communication serials (Comindex). "Cultural imperialism" and "media imperialism" were two main keywords used in searching titles of scholarly works. A search of the 94 communication journals of Comindex yielded 13 articles that had these words in their titles. Articles applying cultural imperialism to areas not involving media were ignored. An informal content analysis of the list of references found at the end of articles was conducted and those works that had the keywords in their titles were considered as literature relating to this theory. These have been collated in table two. These sources are by no means exhaustive but nevertheless those listed represent major sources cited most often in the literature. A sum of 27 journal articles and 14 books addressing cultural imperialism from a media perspective were found, totaling just over 40 works.

Degree and quality of empirical support. Studies found in the literature search have tended to criticize the shortcomings of cultural imperialism by doing research that refutes the theory's proposition. Researchers have "rejected the conspiratorial notion of Schiller's media imperialism by arguing that economics, audience preferences, government policies, and new technologies are important mediating or explanatory variables for the nature and direction of international program flow" (Ware and Dupagne, 1994, p. 947).

Research on cultural imperialism include: content analyses of media programming in developing countries (e.g. Sengupta and Frith, 1997); cross-cultural effects research, primarily based on surveys, stressing external validity through the use of large random samples, rather than a "thick description" of the phenomenon under study (e.g. Brown, 1995); and cross cultural reception analyses, primarily based on in-depth interviews and discourse analyses, emphasizing the importance of context, a multi-faceted condition that influences how viewers react to and derive meaning from television program messages (e.g. Liebes and Katz, 1990). Other scholars have compiled scholarly articles by various authors that analyze trends in media industries in various developing countries (e.g. Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham, 1996). Still yet, others have done meta-analyses of studies on foreign television's impact on local audiences using cultural imperialism as a framework for analyzing the various studies (e.g. Ware and Dupagne, 1994).

Elasmar and Hunter (1997) also did a similar meta-analysis of foreign television's impact on domestic audiences. However, unlike Ware and Dupagne, they do not use a single theory for analyzing their sample of 177 studies done between 1965 to 1994. Instead, as part of their analysis, they note how the theory has been used as the background to some of the research projects. They found that only 11% of all 177 studies used cultural imperialism as a theory for analyzing foreign media impact on local audiences.

Interestingly, most of the studies have narrowly focused on the effects of foreign television, in particular United States programming, on local audiences as an empirical test of cultural imperialism (Land, 1992; Ware and Dupagne, 1994; Elasmar and Hunter, 1997). Ware and Dupagne indicate that to conduct such a test, researchers have generally used "(1) critical analysis, (2) empirical analysis at the macro (i.e., country) level, or (3) empirical analysis at the micro (i.e., individual) level" (p. 947). The flow of international or foreign news between countries is another phenomenon that scholars attempt to explain using the framework of cultural imperialism (Meyer, 1988). Other forms of media such as radio and print are usually ignored. Laing (1986) recognizes this when he does an analysis of music using the cultural imperialism perspective.

From all these studies done, one could easily make the erroneous conclusion that a plethora of works on cultural imperialism obviously means there is empirical support for the theory. But a careful perusal of most of the literature will reveal that there is not much empirical support for cultural imperialism, because the majority of the research does not support the thesis. One is not surprised that this is the case. This lack of empirical support is definitely expected as many researchers do not follow a precisely defined set of propositions with specific concepts while designing their empirical test. In fact, there is no model to follow. At best, researchers base their work on their own interpretations of various purported meanings of cultural imperialism. How then can they be sure that they are all measuring or studying the same phenomenon when almost every other researcher has developed his or her own definition and interpretation of cultural imperialism? continued

Next page: A comparison of cultural imperialism and other theories

References
Tables:
Various definitions of cultural imperialism
A list of authors who have written on cultural imperialism