Emerging,attracting and challenging: how some of the world's largest media companies perceive their challenges and opportunities in China

China's emerging media market, despite having heavy entry regulations, attracts foreign companies that suffer from saturation and stagnation in their home markets. This paper seeks to provide an understanding of how some of the world's largest media companies perceive their opportunities and challenges in China by discussing research interviews with company managers. It analyzes the findings of the interviews in the light of existing conceptualizations, which suggest that in emerging and opening media markets, cultural barriers to the success of imported media increase with the waning interest in foreign media and the increasing strength of the domestic media industry. The article suggests that Chinese audiences will become more inwardly oriented in their media tastes and that if the Chinese media market opens further in the future, the existing advantages that the Western media companies appear to have over their Chinese counterparts will have diminished by that time.     

Managerial power in the German model: the case of Bertelsmann and the antecedents of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Our article extends research on authoritarian neoliberalism to Germany, through a history of the Bertelsmann media corporation – sponsor and namesake of Germany’s most influential neoliberal think-tank. Our article makes three moves. Firstly, we argue that conceptualizing German neoliberalism in terms of an ‘ordoliberal paradigm’ is of limited use in explaining the rise and fall of Germany’s distinctive socio-economic model (Modell Deutschland). Instead, we locate the origins of authoritarian tendencies in the corporate power exercised by managers rather than in the power of state-backed markets imagined by ordoliberals. Secondly, we focus on the managerial innovations of Bertelsmann as a key actor enmeshed with Modell Deutschland. We show that the adaptation of business management practices of an endogenous ‘Cologne School’ empowered Bertelsmann’s postwar managers to overcome existential crises and financial constraints despite being excluded from Germany’s corporate support network. Thirdly, we argue that their further development in the 1970s also enabled Bertelsmann to curtail and circumvent the forms of labour representation associated with Modell Deutschland. Inspired by cybernetic management theories that it used to limit and control rather than revive market competition among its workforce, Bertelsmann began to act and think outside the postwar settlement between capital and labour before the settlement’s hotly-debated demise since the 1990s.