From the perspective of political economy, the deployment of
hegemony in cultural studies is seen as inevitably leading to an
uncritical focus on questions of consumption (see Garnham 1998).
More specifically, it is said that work on consumption in cultural
studies has vastly overestimated the power of consumers by failing
to keep in view the “determining” role of production. What this
seems to mean is that cultural studies should stop being cultural
studies and become instead political economy. So what has political
economy got to offer? According to Peter Golding and Graham
Murdock (1991: 15), political economy “sets out to show how
different ways of financing and organising cultural production have
traceable consequences for the range of discourses and representations
in the public domain and for audiences’ access to them” (my italics).
The significant word here is “access” (privileged over “appropriation,”