The strictest taboo : the marginalization of marxism in mainstream communication studies

Slaček Brlek, Aleksander Sašo (author), Mance, Boris (author)

Our study uses big data analysis to examine the influence of Marxism on communication studies throughout its history. We track citations of Marxist authors and the use of Marxist concepts in the titles, keywords, or abstracts of publications in the Web of Science scholarly database in the category of communication. We find that Marxian authors and ideas were almost completely absent from the mainstream of media studies until the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the Great Recession of 2008 significantly increased citations of Marxist authors. We use network analysis to identify different currents of thought or paradigmatic appropriations of Marxism within communication studies and identify five clusters of appropriation of Marx’s ideas within communication studies: Theories of Democracy, Political Economy of Communication, Critique of Power Relations, Feminism and Antiracism, and Critical Discourse Analysis.

• Language: English
• Keywords: Marxism, big data, network analysis, co-citation analysis, history of communication studies, Karl Marx
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 589–614
• Numbering: Vol. 50, iss. 4/5
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-158410
• UDC: 316.77
• ISSN on article: 0896-9205
• DOI: 10.1177/08969205231213281
• COBISS.SI-ID: 177403651
• Publication date in RUL: 07.06.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Critical sociology
• Shortened title: Crit. sociol.
• Publisher: SAGE, Association for Critical Sociology
• ISSN: 0896-9205
• COBISS.SI-ID: 25289728

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• Description: A creative commons license that bans commercial use, but the users don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: marksizem, veliki podatki, analiza socitiranja, analiza omrežij, zgodovina komunikacijskih študij, Karl Marx, tabuji

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: J5-1793
• Name: Vloga komunikacijskih neenakosti v dezintegraciji večnacionalne družbe

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P5-0051
• Name: Množični mediji, javna sfera in družbene spremembe