Culture, services, knowledge : television between policy regimes

The chapter takes an explicit policy-oriented focus and tracks television as it has been or could be deliberated on across policy 'regimes'. These three grids of understanding – 'culture', 'services', and 'knowledge' - also serve as historical and/or possible rationales for state intervention in television, as well as the industry's own understandings of its nature and role. To emphasize the dynamic, overlapping and in part contesting nature of these regimes, I use Raymond Williams' (1981: 204) distinction between residual, dominant and emergent cultural forces. The first, residual, regime, that of cultural policy, is of well-established vintage for television but is under siege. The second, the dominant, the service industry model, is the most widespread regime. The third, emergent, regime, the place of television in the knowledge economy, is embryonic at this stage of its development