Synopsis :
'This book provides vital insights into the elements of strategy and their application to media firms. Solidly grounded in theory but not pedantic, it is essential reading for those who make or wish to comprehend choices of media companies' - Robert Picard, University of Jonkoping, Sweden. 'Insightful, contextually analytical, yet easy to comprehend, "Strategic Management in the Media" successfully applies the adaptive and interpretative areas of strategic theory in the media sectors. It provides a unique perspective in which common themes linking media strategy and industry environment are thoughtfully discussed' - Sylvia M. Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida. '...an invaluable asset for students of media management. The use of pertinent examples and case studies throughout brings the analysis to life and contributes to a highly readable introduction' - Gillian Doyle, University of Glasgow. This book is a comprehensive, accessible and expert introduction to strategy within a media management context. It is divided into two parts - part one provides an introduction to and overview of the media industry from a strategic management perspective, looking in detail at the sectors that together comprise the industry - newspaper, book and magazine publishing, music, radio and television - and the strategic forces at work in each. This provides the foundation for part two, which analyses a number of strategic topics central to the media sector, such as technological change, organisational structure, leadership, and creativity and innovation. The chapters follow the same structure: the relevant theory is outlined, its application to the media industry is discussed, and case studies from the media industry are used to illustrate the theory and illuminate its relevance for the media field. The cases and examples used come from all sectors of the industry and a range of geographic regions and include News Corporation, Endemol, BBC, Bertelsmann, CNN, MTV, Disney and Pixar.
Extrait:
Page xiii-xv
Because institutional science has become so conservative, so limited by the conventional paradigms, some of the most fundamental problems are either ignored, treated as taboo, or put at the bottom of the scientific agenda. They are anomalies; they don't fit in. For example, the direction-finding abilities of migratory and homing animals, such as monarch butterflies and homing pigeons, are very mysterious. They have not yet been explained in terms of orthodox science, and perhaps they cannot be. But direction-finding by animals is a low-status field of research, compared with, say, molecular biology, and very few scientists work on it. Nevertheless, relatively simple investigations of homing behaviour could transform our under understanding of animal nature, and at the same time lead to the discovery of forces, fields, or influences at preset unknown to physics. And such experiments need cost very little, as I show in this book. They are well within the capacity of many people who are not professional scientists. Indeed those best qualities to do this research would be pigeon fanciers, of whom there are more than five million worldwide.
In the past, most scientific research was carried out by amateurs; and amateurs, by definition, are people who do something because they love it. Charles Darwin, for example, never held any institutional post; he worked independently at his home in Kent, studying barnacles, writing, keeping pigeons, and doing experiments in the garden with his son Francis. Nut from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, science has been increasingly professionalized. And since the 1950s, there has been a vast expansion of institutional research. There are now only a handful of independent scientists, the best known being James Lovelock, the leading proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, which is based on the idea that the Earth is a living organism. And although amateur naturalists and freelance inventors still exist, they have been marginalized. . . I envisage a complementary relationship between non-professional and professional researchers, the former having a greater freedom to pioneer new areas of research, and the latter a more rigorous approach, enabling new discoveries to be confirmed and incorporated into the growing body of science.
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