In this chapter, I argue that actor-network theory, or ANT as it is commonly referred to, has much to offer media studies. I am not the first one to suggest so. A growing number of media scholars have commented upon ANT, or have used some of its concepts in their analysis of media (e.g. Couldry 2001 and 2008; Hemingway 2009; Kendall and Wickham 2001; De Valck 2006; Muecke 2009; Bennett 2005). This chapter aims to make a contribution to this burgeoning intersection of actor-network theory and media studies, and also explain why ANT seems to be such a productive framework for understanding contemporary media. The main argument is that ANT's highly original ontology of the social yields insights into how our contemporary media ‘function’, and can thus help us grasp them, especially regarding media production. In parallel, the article argues that ANT can bring together questions and issues that previously had been scattered across the divide between political economy and cultural studies.

Within cultural studies the category of production is something of a newcomer. The reason for the late arrival of production can be explained by cultural studies’ feud with political economy during the 1980s and 1990s, exemplified by Grossberg (1995), Garnham (1995), or the essays collected in the Cultural studies in question reader (Ferguson and Golding 1997). The arguments are well-rehearsed and only need to be mentioned in passing. Based on different readings of Marx, both approaches constructed different analytical tools for understanding media. Cultural studies foregrounded the centrality of ideology or hegemony, a textualist approach to the media, and the interpretative freedom of the audience. Political economy, on the other hand, underscored questions of ownership, institutions and regulations, and was generally less attentive towards textuality and the reception side of things. This led to a division of labour: political economy studied production, whereas cultural studies focussed on texts and reception.

However, since 2000, we have witnessed a lull in the hostilities between the two approaches. This, in turn, has led to a resurgence of production as a field of study within cultural studies. From different theoretical and political perspectives, several strains of cultural studies started to study cultural production. Roughly two main approaches can be distinguished: neo-Foucaultians and the cultural economy tradition.