Bernard Miège

Bernard Miège (born 1941) is a French media theorist and academic administrator. He is Emeritus Professor of Communication and Information Science (Professeur émérite de sciences de l'information et de la communication) at Stendhal University in Grenoble. He was educated at Paris University, both in political studies and in economics. He has a Ph.D. in economics (Paris) and another Ph. D in humanities (Bordeaux). He is the author of fifteen works in the following fields: the cultural industries, the introduction of the technologies of information and communication in the society and in the organisations, and the analysis of the theories of communication.

Contents

• Work available online
• Selected works
• References

He is one of the most influential founders of the 'cultural industries', approach, which signified a break from Adorno and Horkheimer's influential theorisation of the 'Culture Industry'. While Adorno and Horkheimer saw culture as subsumed by capital, and by an abstract mode of 'instrumental reason', Miège rejected what he saw as their economic determinism, arguing that the cultural industries were far more complex than their analysis allowed for. They were not a unified field, and he argued that whilst there was indeed increased commodification of culture by the introduction of industrial methods of production, this new technology also created the possibilities for new exciting innovations. Miège's work has been highly influential, in particular on communication studies in the UK, influencing important academic commentators on the media such as Nicholas Garnham and David Hesmondhalgh.

Bernard Miège served as the president of Stendhal University from 1989 to 1994. In 2006 Bernard Miège received an honorary doctorate in communications from Université du Québec à Montréal. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest in 2004.