Theoretical Explorations of Asian Television

Review by Sanjay Asthana
Middle Tennessee State University

Imagi-Nations and Borderless Television: Media, Culture and Politics Across Asia, Amos Owen Thomas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005, $59.95/$29.95, ISBN 0-7619-3395-6 hard, 0-7619-3396-4 paper, 289 pp.

The book by Amos Owen Thomas, professor of International Business at the Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands, is an exploratory study of the growth and development of transnational television in Asia, and examines particular national, regional and the global contexts relating to television policies, programming, and media markets in three regions of the Asia – Indian subcontinent, Malay archipelago, and Greater China. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with advertisers, television producers, and policymakers, coupled with numerous surveys conducted over a ten-year period – 1990s to 2000 – Thomas presents a broad overview of how satellite television led to major shifts in regulation and deregulation of media, policy discussions, and increasing consumerism, among other things. Thomas brings the business and market-based materials to analyze transnational television in Asia, and indicates that the book is “both a chronicle and creative outcome of a personal journey of discovery over the mid-1990s into the early 2000s within television and advertising industries in Asia, not to mention the increasing convergent media, communications, telephony and information industries” (p. 10). Consequently, what we have in the book is substantial background information and reference materials that are interpreted in terms of globalization theories.

Imagi-Nations and Borderless Television is organized in nine chapters. Chapter two provides background information on various regional, national, transnational television channels, networks, and satellite providers, and chapter three briefly discusses various theories of globalization in the context of television. Since the main focus of the book is to look at the comparative contexts of television in Asia, chapter four presents a six-fold typology to study government policies towards transnational media. Drawing insights from Joseph Man Chan’s four-fold typology that examined governmental regulatory policies in the face of increasing privatization of media, Thomas extends Chan’s model to examine how governments responded to increasing liberalization, privatization, and regulation of media.

Chapters five, six, and seven are case studies of the Indian subcontinent (India), Malay Archipelago (Indonesia and Malaysia), and Greater China (China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). By placing his overall arguments in terms of a six-fold typology, Thomas unpacks how governments and television industries responded to increasing transnationalization of television in their respective countries. These chapters also discuss how domestic, national and regional alliances and influences shaped the evolution of television. In the context of India, Thomas astutely points out that the dual process of “globalising domestic television and domesticating transnational television” is part of the same dialectic of marketisation of economy that can be discerned in the context of Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as well. However, he points out that it does not have a homogenizing effect (p. 128). The last two chapters of the book place the findings of the case studies to examine comparatively aspects of globalization in relation to television.

To understand the strategic management of transnational television in these societies, and to situate media and development, Thomas adapts Howard Frederick’s theories of global communication as micro, mid-range, and macro-level theories. Using an “analytic grid,” Thomas provides an explication of the impact of transnational television in terms of four broad themes: politico-economic environment, media/broadcasting environment, socio-cultural environment, and advertising/marketing environment (presented as a flowchart, p. 180). Each of these themes is underpinned by a series of factors that are either salient or not depending on the particular country. Thomas studies instances of transnationalization of television in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China through this analytic grid. The final chapter revisits the arguments outlined in chapter one regarding how politico-economic and socio-cultural issues have shaped transnational television in Asia: that is, a series of principles as choices that many developing nations face as they navigate transnationalization of media and television. Some important ideas discussed in these chapters have implications to how we may conceptualize media convergence in Asia as well.

Overall, the book by Thomas offers some interesting counterpoints to theoretical explorations of media globalization in Asia. Thomas usefully draws upon concepts like “hybridity of cultures” to explain that globalization of media cannot be understood in terms of cultural imperialism, and shows how program formats and television narratives disclose aspects of cultural hybridity. The particular focus on “marketization of economy” in terms of how transnational television is developing is refreshing. However, I find that the book has limitations when applying specific analytic and theoretical frameworks – whether through the “six-fold typology” or the “analytic grid.” For instance, though Thomas critiqued several globalization theories for being normative and functionalist, his six-fold typology considers the governmental policy responses to transnational television in terms of specific functionalist and normative criteria: active suppression, latent suppression, complacent inaction, prudent inaction, etc. Furthermore, he does not consider the work of Monroe Price who has developed, in my view, a cogent approach to unpack how governments respond to the globalization of media. Price’s model could have been an able foil to Thomas’s own formulation, and would have steered Thomas’s typology from the normative and functionalist biases. The normative and functionalist issue comes up again in the analytic grid model that Thomas proposes. Although the four themes outlined in the grid can be seen as a useful analytic strategy, the overall reliance on normative and functional approach indeed has limitations in examining the particular articulations of national and global dialectic in transnational television. The last chapter is rather short and could have been more analytical. A more sustained engagement with nationalism, citizenship, and diasporic identities, especially in terms that Thomas points out as “re-imagining” nations, would have been in order. However, Imagi-Nations and Borderless Television is important work on transnational television in Asia, and brings insights from the academic world as well as the industry.