This article seeks a dialectical critique of and synthesis between two conflicting paradigms. In exploring the changing structures and global markets of Hollywood's media industrial complex, it draws on, but also critiques, post-Fordist accounts of corporate change and market competition. It identifies the new dominance of the multi-divisional corporate structure and its combination with subsidiary and subcontractor modes of inter-corporate relations together with a new emphasis on branding to tap into segmented global markets. The second paradigm, the political economy of the media approach, has failed, to its detriment, to draw on or to engage theoretically with post-Fordist discussions. This is largely because post-Fordist accounts implicitly or explicitly suggest that one of the central dynamics of advanced capitalism - namely, its tendency towards the centralization and concentration of capital (the Three Cs Thesis) - is being corrected or reversed. Political economy rightly refutes this but we have to explain why the real relations take the appearance-forms (of autonomy and plurality) that they do and how this connects to the cultural dimension of the media-industrial complex. The analysis includes a case study of Disney as a multi-integrated corporation.
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