Modernization theory

Critical theory
Among the substantial body of research undertaken by the Frankfurt School theorists, the concept of the 'culture industry', first used by Adorno and Horkheimer in a book entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment written in 1944 and published in 1947, has received the widest international attention. Analysing the industrial production of cultural goods - films, radio programmes, music and magazines, etc. - as a global movement, they argued that in capitalist societies the trend was towards producing culture as a commodity (Adorno, 1991). Adorno and Horkheimer believed that cultural products manifested the same kind of management practices, technological rationality and organiza­tio­nal schemes as the mass-produced industrial goods such as cars. This 'assembly-line character', they argued, could be observed in 'the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs)' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979 [1947]: 163).
Such industrial production led to standardization, resulting in a mass culture made up of a series of objects bearing the stamp of the culture industry. This industrially produced and commodified culture, it was argued, led to a deterioration of the philosophical role of culture. In­stead, this mediated culture contributed to the incorporation of the working classes into the structures of advanced capitalism and in limiting their horizons to political and economic goals that could be realized within the capitalist system without challenging it. The critical theorists argued that the development of the 'culture industry' and its ability to ideologically inoculate the masses against socialist ideas benefited the ruling classes.
In an international context the idea of 'mass culture' and media and cultural industries has influenced debates about the flow of information between countries. The issue of the commodification of culture is present in many analyses of the operation of book publishing, film and popular music industries. One indication of this was the 1982 UNESCO report which argued that cultural industries in the world were greatly influenced by the major media and communication companies and were being continually corporatized. The expansion of mainly Western-based cultural products globally had resulted, it argued, in the gradual 'marginalisation of cultural messages that do not take the form of goods, primarily of values as marketable commodities' (UNESCO, 1982: 10).