Bernard Miège

Who is Bernard Miège?

Bernard Miège is a French media theorist and academic administrator. He is Emeritus Professor of Communication and Information Science 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 and another Ph. D in humanities. 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.

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.