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This chapter examines the potential of media distribution, and the balance of structure and agency enacted in different approaches to it, to inform our view of a wide array of major social and scholarly concerns. In particular, it considers the key role played by the technologies and practices of media distribution in the conditions under which people congregate and imagine their communities. It first explores the impact of distribution on the conditions of media work in the media industries, paying attention to media ownership models and their effect on media distribution strategies. It then discusses the ability of online distribution networks to spur social change by cutting across social and regional boundaries and helping to reconfigure them; how distribution renders societal groups and subcultures visible; how states impinge on distribution as a form of political oppression; and how distribution platforms can promote public participation. It also analyzes the implications of distribution platforms for political activism as well as for film and literary culture.

This chapter discusses the social relations of franchising, the industrial structures they enable, and the cultural discourses historically brought to bear on media objects to conceive them in the terms of “franchising.” This requires an analysis that begins outside of media studies to consider the history of franchising as a means of sharing business formats within the retail industries. Although retail franchising does not perfectly fit into media production, the social relations shared by both allows for a better understanding of the industrial exchanges facilitated in and by media franchising. The chapter also examines how media work has already been theorized and imagined as franchising by practitioners, critics, and consumers; as well as the cultural consequences of franchising through the lens of gender.

This introductory chapter asserts that management must be understood as a much wider network of cultural power, negotiated by participants at all levels in institutional hierarchies. Management, in this sense, is a culture of shifting discourses and dispositions that create meaning, generate value, and shape media work throughout each moment of production and consumption. For this understanding, the chapter draws from organizational sociology and critical theory in examining how historically situated ideas about management operate as modes of managerial identity formation. Though management has become an important practice in the contemporary era of branding, IP licensing, and convergence, management as a discursive category has existed for a long time. Its functions, representations, and dispositions have changed in accordance with both industrial and cultural shifts.