This dissertation explores the institutional practices that shape and inform internships within the public relations industry to shed light on the motivations and operating constraints that can lead to exploitive internship opportunities. It addresses how universities prepare emerging talent and the ways the public relations industry solicits labor. Theoretically informed by political economy of communication and cultural studies, this research builds on several key precepts, including creative autonomy, invisible labor, exploitation and practices of resistance, power dynamics within social structures, and investigates how hegemony is exercised through relations of power and consent. The investigation is pursued through three entry points: A textual analysis of PR News examines how trade publications influence the professional identities of PR practitioners to understand how the industry constructs the ideal public relations employee. This study argues PR News creates interoffice conflict between generations of professionals centered on the topic of professional development. Next, an institutional analysis of internship advertisements at the top 25 communications firms provides insights on how the culture industries solicit student workers, illicit emotional responses to the media text, exploit the ontological rewards of future employment, and governance structures that may conceal forms of exploitation. Lastly, in-depth interviews with interns shed light on how these young laborers negotiate creativity within corporate governance structures, as well as intern’s motivations to produce content without earning a paycheck. The conclusion summarizes findings, implications, real world applications, suggestions for future interns, as well as offers areas for future scholarship. / Media & Communication

This thesis examines the circulation of physical music media (78rpm records, LPs, CDs, tape) in the independent music marketplace. It is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Austin, Texas, amongst the producers of goods for the independent marketplace, independent music stores and consumers of these goods and services. Against prevailing constructivist interpretations, I will argue for the value of authenticity as an analytical anthropological concept because it unites what my research participants value about materiality, technology, and marketplace relationships. In the independent marketplace for physical music media, authenticity is a multi-local, multi-vocal phenomenon. A nexus of economic rationales, design, reproduction-technologies, histories and personal conduct interact in an ongoing process that authenticates music commodities and their marketplace. This means that particular commodities are sought out over others on account of the multi-local authenticities they anchor. The thesis firstly demonstrates how the independent music scene safeguards claims to authentic identities by constructing an opposition to the mainstream, drawing on discourses of ethical production and consumption, sound technologies, spaces of consumption and cultural production. Secondly, I will uncover how physical music media and sound-reproduction technologies are assessed as effective providers of authentic musical reproductions according to their historical contingencies and performative material capacities. Thirdly, I develop the notion of the scene (Shank 1994) from its previously genre-fixed perspective to encompass multiple musical styles operating within a common social network of producers, retailers and collectors. The pluralistic scene I describe utilises multiple musical genres and nuanced notions of materiality and authenticity to establish their complex hierarchy of sonic and technological experiences.

This thesis explores the Turkish book publishing industry within the framework of historical development of book publishing since Ottoman practice onwards and current structure of the Turkish book market. The aim of the thesis is to understand recent trends, developments, and problems in the Turkish book market, within its specific historical conditions and in a comparative method to the current structure of book publishing industry in developed countries where book publishing is a global business and highly integrated to other sectors of cultural commodity production. The hypothesis is that although there have been profound changes in the Turkish book publishing sector on the way towards industrialization during recent decade, especially after 2000s / book publishing in Turkey remained an &quot / infant industry&quot / and Turkish book publishing market is still unsaturated as a result of serious problems continuing in different cycles of circulating capital in the Turkish book market and in preconditions of profit-maximization and capital accumulation processes / impediments on the creation of a large mass of readers and new genres / lack of an industrial organization of book production and business, and belated developments in regulative-legal framework in copyright regime.