Making Sense of Mobile Media. Institutional Working Notions, Strategies and Actions in Convergent Media Markets

Abstract

This thesis is a study of how established institutions within the media and telecom industries act in times of change, using the first decade of the 2000s as its time frame. As an emerging field that has inspired high expectations but also much uncertainty, mobile media has been a leading subject of scholarly investigation. Located mainly within the management of technological innovation tradition, this thesis discusses how incumbent institutions, with their legacies from the traditional media and telecom industries, make sense of the mobile device as a media platform, as well as how they translate their perceptions into plans and actions. Furthermore, this thesis connects the development of mobile media to other, more far-reaching developments—technological, cultural and economic—within the media and telecom industries. Hence it considers how mobile-media perceptions and facilitations are related to the more general developments of media convergence, changing audience relations and challenging new-media business models. It concentrates on well-established institutions from the Norwegian media and telecom markets—the incumbent telecom operator Telenor, the public service broadcaster NRK, the tabloid newspaper VG, the commercial television channel TV 2 and the commercial radio channel P4 in particular. This thesis relies upon a multifold definition of the term “strategy” and distinguishes further among strategies as plans, patterns and perspectives. Hence, it analyses not only what these institutions say they plan to do (and what they actually do) regarding mobile media but also the foundation of these decisions—that is, industry perceptions and working notions. The latter term is given particular attention in this thesis, because analyses of strategies as plans or patterns can mislead us into believing that the institution’s decision-making processes are linear and rational and driven by well-documented goals and aims. On the other hand, studies that incorporate working notions - where different working notions compete and where the dominant working notion might even change over time - provide a more chaotic but ultimately more dynamic and realistic representation of reality. This thesis aims to substantiate why, and outline how, this is so.