I remember a textbook written by one of my favorite professors at university. When I bought it, I could literally feel the magnitude and scope of the subject. It weighted so much, because it had over a thousand pages, and yet, I read that book cover-to-cover several times during my studies, and this memory continues to bring a smile on my face when I think about it. Eli Noam’s book inspires the same feeling of magnitude, scope, and comprehensiveness. Despite its sheer size and scope, it is eloquently written, which makes it approachable. It is relevant, because it bridges scientific knowledge, concepts, and understandings for graduate students and professionals with an aspiration to act with practical relevance and skill.
If you aspire to develop yourself as a media manager, you might wonder: “What makes media management special?” (Lowe, Citation2016). To answer this question, Eli Noam reviews micro- and macro-economic factors that help answer this in a balanced manner. In short, he sustains that unique incentives, demands, and constraints pale those of industrial production or other services (Noam, Citation2019). Maybe because this topic is highly disputed across the academic field (Küng, Citation2007; Achtenhagen & Mierzejewska, Citation2016; Picard & Lowe, Citation2016), he inspires his readers by elucidating that “the media industries are also a driver of change, leading technological innovation, testing new organizational practices, and transforming societal institutions and culture” (Noam, Citation2019, p. 4). This creates the basis for a comprehensive overview of different management functions that follows.
Essentially, the book covers a plethora of management functions and departments and their application to media management. He chooses to organize his content in classical manner, focusing on functions in organizations. These range very broadly from creating media content, concerning media production, to applying technology management, HR, financing, asset management, law, regulation, toward understanding the market and selling the products and services successfully. It is complemented by knowledge around controlling, accounting, and strategy. By doing so, the book achieves significant depth and scope. It could potentially claim to be exhaustive of all ”classical” content that managers need to know. As such, it can also serve as a reliable source of reference, no matter if the interest is on a qualitative appreciation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Open Innovation and Community-Based R&D, as well as quantitative topics, such as Demand System Modeling, Network Analysis, Price Modeling, and finance.
At the same time, one might argue that the management challenge that many if not all managers face today, is to manage processes and practices across functions, preferably in strategic, well-executed and reflective manner (Horst, Järventie-Thesleff, & Baumann, Citation2019). This demands a good deal of leadership that can be conceptualized as a practice that aims to bridge all the messy tendencies across and within organizational functions (Raelin, Citation2017). Furthermore, the challenges that media managers face, such as eroding markets, new forms of competition, different workstyles, new technologies, and many other disruptive tendencies in the media industry, but also across markets on a global scale, certainly make it a daunting task to be a manager today, even if you are “just managing your startup” centered around digital media (Horst, Järventie-Thesleff, & Perez-Latre, Citation2019). And while the book might be seen to fall short on explaining the latest strategic and leadership challenges in detail, Eli Noam maps these edges briefly and invites the reader to consider the challenges that new business models, new structures, new regulation, globalization, and organizational as well as personal responsibilities today entail for being a manager. In my view, the book does exactly what it is supposed to do: To cover the breadth of the field of media management and the functions of organizations. It provides a rich perspective on managing media and digital organizations today. It acts as guide and foundation for any well-versed generalist that we can only hope we aspire our students to become. For all else, it caters to the curiosity of the reader to learn more and develop oneself as a media manager in the world today.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
- Achtenhagen, L., & Mierzejewska, B. (2016). The development of media management as an academic field: Tracing the contents and impact of its three leading journals. In G. F. Lowe & C. Brown (Eds.), Managing media firms and industries: What’s so special about media management? (pp. 23–42). Heidelberg: Springer.
- Horst, S.-O., Järventie-Thesleff, R., & Perez-Latre, F. J. (2019). Entrepreneurial identity development through digital media. Journal of Media Business Studies, 17(2), 87–112. doi:10.1080/16522354.2019.1689767
- Horst, S.-O., Järventie-Thesleff, R., & Baumann, S. (2019). The practice of shared inquiry: How actors manage for strategy emergence. Journal of Media Business Studies, 16(3), 202–229. doi:10.1080/16522354.2019.1641672
- Küng, L. (2007). Does media management matter? Establishing the scope, rationale, and future research agenda for the discipline. Journal of Media Business Studies, 4(1), 21–39. doi:10.1080/16522354.2007.11073444
- Lowe, G. F. (2016). Introduction: What’s so special about media management? In G. F. Lowe & C. Brown (Eds.), Managing media firms and industries: What’s so special about media management? (pp. 1–20). Heidelberg: Springer.
- Noam, E. M. (2019). Managing Media and Digital Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan (Springer): Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71288-8
- Picard, R. G., & Lowe, G. F. (2016). Questioning media management scholarship: Four parables about how to better develop the field. Journal of Media Business Studies, 13(2), 61–72. doi:10.1080/16522354.2016.1176781
- Raelin, J. A. (2017). Leadership-as-practice: Theory and application—An editor’s reflection. Leadership, 13(2), 215–221. doi:10.1177/1742715017702273