Over the last forty years or so academic interest in ‘globalization’ has burgeoned, and, since the 1970s at least, attempts to define, analyse, and critically explain it have become vital areas of research and study across many disciplines. Moreover, if globalization is a defining phenomenon of our age, then it cannot begin to be understood without a close interrogation of the role of media and communications. Indeed, the complex relationship between macro and micro processes of globalization and the action of media and communications to create what the editor of this new Routledge collection describes as a ‘mediated globalization’ has, she argues, never been more significant.

As serious academic work on and around globalization and the media continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and is organized in four volumes.

Edited by Terhi Rantanen, Professor of Global Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, Globalization and the Media is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.