Photo by: https://prabook.com/web/herbert.schiller/625761
IAMCR is pleased to announce that the 2026 award in memory of Herbert I. Schiller will be awarded to Sanjay Jolly (University of Pennsylvania) for his paper titled: "Telecommunications, Digital Convergence, and the Unmaking of the Postwar Liberal Order, 1945-74".
The award will be formally presented at a special session during the IAMCR 2026 conference in Galway.
Telecommunications, Digital Convergence, and the Unmaking of the Postwar Liberal Order, 1945-74
Abstract
Submitted to Political Economy Section (POE)
This paper provides a historical account of how digital communications shaped the global conjuncture of the early 1970s. It argues that cross-border digital networks were constitutive of postwar Keynesianism while simultaneously becoming subject to social forces antagonistic to the liberal order’s structural limitations.
Over nearly three decades, liberal political and economic arrangements were beset by a heterogeneous set of tendential pressures: the contradictions of structuring postwar U.S. hegemony in multilateral institutions, the divergent interests of telecommunications monopolies and ascendant vectors of U.S. capital, the international expansion of commercial banking, intra-capitalist industrial competition, social unrest tied to antiwar sentiment and labor conflict, and Third World efforts to reform international property relations. In the early 1970s, these elements converged in the dramatic breakdown of the postwar class settlement. As the United States struggled to forge a strategic response to its declining hegemony, digital networks furnished the material and ideological means to reorganize capitalist social relations through new modes of accumulation. The liberalization of telecommunications, unshackling of international finance, and defenestration of labor all developed as tendencies within and against embedded liberalism.
However, it was not until the mid-1970s that they were fully embraced by the state to attend to crises for which previous levers proved insufficient. Whereas communication networks had always figured in U.S. imperial statecraft, they soon became the leading edge of American economic policy for both foreign and domestic purposes, requiring new steering institutions, legitimating narratives, and vigorous defenses against opposition. By examining the relationship between technological development, monetary practices, and international relations, this paper offers a historically specific explanation of how digital networks facilitated early trends towards globalization and financialization—and thus of the role communications played in the global transition to neoliberalism.
Sanjay Jolly is an attorney and a doctoral candidate in communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation project, A Law and Political Economy Perspective on the Global Information Order, 1945-1989, examines how the rise of cross-border electronic financial networks reshaped international economic statecraft.
The Herbert Schiller prize was established at IAMCR's Singapore Conference (2000) to celebrate Herbert's lasting contribution to communications scholarship and to remember his work in helping to establish IAMCR as a open, hospitable and vital space of debate. He was one of the founders of the Political Economy Section and served as Vice President of the Association. The prize is awarded to a paper which combines scholarly excellence with a commitment to developing and extending the critical, innovative and engaged spirit that characterised Herbert Schiller's own contribution to communications analysis.
Herbert Schiller Award 2026 Selection Committee
Chair:
Tanner Mirrlees (Ontario Tech University, Canada)
Members:
Rodrigo Gomez (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, Mexico)
Yu Hong (College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China)
Mandy Tröger (University of Tübingen, Germany)