Professor Aeron Davis has studied and worked in departments of Media and Communication, Politics, History, and Sociology. His research and teaching merges elements of each of these disciplines, and includes: sociology of elites and power, political communication, media sociology and journalism, promotional culture and cultural intermediaries, economic sociology and financialization.
He has conducted research at Westminster, Whitehall, the London Stock Exchange, across business and financial networks, amongst the major political parties and the trade union movement. Along the way, he has interviewed over 350 high-profile individuals working in these sectors. He has published two edited collections, over 50 other journal articles, book chapters and reports, and six books: Public Relations Democracy (MUP, 2002), The Mediation of Power (Routledge, 2007), Political Communication and Social Theory (Routledge, 2010), Promotional Cultures (Polity, 2013), Reckless Opportunists (MUP, 2018) and Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times (Polity, 2019).
Davis, Aeron. 2019. The Election Where Fourth Estate Journalism Moved Closer to Extinction. In: Daniel Jackson; Einar Thorsen; Darren Lilleker and Nathalie Weidhase, eds. UK Election Analysis 2019: Media, Voters and the Campaign. Poole: Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University, p. 22. ISBN 9781910042243
Davis, Aeron and Cuonz, Daniel. 2018. Forget Neoliberalism: Its Financialization, Stupid! In: Daniel Cuonz; Scott Loren and Jörg Mettlemann, eds. Screening Economies: Money Matters and the Ethics of Representation. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, pp. 175-186. ISBN 9783837645279
Davis, Aeron. 2011. Promotion, Propaganda and High Finance. In: Gerald Sussman, ed. The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 251-266. ISBN 978-1433109966
Davis, Aeron. 2010. Media and Politics: An Overview. In: James P. Curran, ed. Mass Media and Society, Fifth Edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 83-102. ISBN 978-0340984451
Davis, Aeron. 2008. Public Relations in the news. In: Bob Franklin, ed. Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism. Routledge, pp. 254-264. ISBN 978-0415425568
Davis, Aeron. 2008. Investigating Cultural Producers. In: Michael Pickering, ed. Research Methods for Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 53-67. ISBN 978-0748625789
Davis, Aeron. 2007. Spinning Money. In: David Miller and William Dinan, eds. Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy. Pluto Press, pp. 212-225. ISBN 978-0745324449
Davis, Aeron. 2005. Placing Promotional Culture. In: James P. Curran and David G. Morley, eds. Media and Cultural Theory. Routledge, pp. 149-163. ISBN 978-0415317054
Professor Davis’ research has covered several areas. One of these is public relations and the interaction of PR with news journalism. His earliest studies were of corporate and trade union public relations. He was interested in questions of how PR affected news outputs and also in comparing how different organisational sectors in society interacted with news media. This resulted in his first book, Public Relations Democracy (2002, MUP), and several articles in media and journalism journals. He has returned periodically to the topic, extended this work to look at the promotional professions more generally, including PR, advertising, marketing and branding. As well as teaching in these areas, he has also published a wide-ranging study, Promotional Cultures (2013, Polity).
A second ongoing area of research for Professor Davis is political communication, broadly defined. His earlier work looked at trade union and interest group campaigning. But, he has also regularly looked at politicians, political parties, civil servants and political journalists. Much of this research was published in two books, The Mediation of Power (2007, Routledge) and Political Communication and Social Theory (2010, Routledge). The second of these was based on 100 interviews with politicians, officials and journalists. Findings were also published in journals of media, journalism, and politics. His most recent book, Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times (Polity, 2019), engages with the dramatic shifts in democratic political and media systems since 2016.
A third continuing area of interest cuts across economic sociology, cultural economy and financialization. His first research on public relations looked at financial public relations and media, as well as communications more generally in the City. Later, he returned to interview fund managers and analysts operating around the London Stock Exchange. He was particularly interested in the dot.com boom and bust of 2000, with obvious implications for what happened in the 2007-08 financial crash. Since then, he has interviewed former civil servants and ministers in the Treasury and former DTI about economic policy and the financial sector, as well as large company CEOs about their communication, social relations and decision-making. Findings have been published in each of the above books as well as in journals of media, politics and sociology. Since 2014, Professor Davis has been Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) with Will Davies, which seeks to explore alternative approaches to mainstream neoclassical economics. He is currently writing a book for MUP focusing on the UK Treasury and the evolution of economic policymaking since 1976.
In most of this research, there have been several linking strands. Most obvious is a continuing focus on elites, their social worlds and networks. In various ways, he wishes to explore the communications, behaviours, cognitions, cultures, discourses and organisational elements of elites and centres of power, and the implications for wider society. His interview findings are combined with larger political and economic data. This has all been put together in the book Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment (MUP, 2018). He also published a co-edited (with Karel Williams of CRESC) special journal edition for Theory, Culture and Society, on Elites and Power After Financialization.
