Questioning the business–humanities divide in media studies: A reformulation of the administrative–critical distinction in stakeholder collaboration

This chapter proposes to bridge two perspectives on media audiences – a critical perspective represented mostly by scholars in academia and an administrative perspective held by actors working in the media industry – and to showcase how collaboration can be used to overcome diverging knowledge interests between these two perspectives. We argue that the opposition and separation of these knowledge interests is unproductive to address current issues such as the datafication of media. We challenge and reformulate this opposition into a proposal for a stakeholder collaboration based on a phenomenological approach. In conceptualising the collaboration as a joint production of knowledge that acknowledges differences in the business–humanities relation and puts these differences into productive use, our intention is to foster innovation and more robust knowledge about socially critical topics, and more generally about the relation between humans and technology.