ture needs to be taken seriously

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Analytical Frameworks this focus on consecrated, ‘high culture’ texts. This has resulted in some ana- lysts associated with cultural studies celebrating popular culture in an uncrit- ical way (see below). However many others chose not to do so, and it may be that the term ‘cultural studies’ should not have been applied to such uncritical researchers: they were more like naïve sociologists or cultural commentators.
Cultural studies at its best has insisted that we need to think broadly about all the different elements in a culture in relation to each other rather than decide in advance which parts need to be analysed and which do not. This broader conception of culture has an international dimension as well. As cultural studies became internationalised in the 1980s and 1990s, writers who were originally from outside the Euro-American cosmopolitan heartlands, includ- ing diasporic intellectuals such as Edward Said (1994) and Gayatri Spivak
(1988), addressed the concept of culture in ways that recognised the complex legacy of colonialism. Because of this, the best cultural studies approaches can be seen as a considerable improvement on the often dismissive attitude to popular and non-Western culture to be found in some political economy and liberal-pluralist communication research. The best cultural studies work has achieved an in-depth, serious consideration of a much wider range of cultural experience than had been recognised in other traditions of writing about culture. Other anthropological and sociological approaches (including the empirical sociology of culture) had this democratising impulse, but cul- tural studies deals more fully with questions of symbolic power.
Second, cultural studies has provided considerable refinement of what

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