Governing the country through the public broadcasting corporation

Public service broadcasters are a peculiar form of organisation, corporations in name but extensions of the state that call them into being. They share that distinction with other firms, long since privatised: the PTTs of yore – post, telegraph, and telephone providers – or what were once seen as natural monopolies: water and electricity. But they differ in a crucial and paradoxical regard: Among their functions is to hold the state to account. It is, therefore, a corporate form with the agency problem as part of its reason for being. It is a governance mechanism over its own governors. In liberal democracies, states have come to accept that paradox and tolerate its ambiguities as a condition of state legitimacy. In this paper we ask the question: How does a state broadcast retain its legitimacy when the legitimacy of the state in under question

Suppressing higher aims? Buried institutional logics resurface in public service broadcasting in Zimbabwe, 1970-2008

Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation operates in a complex institutional environment, with contestation over logics – some idealised, others cynical – about what it means to be a public service broadcaster. This paper draws upon the institutional logics perspective to analyse secondary data source for signs about how institutional logics might help to explain the curious, periodic resurfacing of ideals of independence, drawn in part from the legacy of its roots in the logics of public service broadcasting developed in the BBC and not always enacted the ideals would have it