Self‐regulation, public issue management and marketing practices in the US entertainment industry

The practice of issue management is widely recognised as a necessary activity for effective corporate and industry political strategy. The issue of violent content, children and the US entertainment industry offers an excellent platform for applying a firm/industry issue management framework developed by Kaufman et al. (1989). To that end, the scope of this paper is three‐fold: first, to categorise the motion picture, television, music recording, and computer and video game industries product self‐regulation regime utilising an expanded version of a model originally developed by Garvin (1983) that identifies a spectrum of governmental regulation categories; second, to employ the above mentioned issue management framework developed by Kaufman et al. (1989) to describe the issue circumstances under which the entertainment industry engages in political activity; and third, to analyse and categorise the entertainment industries' self‐regulation regimes, using the structure and control approach offered by Kaufman et al. (1989) and adapted in a model developed by the author. In conclusion, the Kaufman et al. (1989) model, while offering a credible explanation of issue specificity criteria in this case, does not offer the same credibility for issue frequency criteria. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications