Publishing Industry Self-regulation Research

Publishing career is the recorder and the distributor of the national culture, and a rising industry in the national economy development as well. The Publishing career always stands in the intersection of the culture and the economy, pursuing the perfect combination of social benefit and the economic returns. Industrialization of the Chinese publishing strengthens the economic capability to great extent and intensifies the competition, which consequently brings many immoral business cases and poses intractable issues to the industry management. Besides, the market expansion and administrative management institutional reform give birth to many issues in the management of the industry, which requires to build a medium-administration mechanism of Industry Self-regulation, besides of current macro-administration.Based on this, the paper raises the concept of the Publishing Industry Self-regulation and gives the connotations. By borrowing relative economic and public management theories like governance theory, regulation theory, and drawing on successful experiences of the practices in publishing self-regulation in the U.S and in the U.K., it discusses the issues like publishing association function, publishing self-regulation supervision mechanism, and the codes of conduct in the publishing industry, in order to offer the new thought for the industry management reform, and provide theoretical basis for the publishing industry self-regulation construction. The whole paper contains 8 chapters.The first chapter is to introduce the background, the research purpose and the methodology, also gives a literature review, and highlights the creative points and significance of the study.The second chapter stresses on the rationale and realistic demands for the institutional construction. First of all, it defines the self-regulation, then introduces the state quo from the aspects of legislation, organization, administration, and code of conduct referring to the self-regulation of the Chinese publishing industry, and finally provides the rationale and realistic demands, as well as the feasibility. The third chapter focuses on the reference theories of the research, including governance theory, regulatory pluralism, and the theory about functions self-regulation organization, aiming to provide the theory foundation of the research.The fourth chapter is about the functions of the publishing association. Firstly it explains the competency of the association and the disposition generally, then scrutinizes the actual competency of the Association of American Publishing and The Publishers Association, and compares them to the Publishers Association of China, thereby analyzes the transformation orientation of the publishing associations in our country.The fifth chapter is about the control and supervision mechanism of the publishing industry self-regulation, which is represented from legislation, political administration and the supervision mechanism from inner association and from the outside.The sixth chapter is about the code of conduct of the publishing industry. It gives an overview of the subject, through giving the explanation of the form, the nature, and the normative power, as well as talking about the censorship and judicial assistance.The seventh chapter returns to the starting point of the reality of the Chinese Publishing Industry Self-regulation, and provides the suggestions to build it. Firstly it gives the concept of the institutionalization, with 3 elements,4 must-bees, and pointing out that the most important is to properly proportionate the power between the publishing administration and the self-regulation. And then aiming at the current issues in the administrative system, it provides some suggestions on the reformation, including separating power from administration to the self-regulation, constituting support policy to improve the publishing associations, as well as solutions to the problems of the appearing social corporatism with the reform. Besides, it suggests enhancing the competency of the publishing associations by power delegation from authority and strengthening its service function. Last, it proposes to enhance the governance mechanism, financing and recruiting guarantee, etc..The final chapter makes the conclusion, pointing out the essentials of the Publishing Industry Self-regulation of our nation, and the issues that have to be solved at present.